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Nice, especially the zoom-approach, have anyone seen this being implemented? However, I disagree with the whole idea of typing commands. For power users that's

Nice, especially the zoom-approach, have anyone seen this being implemented? However, I disagree with the whole idea of typing commands. For power users that's great, but for casual users, it's nearly impossible to know which commands exist, what they are called or what they will do. The menu based interface has the great advantage that it categorizes commands and allows the user to see what can be done, and use deduction to pick the right command. There should be no need to remember any command names or key combinations for light users.

pmarin 13y ago
The Active Oberon System (AOS) use the zoom-approach. There are some videos in youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe0ZdzO_urU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe0ZdzO_urU
readme 13y ago
The 'zoom approach' is used in inkscape and adobe illustrator.
TheZenPsycho 13y ago
There is no need to remember anything actually. If you've ever used Enso, Ubiquity (both made by Jef's son Aza) or Sublime Text 2, or Google Instant/autocomplete, or indeed Firefox's "Awesome Bar", then that is the kind of experience the humane interface describes.
TuringTest 13y ago
Menu and typing commands are not either-or exclusive; you can have both. In a system like Archy there can be menus stored as plain text - given that it's trivial to select text and invoke it as a command. It's just that menus don't require a separate subsystem or component, they're stored in the homogeneous system's data representation (and they can be user-editable, which modern GUIs don't allow - yet). I've known of Archy and The Humane Interface for about ten years, and it's funny how more and more interfaces are converging towards the interaction style defined by it (with some tweaks because of backwards compatibility and-or because some of the ideas in the book have been tested and improved since then).
dividuum 13y ago
I wrote a ZUI at my previous job. We needed to speed up the process of manual classification for large number of products. The web based approach did work but we figured there might be a better way. The idea was to split large number of product into smaller sets using various tools. These small sets were then manually classified (with suggestions provided by the system). All this was done in a zoomable interface, so it was very easy to navigate the sets. The system was a huge success. Here is a short video. Sorry about the quality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLy6Qj7MNOo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLy6Qj7MNOo
npsimons 13y ago
Most people who aren't used to (decent) tab completion interfaces have this misconception. Let me guess: you've never really spent much time in a CLI like bash or Emacs? It's incredibly powerful to try tabbing into what might be related. Emacs tab completion (variables, functions, buffer names, etc) in particular is very nice in that you can type part of what you're looking for and anything that matches in any part will show up in the completion list (eg M-x -mode<TAB> will get you a completion list of anything containing "-mode" anywhere in the function name). As Steve Yegge points out in Effective Emacs (https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs), mousing through a menu is very inefficient, even when you're learning or exploring. They don't scale well, can't possibly cover all the options, and once you've dug down two or three deep, you're sort of trapped. Whereas with decent tab completion, you can backward-kill or just plain <DEL> your way back up the heierarchy.

pmarin 13y ago

The Active Oberon System (AOS) use the zoom-approach. There are some videos in youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe0ZdzO_urU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe0ZdzO_urU

readme 13y ago

The 'zoom approach' is used in inkscape and adobe illustrator.

TheZenPsycho 13y ago

There is no need to remember anything actually. If you've ever used Enso, Ubiquity (both made by Jef's son Aza) or Sublime Text 2, or Google Instant/autocomplete, or indeed Firefox's "Awesome Bar", then that is the kind of experience the humane interface describes.

TuringTest 13y ago

Menu and typing commands are not either-or exclusive; you can have both. In a system like Archy there can be menus stored as plain text - given that it's trivial to select text and invoke it as a command. It's just that menus don't require a separate subsystem or component, they're stored in the homogeneous system's data representation (and they can be user-editable, which modern GUIs don't allow - yet). I've known of Archy and The Humane Interface for about ten years, and it's funny how more and more interfaces are converging towards the interaction style defined by it (with some tweaks because of backwards compatibility and-or because some of the ideas in the book have been tested and improved since then).

dividuum 13y ago

I wrote a ZUI at my previous job. We needed to speed up the process of manual classification for large number of products. The web based approach did work but we figured there might be a better way. The idea was to split large number of product into smaller sets using various tools. These small sets were then manually classified (with suggestions provided by the system). All this was done in a zoomable interface, so it was very easy to navigate the sets. The system was a huge success. Here is a short video. Sorry about the quality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLy6Qj7MNOo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLy6Qj7MNOo

npsimons 13y ago

Most people who aren't used to (decent) tab completion interfaces have this misconception. Let me guess: you've never really spent much time in a CLI like bash or Emacs? It's incredibly powerful to try tabbing into what might be related. Emacs tab completion (variables, functions, buffer names, etc) in particular is very nice in that you can type part of what you're looking for and anything that matches in any part will show up in the completion list (eg M-x -mode<TAB> will get you a completion list of anything containing "-mode" anywhere in the function name). As Steve Yegge points out in Effective Emacs (https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs), mousing through a menu is very inefficient, even when you're learning or exploring. They don't scale well, can't possibly cover all the options, and once you've dug down two or three deep, you're sort of trapped. Whereas with decent tab completion, you can backward-kill or just plain <DEL> your way back up the heierarchy.