It's nice to hear about UI research, but at the moment _nobody seems to be making use of the UI research that's already been done._

Consider, for example, the current fad for "mystery meat" UIs (affordances that can't be seen and thus can't be found unless you already know where they are). What's with that? Haven't designers read "The Design of Everyday Things?" Heck, haven't they read the 1983 edition of "Inside Macintosh?"

It's still a one-trick pony, and not a trick that many people need to do very often. Sure, a professional may invest in any number of specialized $1,200 tools to get images under special situations. It's just the idea that this revolutionizes the field of photography, or that _everyone_ needs this to get good pictures of Tommy blowing out the candles on his birthday cake, that's crazy.

I cannot think of a single time in my life when I wanted to press the button once and get two different images, one with subject A in focus and subject B blurred, and the other with subject A blurred and subject B in focus.

If this camera could take "deep focus" pictures, a la _Citizen Kane_, in which all objects at all distances were in focus at the same time, that would be mildly useful and a lot of amateur photographers would like it, even if the effect were a little boring. But, as nearly as I can tell, it can't.

"Viewers today are more likely captivated by the refrigerator-size computers and 1960s hairdos." No, the very first thing that struck me was the once-familiar announcer's "authoritative" style of delivery. Among other things, the voice often drops by about a musical fifth on the last word of the sentence.

This is not only standard for announcers (Edward R. Murrow being one example), but you even hear it in movie dialog.

I keep wanting to know some name for the change. It was not instantaneous, but it seems to me that it occurred over not much more than a decade or so. Walter Cronkite had a transitional voice style--somewhere in between what you hear in this movie and a more natural, conversational delivery such as you hear today. (Or, at least, I hear it as natural and conversational--maybe fifty years from now it will sound mannered and affected, too).

A nineteenth-century schoolbook addresses this question. Post-apocalyptic society might not be too different from that of a "colony." Farmers, millers, carpenters, blacksmiths, masons, shoemakers, doctors, school-masters make the cut; barbers, just barely; silversmiths, soldiers, dancing-masters, lawyers, politicians, and "gentlemen" do not.

[note.â"Mr. Barlow one day invented a play for his children, on purpose to show them what kind of persons and professions are the most useful in society, and particularly in a new settlement. The following is the conversation which took place between himself and his children.]
Mr. Barlow. Come, my boys, I have a new play for you. I will be the founder of a colony; and you shall be people of +different trades and professions, coming to offer yourselves to go with me. What are you, Arthur?
Arthur. I am a farmer, sir.
Mr. Barlow. Very well. Farming is the chief thing we have to depend upon. The farmer puts the seed into the earth, and takes care of it when it is grown to ripe corn. Without the farmer, we should have no bread. But you must work very +diligently; there will be trees to cut down, and roots to dig out, and a great deal of hard labor.
Arthur. I shall be ready to do my part.
Mr. Barlow. Well, then I shall take you +willingly, and as many more such good fellows as I can find. We shall have land enough, and you may go to work as soon as you please. Now for the next.
James. I am a miller, sir.
Mr. Barlow. A very useful trade! Our corn must be ground, or it will do us but little good. But what must we do for a mill, my friend?
James. I suppose we must make one, sir.
Mr. Barlow. Then we must take a mill-wright with us, and carry mill-stones. Who is next?
Charles. I am a carpenter, sir.
Mr. Barlow. The most +necessary man that could offer. We shall find you work enough, never fear. There will be houses to build, fences to make, and chairs and tables beside. But all our timber is growing; we shall have hard work to fell it, to saw boards and planks, and to frame and raise buildings. Can you help in this?
Charles. I will do my best, sir.
Mr. Barlow. Then I engage you, but I advise you to bring two or three able +assistants along with you. William. I am a blacksmith.
Mr. Barlow. An +excellent companion for the carpenter. We can not do without cither of you. You must bring your great bellows, +anvil, and +vise, and we will set up a forge for you, as soon as we arrive. By the by, we shall want a mason for that.
Edward. I am one, sir.
Mr. Barlow. Though we may live in log-houses at first, we shall want brick-work, or stone-work, for +chimneys, +hearths, and ovens, so there will be employment for a mason. Can you make bricks, and burn lime?
Edward. I will try what I can do, sir.
Mr. Barlow. No man can do more. I engage you, Who comes next?
Francis. I am a +shoe-maker, sir.
Mr. Barlow. Shoes we can not well do without, but I fear we shall get no +leather.
Francis. But I can dress skins, sir.
Mr. Barlow. Can you? Then you are a useful fellow. I will have you, though I give you double wages.
George. I am a tailor, sir.
Mr. Barlow. We must not go naked; so there will be work for a tailor. But you are not above mending, I hope, for we must not mind wearing +patched clothes, while we work in the woods.
George. I am not, sir.
Mr. Barlow. Then I engage you, too.
Henry. I am a silversmith, sir.
Mr. Barlow. Then, my friend, you can not go to a worse place than a new colony to set up your trade in.
Henry. But I understand clock and watch making, too.
Mr. Barlow. We shall want to know how the time goes, but we can not afford to employ you. At present, I advise you to stay where you are.
Jasper. I am a barber and hair-dresser.
Mr. Barlow. What can we do with you? If you will shave our men's rough beards once a week, and crop their hairs once a quarter, and be content to help the carpenter the rest of the time, we will take you. But you will have no ladies' hair to curl, or gentlemen to powder, I assure you. Louis. I am a doctor, sir.
Mr. Barlow. Then, sir, you are very welcome; we shall some of us be sick, and we are likely to get cuts, and +bruises, and broken bones. You will be very useful. We shall take you with pleasure.
Stephen. I am a lawyer, sir.
Mr. Barlow. Sir, your most obedient servant. When we are rich enough to go to law, we will let you know.
Oliver. I am a +school-master.
Mr. Barlow. That is a very respectable and useful profession; as soon as our children are old enough, we shall be glad of your services. Though we are hardworking men, we do not mean to be ignorant; every one among us must be taught reading and writing. Until we have employment for you in teaching, if you will keep our accounts, and, at present, read sermons to us on Sundays, we shall be glad to have you among us. Will you go?
Oliver. With all my heart, sir.
Mr. Barlow. Who comes here?
Philip. I am a soldier, sir; will you have me?
Mr. Barlow. We are +peaceable people, and I hope we shall not be obliged to fight. We shall have no occasion for you, unless you can be a +mechanic or farmer, as well as a soldier.
Richard. I am a dancing-master, sir.
Mr. Barlow. A dancing-master? Ha, ha! And pray, of what use do you expect to be in the "backwoods?"
Richard. Why, sir, I can teach you how to appear in a drawing-room. I shall take care that your children know """precisely how low they must bow when saluting company. In short, I teach you the science, -which will +distinguish you from the savages.
Mr. Barlow. This may be all very well, and quite to your fancy, but / would suggest that we, in a new colony, shall need to pay more attention to the raising of corn and +potatoes, the feeding of cattle, and the preparing of houses to live in, than to the +cultivatioa of this elegant "science" as you term it.
John. I, sir, am a +politician, and would be willing to edit any newspaper you may wish to have published in your colony.
Mr. Barlow. Very much obliged to you, Mr. Editor; but for the present, I think you may wisely remain where you are. We shall have to labor so much for the first two or three years, that we shall care but little about other matters than those which concern our farms. We certainly must spend some time in reading, but I think we can obtain +suitable books for our +perusal, with much less money than it would require to support you and your newspaper.
Robert. I am a gentleman, sir.
Mr. Barlow. A gsntlemanl And what good can you do us?
Robert. I intend to spend most of my time in walking about, and +overseeing the men at work. I shall be very willing to assist you with my advice, whenever I think it necessary. As for my support, that need not trouble you much. I expect to shoot game enough for my own eating; you can give me a little bread, and a few """vegetables; and the barber shall be my servant.
Mr. Barlow. Pray, sir, why should we do all this for you?
Robert. Why, sir, that you may have the credit of saying that you have one gentleman, at least, in your colony.
Mr. Barlow. Ha, ha, ha! A fine gentleman, truly! When we desire the honor of your company, sir, we will send for you.

...had a lot of acerbic observations on the topic.

"I said this in 1971, in the very first week of PG, that by the end of my lifetime you would be able to carry every word in the Library of Congress in one hand - but they will pass a law against it. I realized they would never let us have that much access to so much information." http://samvak.tripod.com/busiw...

He was scathing on the topic of the attempts (which are largely succeeding) to convert us from an ownership society to a rentier society:

http://comments.gmane.org/gman...

"I worry that 100 years from now that 99% of foods will be GMO's [Genetically
Manipulated/Manufactured Organisms] and hence under copyright. . .and this
will enforce a copyright-powered hunger/starvation/malnutrition of the body
just as current copyright extensions are powering such for the mind.

The goal of WIPO is that EVERYTHING should HAVE to be paid for, plus a
royalty for the intellectual property. . .at a time when everyone COULD
have everything pretty much free of charge from replicator technology.

100 years ago the atom-powered Nautilus and atomic bomb were fiction,
only 50 years later the Nautilus was being built, and it sailed into
my own home town and their crew came to my school. . . .

Do you REALLY think it won't be even more different in the future?

But WIPO still wants to charge hugely for replicated food, just as
it does for replicated books."

One of the reasons I no longer respect content providers at all is that they do not take any concrete actions to support anyone who WISHES to comply with their restrictions. This shows that they are insincere.

When the RIAA expressed the view that you do not own the right to play a ripped file unless you retain physical possession of the media, I wrote to them saying that was impractical for me, and couldn't I ship them my physical CDs and receive a list of them with an RIAA certification that I owned them. They could store them or destroy them or whatever they liked. They never answered me.

If they were sincere, CDs would come with a prepaid mailer that you could use to mail the physical CD to RIAA and receive some kind of easily stored license that demonstrated that you had the right to listen to the content.

RIAA believes in their hearts that all electronic copies are infringing. They do not provide any practical way to prove that your electronic copies are not infringing.

This is EXTREMELY cool. But it seems to me they might have given a tip of the hat to Antony van Leeuwenhoek, who developed spherical glass microscope lenses in the late 1600s. Well, I see their paper does: "Although the use of high-curvature miniature lenses traces back to Antony van Leeuwenhoek's seminal discovery of microbial life forms (8), manufacturing micro-lenses in bulk was not possible until recently."

It all seems reasonable to me. The existing law had a bug. Nobody ever intended for upskirt pictures to be legal. The judge did the right thing: reported the bug. The developers of laws did the right thing: they fixed the bug. Now the legal situation is better than it was.

Great! Now there's new way for nerds to show off: by reciting the names of the planets. Easy when there were only nine, easier then there were eight, now it's a real challenge. Way more interesting than the digits of pi. Although that's setting the bar pretty low.

Metro might be OK if you don't actually care what your computer does and don't want the machine to accomplish any particular task, just do the computer equivalent of channel surfing. If you just want to poke here and there and experience pleasant little surprises at what comes up, it's OK. As soon as you try to accomplish any specific task you have decided on yourself, it is bad.

My wife is a neither a computerphobic or a techie. She just wants to get "simple" stuff done. She bought Windows 8 with careful consideration, spending time in a Microsoft store having a rep show it to her and saying to me "I know it's different, but I'll just learn it."

And she hates it.

One of the few things she really LIKED in Windows 8 was having the Bing picture of the day on her desktop. And it just quit working in 8.1. And she hasn't been able to figure out why or how to get it back. That's pure Microsoft for you

Medium-sized company, small groups, but nevertheless excellent managers. And, incidentally, willing and able to pitch in and do some of the work occasionally. One of the interesting things is that both of the excellent managers always chose to use the slowest, oldest, hand-me-down PCs.

I've also... ONCE in my career... gone to engineering planning meetings led by the VP of R&D, who insisted on doing everything in detail with Microsoft Project, and... you'll never believe this, never... actually used the tool to get a picture of the overall project and the critical paths. Someone would say something like "So, according to the chart, we're going to be three weeks late here," and he might say "Well, that's when marketing says they want it, but they don't really need it and I'm pretty sure I can push that back."

Or he would stare at another part and say, "Well, this looks like the critical path, and why is it going to take eight weeks to get this lens made?" And the optical engineer would say "That's what XYZ in Rochester is quoting us." And the VP would say "Hmmm... is there any way to get that faster?" "Well, we could get it in five weeks if we placed an expedited order but that's very expensive." "How expensive?" "It will cost $22,000 instead of $8,000." Pause. VP says "Well, it looks to me like we'd better do that, then."

There's no good reason for it, it simply reflects the tastes and preferences of people who are attracted to programming who are the market. The people who like visual aspects of programming are a minority. The mainstream does not "get" it, doesn't want it, and doesn't care about it.

To prove this, take a case that is much simpler than visual programming: Donald Knuth's "literate programming." This simply means an environment in which the source code can be commented with comments having the full capability of TeX, with rich text and illustrations.

Why is it that IDEs, programmers' editors and compilers are restricted to plain text? Why not rich text and compound documents (embedded graphics?) It not a difficult technical problem, as shown by the fact that Knuth already solved it. It is not a standards issue, as there is at least one perfectly good open and ubiquitous standard that could be used--HTML. It is not a cost or difficulty of migration issue, as shown by the fact that everyone was able to migrate from ASCII to Unicode. Yes, HTML would be harder, but perfectly feasible. Unlike visual programming, it is still just text.

The reason we do not have mainstream "literate programming" environments is because the vast majority of programmers, who form the market, don't care. They just don't want code with word-processor-like comments in it. They are perfectly happy to represent emphasis with leading and trailing underbars--after all, the semantics is the same.

Closest I ever came to literate programming was the original version of Nisus, a Mac word processor which stored all the formatting information in the resource fork. It was a fully formatted WP document, but if you ignored the resource fork it was an ASCII document. No, it didn't need to be converted, it just was. And you could use Nisus to write literate-programming-like documents, and provided the comments were delimited by /* and */ you absolutely could use a Nisus document as input to any standard Mac compiler with no change. However, there was no good way to integrate it into an IDE...

I've heard Apple people describe this with the too-kind phrase "tradition of demonstrating a wolf in sheep's clothing." That is to say, the Mac he was demonstrating was different from the Mac Apple was selling: it had 512K of RAM. The only Mac available for purchase at launch had 128K and was not capable of running the MacInTalk speech synthesis software.

This was indeed a Steve Jobs tradition; I recall him demonstrating a NeXT in Boston--brilliant demo, brilliant showmanship--and the NeXT he was demonstrating had an internal hard drive, which delivered much better performance than the product available for sale which ran entirely off a read/write optical drive.