4 ms·

> there's only so much you can describe with hand gestures without the movements becoming unintuitive. Even more so for sounds. Most spoken words are no more i

> there's only so much you can describe with hand gestures without the movements becoming unintuitive. Even more so for sounds. Most spoken words are no more intuitive than arbitrary gestures in modern gestural languages (which can similarly be articulated in powerful systems just like spoken languages). Aural, visual, tactile and chemical channels each have advantages and disadvantages for different applications. I'm not convinced intrinsic 'intuitiveness' is one of these factors. In communication, intuition is mostly hardwired convention. Lowering ears and wagging tail has a different (and quite opposite) instinctive meaning for cats and dogs.

Scriptor 16y ago
Command-line interfaces seem to involve two main parts. The commands themselves (ls, mv, rm, and so on) and the arbitrary parameters supplied to them (all files with the .txt extension or compiler flags). For the former hand gestures would work well since there is a limited and well-defined set of commands, the latter would be better served with a regular text input. Even here the distinction gets blurred by commands created by applications you install yourself. A combination of the two with instant switching between the two modes would be nice. But that still seems like an uncreative solution.
bad_user 16y ago
> Aural, visual, tactile and chemical channels each have advantages and disadvantages for different applications I wasn't talking about the method of delivery. A wagging tail may not be intuitive, but moving a physical object from A to B by picking it up and dropping it is very much intuitive, not just by hardwired convention (both cats and dogs do it in the same way). And the only rationale for the futuristic graphical interfaces we see demoed (including stuff like multitouch in iPhone/iPad) is based on the implicit intuitiveness of handling physical objects with your hands. But that's just a niche ... beyond that you need a language for building stories out of composable phrases, and the demos of futuristic graphical interfaces I've seen just don't cut it.

Scriptor 16y ago

Command-line interfaces seem to involve two main parts. The commands themselves (ls, mv, rm, and so on) and the arbitrary parameters supplied to them (all files with the .txt extension or compiler flags). For the former hand gestures would work well since there is a limited and well-defined set of commands, the latter would be better served with a regular text input. Even here the distinction gets blurred by commands created by applications you install yourself. A combination of the two with instant switching between the two modes would be nice. But that still seems like an uncreative solution.

bad_user 16y ago

> Aural, visual, tactile and chemical channels each have advantages and disadvantages for different applications I wasn't talking about the method of delivery. A wagging tail may not be intuitive, but moving a physical object from A to B by picking it up and dropping it is very much intuitive, not just by hardwired convention (both cats and dogs do it in the same way). And the only rationale for the futuristic graphical interfaces we see demoed (including stuff like multitouch in iPhone/iPad) is based on the implicit intuitiveness of handling physical objects with your hands. But that's just a niche ... beyond that you need a language for building stories out of composable phrases, and the demos of futuristic graphical interfaces I've seen just don't cut it.