The Real History of the GUI 265
Big Nothing writes "Mike Tuck @ webmasterbase.com has written a piece on the development of GUIs. Like most other articles on webmasterbase.com it is fairly non-technical, but entertaining nonetheless." Update: 08/21 02:45 AM GMT by T : Note that the link above takes you to the print-friendly version of the story; for online reading, you might prefer this version instead.
finally Smalltalk gets its dues (Score:2, Interesting)
*smalltalk was the first cross platform portable bytecode language
* smalltalk is good pure OO unlike C++ (not pure OO) and Java (not good OO - the class hierarchy is a monster - ST's object heirarchy is much more clean)
GUI Design (Score:4, Interesting)
The GUI became popular because it really made most things that users need to do on a computer far easier than cryptic command lines. For years GUI's have been refined for ease of use. We're now coming to the limit of current icon-oriented design. There's just so many ways that an icon-based system can be presented to the user before usability starts going into the toilet.
We moved to GUI's because command line interfaces only got us so far, and some day someone will come up with a better-than-icon based system that is more logical. We'll all say "gosh, why didn't I think of that?" and everyone will jump into the "new way" of thinking.
I have visions of time-oriented interfaces that respond to "get me the spec sheet for the network I did last week sometime" and "set a new meeting for next Tuesday with Jim and Bob in the conference room". These new interfaces will be able to store and retrieve information based upon how we think, not in the traditional tree-like-structures we're currently used to. The concepts behind OO/RDBMS systems have some potential, such as nested tables and object oriented models, but don't present their information to a user very easily.
I don't see new interfaces becoming popular until they target the non-computer user market. I envision voice-activated systems, but they tend to be annoying to other people around. Mouse navigation doesn't seem to be viable because of it's limited 2D space, and thus the 2D GUI. The 3D systems (see spaceball on google) look neat, but aren't very intuitive to users. We may wind up with virtual filing cabinets, but hopefully we'll stay away from the Packard Bell Navigator!
Is there anyone (university or other) that is working on a new interface concept? I'd be interested in hearing what works and what doesn't. I know M$ and (Cr)Apple invest millions into GUI research, so I wouldn't be surprised if we saw something new out of those camps in the next few years.
And no, I don't count XP's "new and improved" GUI anything more than an over-hyped icon-based system.
[/random thoughts]