csant/log

Today there are only two popular methods of user interaction: command-line and GUI. Command-line interfaces are often favorable to the experienced user, if only because graphical interfaces are so poorly designed. They are also severely limited in their input and output capabilities. Graphical interfaces are all some slight variation of a system developed at Xerox PARC long ago, which was designed to emulate troublesome, tangible objects such as paper and desks. As anyone knows, this is a tiresome paradigm; why should computers emulate it?

WIMP interfaces have been dominant since the late eighties - and it is shocking to see how little we have moved away from that model. The only progress we seem to be able to have made is in adding 3D, drop shadows, transparency, a shiny look and, most recently, the ability to slant your windows. As long as we are not able to project 3D objects in the air, 3D for GUI is just a silly gimmick. The user interaction is on the screen, and the screen is flat. 2D.

Instead of eye-candy, some evolution in the way we interact is badly needed, some substantial re-thinking of the UI experience instead of polishing up the surface. WIMP interfaces seem here to stay in the near future - that was 1997, which is now almost 10 years ago! Time for them to be replaced by something more adeguate. Why would we, in an age in which many people do not even know anymore how a desktop (a desk top, not a PC) with tangible objects looks like, care about emulating it? Wouldn't it make much more sense to think about a UI paradigm based on the possibilities the medium (the screen, in our case) has to offer? Designing a GUI emulating your desk top is somehow equivalent to designing a mobile phone based on the paradigm of your fountain pen - nobody would even dream about something like that, and yet we are still stuck in windows and icons mimicking your desk, menus and pointing devices.

The command line interface has not undergone any substantial development either, and ended up being somehow the antagonist of the graphical user interface. For several tasks I find the CLI more appropriate, but I don't really understand why it needs to be an either-or scenario - I would wish for a less radical distinction between the text based nature of the CLI and the GUI, allowing for text based "queries", or dialogs with the application from within the graphical environment, allowing me to interact from the command line with the graphical environment, and allowing for graphical elements on the command line when they'd help the user understanding or finding some orientation. I wish for a better user interface.