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The iPhone illustrates exactly what I mean -- Windows Mobile is an example of trying to port Windows (and all it's associated cruft) onto the phone. It's bette

by Qz 17y ago

The iPhone illustrates exactly what I mean -- Windows Mobile is an example of trying to port Windows (and all it's associated cruft) onto the phone. It's better than it was, but it's still pretty terrible and a lot of that has to do with its legacy. For iPhone they really sat down and thought, what actually works on a smartphone? This took a long damn time as far as I'm concerned. I have a motorola phone from 2008 and the interface is godawful and makes me want to tear things apart every time I have to navigate its unwieldly menu system. My previous phone was from 2004 -- there was almost no improvement from one to the next. As for the desktop, a lot of where I see potential is in interactivity between programs. Pretty much any time there is interactivity between programs these days it's because the application developers programmed it in, and I think there's a huge opportunity to weave application interactivity into the desktop shell itself, so that things Just Work, without everyone having to code that stuff up all the time. There's also, in my experience, a crapload of user time wasted doing menial things like window management that doesn't need to happen. Those are just a few things -- don't want to give away all my ideas...

ericd 17y ago
Right, but how do you see that happening with desktop OS's? Their limitations were already largely thought through at Xerox PARC decades ago, and that's how the mouse and windowing systems were born - they're very good methods of dealing with the limited screen real estate. If anything, there are less limitations on them now. Touch tablets are potentially an area for expansion, but I don't know that I've seen anything that warrants a radical change on the desktop. As for the menial tasks, I do next to no window management - my screens are completely unorganized, but a combination of Expose, alt-tab/tilde, and Quicksilver tend to make that a nonissue.
- Qz 17y ago
  The mouse is pretty good, but I think in many ways it has been abused as an interface device. Now, it's a slightly different story for Macs since you all went years with only one button, but for the rest of the world there were multiple buttons, and while we can all generally agree what a left click should do, the other buttons are a complete mess. Programmers basically make them do whatever the hell they want them to do, and in doing so make software designed for multiple mouse buttons dramatically harder to learn intuitively. So that's one point where the desktop experience could be improved. As for windowing systems, I think they're all terrible. I think they were good at the point where computer's couldn't really manage to display more than a few windows on screen to begin with. However, modern computers can display hundreds of windows simultaneously, and windowing systems are all playing catch up with how to handle that, rather than rethinking the basics of how to interact with lots of data. Another example is tabs in the browser, which is a microcosm of what I'm talking about with windowing systems. Tabs are an awful awful user experience once you get past 4-5 open at once. But they're way better than separate windows, so everyone loves loves loves their tabs. But tabs are awful. I'd explain exactly how to make it better, but that's the exact project I'm working on right now, so I'll just say that the solution I have for browser tabs applies just as well to desktop windows. I'm really not a Mac person, but you're right about Expose and I do get jealous of that. I've used Expose a bit on the Macs in my university, but as a hacker/sometimes game modder, I often get into situations where I have several explorer windows open, with several files in each of those folders open, in addition to whatever browser windows or IDE/text file windows I might also have open. Managing those is a pain. I don't see how Expose or alt-tab can help with 20 odd windows on screen. (Quicksilver seems to be a keyboard centric program, and I'm that rare hacker who favors the mouse). Here's the other thing -- is the Expose code really that complicated? Not really. In fact, to me it seems like something you should be able to tell your desktop shell to do without needing to know how to code it, and without installing some addon that someone else coded for you. There are countless other minor UI tweaks that any random user could think up, but that they can't actually get their OS to do without getting someone to code it for them. Even take the earlier example of dragging a file onto the file browser dialog. It's great that OSX has it built in. And yet it's so ridiculously simple to implement that I don't understand why I can't just tell Windows: "When I drag a file into this text box, copy in the location of that file". Instead, users have to sit around waiting for the shell-masters to approve minor improvements to the UI/UX. Imagine if there was something like Greasemonkey that worked on your desktop shell, but didn't require you to know even the basics of programming. I don't know if that sounds to you like I'm talking insane-fantasy-world here, but I've got some solid ideas on how to implement exactly that.
  - Symmetry 17y ago
    If I might ask, what windowing systems do you have experience with? While its true that desktop Linux has been lagging behind in a lot of areas it seems that a lot of innovation in window managers is happening there. Having multiple workspaces each with its own reasonably sized set of windows really eliminates the need for expose for me. Well, thats how it is at work where I use a default GNOME workspace. One the laptop I'm using right now I'm running a window manager called Awesome (its a silly name, I'll agree) that actually assigns one or more tags to each window and displays a set of tags to the main screen at once. Mostly I just have one tag per window and display one tag at a time and it ends up working like multiple workspaces, but sometimes I'm working on something where I want to toggle another window in and out repeatedly. Since Awesome has a tiling as well as a stacking mode, when I toggle the new window in all the other window rearrange themselves to accommodate it And using a tiling window manager makes it easy to do everything with the keyboard instead of having to use a mouse though you can use your mouse too if you really want to. Thanks to that and vimium I'm not sure I've had to touch my mouse yet today.
    - Qz 17y ago
      Mostly Windows on a daily basis, although I have used linux and I've done a bunch of research into the various window management systems linux offers, including Awesome. The window tagging thing you're talking about is definitely a step in the right direction -- what I'm envisioning is something along those lines, but more naturally integrated into the shell.

by Qz 17y ago

ericd 17y ago

Right, but how do you see that happening with desktop OS's? Their limitations were already largely thought through at Xerox PARC decades ago, and that's how the mouse and windowing systems were born - they're very good methods of dealing with the limited screen real estate. If anything, there are less limitations on them now. Touch tablets are potentially an area for expansion, but I don't know that I've seen anything that warrants a radical change on the desktop. As for the menial tasks, I do next to no window management - my screens are completely unorganized, but a combination of Expose, alt-tab/tilde, and Quicksilver tend to make that a nonissue.

Qz 17y ago
The mouse is pretty good, but I think in many ways it has been abused as an interface device. Now, it's a slightly different story for Macs since you all went years with only one button, but for the rest of the world there were multiple buttons, and while we can all generally agree what a left click should do, the other buttons are a complete mess. Programmers basically make them do whatever the hell they want them to do, and in doing so make software designed for multiple mouse buttons dramatically harder to learn intuitively. So that's one point where the desktop experience could be improved. As for windowing systems, I think they're all terrible. I think they were good at the point where computer's couldn't really manage to display more than a few windows on screen to begin with. However, modern computers can display hundreds of windows simultaneously, and windowing systems are all playing catch up with how to handle that, rather than rethinking the basics of how to interact with lots of data. Another example is tabs in the browser, which is a microcosm of what I'm talking about with windowing systems. Tabs are an awful awful user experience once you get past 4-5 open at once. But they're way better than separate windows, so everyone loves loves loves their tabs. But tabs are awful. I'd explain exactly how to make it better, but that's the exact project I'm working on right now, so I'll just say that the solution I have for browser tabs applies just as well to desktop windows. I'm really not a Mac person, but you're right about Expose and I do get jealous of that. I've used Expose a bit on the Macs in my university, but as a hacker/sometimes game modder, I often get into situations where I have several explorer windows open, with several files in each of those folders open, in addition to whatever browser windows or IDE/text file windows I might also have open. Managing those is a pain. I don't see how Expose or alt-tab can help with 20 odd windows on screen. (Quicksilver seems to be a keyboard centric program, and I'm that rare hacker who favors the mouse). Here's the other thing -- is the Expose code really that complicated? Not really. In fact, to me it seems like something you should be able to tell your desktop shell to do without needing to know how to code it, and without installing some addon that someone else coded for you. There are countless other minor UI tweaks that any random user could think up, but that they can't actually get their OS to do without getting someone to code it for them. Even take the earlier example of dragging a file onto the file browser dialog. It's great that OSX has it built in. And yet it's so ridiculously simple to implement that I don't understand why I can't just tell Windows: "When I drag a file into this text box, copy in the location of that file". Instead, users have to sit around waiting for the shell-masters to approve minor improvements to the UI/UX. Imagine if there was something like Greasemonkey that worked on your desktop shell, but didn't require you to know even the basics of programming. I don't know if that sounds to you like I'm talking insane-fantasy-world here, but I've got some solid ideas on how to implement exactly that.
- Symmetry 17y ago
  If I might ask, what windowing systems do you have experience with? While its true that desktop Linux has been lagging behind in a lot of areas it seems that a lot of innovation in window managers is happening there. Having multiple workspaces each with its own reasonably sized set of windows really eliminates the need for expose for me. Well, thats how it is at work where I use a default GNOME workspace. One the laptop I'm using right now I'm running a window manager called Awesome (its a silly name, I'll agree) that actually assigns one or more tags to each window and displays a set of tags to the main screen at once. Mostly I just have one tag per window and display one tag at a time and it ends up working like multiple workspaces, but sometimes I'm working on something where I want to toggle another window in and out repeatedly. Since Awesome has a tiling as well as a stacking mode, when I toggle the new window in all the other window rearrange themselves to accommodate it And using a tiling window manager makes it easy to do everything with the keyboard instead of having to use a mouse though you can use your mouse too if you really want to. Thanks to that and vimium I'm not sure I've had to touch my mouse yet today.
  - Qz 17y ago
    Mostly Windows on a daily basis, although I have used linux and I've done a bunch of research into the various window management systems linux offers, including Awesome. The window tagging thing you're talking about is definitely a step in the right direction -- what I'm envisioning is something along those lines, but more naturally integrated into the shell.