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Microsoft's Vista will "shortly" be upon is, but is the interface a missed opportunity?
My second disappointment concerns the user interface. There has been a lot of discussion and excitement concerning the "Aero" desktop interface, how it can [finally] utilise the power of modern graphics cards and the 3D representation. I had hoped that would have bought one or two new metaphors to the party: a true 3D desktop, (as opposed to a 3D view of a2D desktop), and the ability utilise a desktop larger than the screen.
Eh?
A 3D view of a 2D desktop is just that. Vista displays windows and folders slanting away into the background, ie much like the isometric drawings we did (or maybe didn't do!) in Technical Drawing classes in school. The picture (desktop) itself is still 2D; the mouse (and windows, icons, etc) still only have an x an y position.
Now imagine if the screen had depth...
I'm not referring to the so-called 3D view offered by utilities such as Flip3D which merely scrolls through a stack of windows, or the 3D presentation offered by Sphere. Oh no, I'm thinking of a true thee dimensional environment presented on the screen, the concept of the screen having depth as well as height and width, placement of icons in the middle and rear-ground, the ability to move the mouse pointer towards the rear of the screen... ie moving backwards into the screen.
"Whaaaat???" OK, you play 3D FPS shooters... the alien/monster/bad guy has just come round the corner, you fire, and your bullet goes towards him... Or a racing simulator, where a car overtakes you, and moves further away as it accelerates. In both cases, the object 'moves' towards the rear screen. The effect is achieved by reducing the size of the object, but the physics are the same; in the simulated environment, the object is moving away from the observer. It has x, y, and z co-ordinates.
The metaphor I would liked to have seen is as such; the icon/screen I want is at the back of the screen, I "move" the mouse into the screen, passing through an open window/folder or two, and click on the target icon/window. An analogy: I am sat here typing, I reach left and right for my mouse and coffee cup, I reach upwards to get an article off the shelf. And I move forwards past the keyboard to turn the monitor off.
Open up six or seven folders or programs on your current machine. Windows conveniently staggers them, Vista will make them transparent (so you can more easily identify the required one), but you still have to click them back/front to work on the one you want. A truly interactive 3D interface you would just move the mouse into the distance, selecting the screen/folder you wanted.
Screen scrolling refers to to screens larger than the display. I'm sat here on a 19" monitor, with a display of 1280x1024. I can have 1600x1200, but the display is too small for comfort on a 19" CRT. How can I have a bigger screen size? Only by increasing the display size by adding a second screen and extending the desktop onto that. (as I did with my LCDs). Linux, Solaris, and some Windows add-ons allow for multiple desktops. You have 2 or 4 (or more) logical desktops, and flip through them by clicking on an icon or using a key-combo. But these are all independent of each other, and constrained by display size, ie each and everyone one isa separate 1280x1024 desktop, with its own start button, trashcan, etc.
So why not have a desktop larger then the display, ie a 4800x3600 display, of which a portion is shown (lets say 1280x1024) and one scrolls around the desktop. Much like one does with a spreadsheet or word document... The scroll button would be admirable for that.
Thinking about it, why not fuse the two "wants" together... a truly 3D desktop that can moved around, like the 3D fps we are used to. And not just "moved around in", but also viewed from an external viewpoint. ie, imagine a transparent cube in your hand, with something inside (much like a snow globe), You move it about to see inside from a different angle. I'd like a desktop like that. A desktop that is 4800x4800x4800, and I could zoom out of, leaving a cube view of it, which I could rotate and zoom back into.
Such a desktop (and features) is well within hardware abilities of even gfx cards from the Matrox G400 era, and would only really be constrained by system memory (to keep track of the desktop contents and position). The only -potential - requirement for serious gfx grunt would be a complex background image that required real-time appearance processing. Heck, one would use backdrops, one would use "environments". Imagine the default XP "bliss" backdrop being a real 3D environment, complete with individual flowers, grass blades, etc.
Hmm... there again productivity would drop as one wandered a 3D world desktop, and when the boss complained, would use "I couldn't find the Office icon" as an excuse!
But joking aside, it would make for a lovely interface. No more missing windows trying to find the one you want. No longer would one have hundreds of icons cluttering the backdrop.
The practical side is the doing away of folders on the desktop - and more so when WinFS is brought to the equation - instead of multiple on-screen folders for documents/data, one could have a single filing cabinet, with different drawers and folders inside. As an example. Or if you have ever read the book Disclosure (as opposed to the limited film version), imagine the real-world application of seeing data on the screen in stored format, and interacting with it.. All via a 3D interface.
This also neatly leads onto a related missed opportunity, although it still concerns the interface: the closed nature of the styles library. I'm stuck with the same width scroll bars, screen frames, dialog boxes, and so forth. Unlike unix, I cannot set the window pane widths to one pixel. I cant remove the scroll bars and replace them with buttons - or do away completely and rely on a scroll mouse.
The single biggest gripe I have with most interfaces is the lack of working room; look at Word or Excel, or many many web pages. The actual content area is often less then 60% of the page size. I'm sure that I had more editing space in Word Perfect, running on a DOS screen, in 1991, than I do today running on a 1280x1024 screen. And that affects my productivity. Even on this site, the edit area is less than 25% of my desktop. And there is nothing I can do. I can't alter the layout, but neither can I alter the default width of the scroll bars. Its frustrating. Especially when working with pictures and video, when one needs to see multiple images or several video and audio tracks. Instead of doing the work, one has to concentrate on manipulating the screen. Not clean and efficient working.
Vista's interface, I feel, compounds the problem. Instead of minimising clutter, it creates it. Irregular shaped folders help utilise space a little better, but not when they are trying to preview every document in the folder (and fail to do so, so why bother.. it slows the system down and uses up yet more space).
Have a ponder. What you *you* want to see in a revamped interface?
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Written by Guest on 2006-09-14 00:34:56
It makes more sense to group windows or rip interface elements from one window and move them to another, or using the zooming paradigm, where windows can be made much smaller and bigger at will (solving a lot of problems for visually impaired people to boot). There aren't many people who have solid relational skills to handle interfaces with depth, especially "fake" depth. You should always avoid "stacking" stuff, if possible.
Also, setting up a consistent work area with custom window styling helps. This work area is saved and restored whenever you log in. You don't have to fumble with large folder views if you create groups of your favorite folders with special borders with all the useless peripheral buttons removed. Today's GUI tool-kits don't allow much flexibility as far as removing "standard" window elements.
We've had picture within picture on our TVs for a while. We've had virtual desktops for a while. Why not combine both ideas? Isn't that why windows were created?
Application support for clever organization depends on what GUI toolkit is used. Regardless of what tools the OS offers, developers will usually respect system-wide programming guidelines, but will rarely, if ever, use only system tools to write their software. Java suffers from this problem considerably (probably given how many times Sun rewrote their toolkit -- and it still sucks).
BTW, WinFS was canned, at least in its exiting form. I doubt it would have been truly useful, as it depends on metadata to actually store information, and most content creators do a horrid job of setting this vital information.
What would make more sense is a flexible rules system, allowing people to write rules about how information is displayed, based on type, age, quantity, file-name syntax, etc., and allowing you to apply rules to certain folders. For example, you might have a natural sorting rule, which will sort things as "1, 2, 03, 4, 40". XP does this by default, and I find it annoying as my UNIX servers and application tools do not. Another rule is that any folder that contains a catalog would automatically count the number of records and display it as a property in the folder view. XP can be configured to do some of these things, but it requires some nasty registry hacking. A clean, CLI-based way of doing this would be nice, with a simpler GUI-based front-end for people who can't handle scripting.
I think this is what the technology inside WinFS was meant to do, but nobody thought about using it that way.
-- Waccoon
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