Hybrid graphic text interfaces
Monday, 2. March 2009, 01:36:01
There was a time, many will look back on with various feelings, when one had to approach a computer with a certain well measured dose of respect. This humming white metal box connected to a painfully contrasted monochrome screen, would sit there motionless, blinking away impatiently on the screen, waiting for your input. Making a mistake meant anything from light psychological trauma to loss of data. It is natural that these early machines only appealed to the bipedal byproducts of the information era, the beloved hackers, without whom we'd be short for many programs we take for granted. Those of less intrepid nature, waited patiently until software appeared which was willing to help.
The solution we might say, presented itself in the form of a graphical user interface. Whereas abbreviated commands placed in a strict syntax can be somewhat discouraging to people, pointing a friendly arrow above a comforting set of metaphors such as the desktop and wallpapers immediately showed marketing and subsequently consumer appeal. And for a time, it was good. With the latest generation of operating systems, we have reached the saturation point of the usefulness of the GUI. Whereas we used to call them accessibility features with options to increase the size of the icon to that of a pre-war Volkswagen, these now come as standard so that your grandmother can surf right out of the box without the fear of her AOL icon being lost. Though some have learned this lesson, and are trying to make the best of it, efficient use of screen space is largely a free-for-all, leisure time activity. But there came a light at the end of the carpal tunnel.
Whereas the text based interface may seem imposing, and the shiny looks may become tiring and in fact annoying, there is a tendency today, given the natural evolution of the way we look for and manipulate data, to use the best of both worlds. Application launchers like Launchy, Gnome-Do and Quicksilver have received world wide praise for the simplicity of their operation and the incredible increase in productivity they provide. Going further, the Ubiquity plugin for Firefox makes use of verbs understandable by humans to take in requests for processing things such as looking up maps and dictionaries. It makes brilliant use of a spectrum of well structured web services and delivers information without having to open new tabs or hell forbid you from still running that browser, new windows.
Lifehacker and Deviantart have both acknowledged the brilliance of a configurable typography based skin for an application which can be compared to nothing more than a widget engine. Could it be that we're seeing a birth of a user interface Renaissance where we will appreciate the purity of the information presented in what we have argued for centuries to be the keepers of knowledge? Should this be the case, the future should be bright for typographers, type enthusiasts, and information junkies. But still we must consider grandma's case...
WIDGETIZE