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Jacques Mony wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Personnally, I'm totally bored of windowing systems. I spend to
> much time thinking about rearranging my windows in order to become
> efficient at work.
>
> Before I go into a "new kind of gui" design, I'd like to get a list
> of what people usually do with a computer.
>
> For example: One wants to write an email and watch movies. Others
> will write code and listen to music. Others will create music and
> edit pictures, etc.
>
> We're stuck in the desktop paradigm, and in order to get out of it,
> I think that listing the needs for a GUI will help in defining an
> efficient way to fullfill these goals.
>
> So, what do you do with a computer?
i made a concept for a graphical user interface and i showed it to
some people on the #uuu channel. you can find a mock up of it at:
http://stud4.tuwien.ac.at/~e0526971/framework.odp (interactive slides)
http://stud4.tuwien.ac.at/~e0526971/framework.pdf (non-interactive --
use the previous one if possible!)
when starting the interactive slide you get the login screen. you "log
in" by clicking on the hidden password symbols. i think you can find
out the rest ;).
unfortunately i did not get much positive feedback, but i am still
confident, that it might be at least a base for a
unununium-implemented user interface.
the intention behind it was that software should not be represented as
a single box (application). therefore i thought programs should be a
set of components which are based on each other (component hierarchy).
i split the ways a user interacts with the computer into five
different usage cases (accessible by F1 through F5 keys). this
separation affects only the user interface and splits e.g. the editor
components of all programs from the viewer components and settings
components.
a specific example: a word processor package contains several core
components (which do not affect the user interface) and three front
end components, one for authoring, one for just displaying (and
browsing) and the third one for changing the word processor's behavior.
this is what these five categories mean:
administration [F1]:
all settings land here. there are no system- and component
configuration options in any of the other four categories. if you
change e.g. mail parameters, you still change it in the administration
subsystem because you are changing the computer's behavior. also user
management and remote administration are tasks located here.
authoring [F2]:
means that the user is productive and creates stuff. that might be a
drawing, photo editing or just writing a text document. the computer
should interfere with the user's work as less as possible
(non-/less-interactive creation -- only what the user expects should
happen with his creations).
browser [F3]:
contains the collectivity of all viewer components of all programs and
do not modify things. here is also the movie player, and the web
browser. if the user wants to change something found here the selected
item(s) gets copied to a modifiable item in the authoring panel where
all editor tools are available. note that items in the browser have a
different meaning than items on the authoring tab. one item can not
exist as an authoring object and a browsable object at the same time
(therefore copies). this sounds stupid, but this represents the user's
intention. this is easy: if i want to listen to music it is in the
browser since i did not make it but the letter to my girlfriend i
wrote last year is my work and is located on the authoring tab.
communication [F4]:
this is another usage which differs from the others. principally
communication with others on the network.
interactive [F5]:
related to communication but this describes communication with the
computer itself. games and hmi/scada (control engineering) things are
interactive things. you can think of it as doing things and expecting
the computer's response. this is everything where maximum
interactivity is expected. i placed an X11 desktop here, because it
doesn't integrate into the categories and working with current window
managers and desktops is rather a interactive task. i would not see
this one as an "others" category because i exactly defined this
category as what it is.
i also got a question where a program, where several people can e.g.
paint an image together (you know microsoft's whiteboard shipped with
netmeeting?), might be located. this program would be split into
components: the core components (network protocols, logics etc.) are
common and do not affect the user interface. then there are several
user interface components, which are still connected with each others,
but categorized on the user interface side. the program's settings
component uses several other settings components as base and adds it's
special settings options to the administration panel. the
communication panel hosts the part of the user interface which
contains the chat window or the voice/video chat controls. in the
authoring category the whiteboard is shown.
if the chat partner writes something to you while you are drawing in
the whiteboard a system notification would highlight the
"communication" tab. when clicking on it or hitting F4 the chat event
is shown. hitting F2 gets you back to the authoring panel. this is a
limitation of my concept because you can not see both things at once.
therefore this concept might be extended with a floating mode for the
chat box and video window or with other ways to utilize today's large
screen resolutions (and the possibility of multiple screens).
- --
Stefan Mayrhofer (Pythagoras1)
e-mail: stefan.mayrhofer@xxxxxxxxx
jabber: pythagoras1@xxxxxxxxxxx
mobile: +43 650 990 20 81
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