Re: 3D - ish

David Reid wrote:
> Is it? It looks like a complete gimmick to me.

If you want to keep an eye on what is going on in a process, e.g. cad
rendering, having a "live" image of the window inside the icon is very
very useful. And being able to tilt them or otherwise move them to fit
more in makes total sense.

I liked the post-it on the back idea a bit, but flipping and rotating
the real windows is not that useful.

But new user interfaces written expresely for it are another matter.
For years games players have had these sort of 'orbiting things from
inside the rucksack' metaphors for viewing and selecting from lists and
they seem to like them. I have seen a stock control system that
consists of mini pictures of the items in stock, changing colour as the
stock levels altered.

We had all these ideas floating around in the late 1980s - the stock
tree for example - bsaed on proper workstations. "Data visualisation"
experiments by the likes of IBM and Xerox. Then the world went
windows-crazy and innovation has more or less stopped. Much of the
debate about the UI for OpenOffice 2.0 has been about wheterh to
exactly duplicate M$ icons or write your own. This interminable
scraping under toenails seems to have prevented people striding forward
and actually moving the world somewhere else. The period 1989 to 2005
seems to be the era of lost opportunity. PC hardware power has
increased by factors of thousands but the computer experience of 99% of
users is stagnant.

No, flipping word processor windows is not a new form of productivity.
But it does suggest that there is more than one way to skin (pun
intended) that particular cat.

I want to know what happened to voice-op, voice-input, spoken output,
heuristic searching, 3-layer neural models, dna code, and all the other
projects that were half-completed in 1991? Go and look at some old
copies of Byte and Dr Dobbs and compare to modern journals. Now we get
excited by yet another wholesale change in the M$ api and spend 2 years
learning to do the same thing. Back then we got excited about vans
that drove themselves around american campuses, generalising game and
queue theory into models about how political ideas propagate, and the
like.

20 years ago surgeons and anatomists were pouring thier learning into
"knowledge bases" that would revolutionise automatic diagnosis. Isn't
it time we saw some fruit from all that effort? Oh, I forgot. We are
supposed instead to be excited because Office12 has pale green menus
(sorry "ribbons")

.

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