[geeks] 3D desktop interfaces...

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Sun, 25 Jun 2006, Nate wrote:

> http://honeybrown.ca/Pubs/BumpTop.html
>
> http://macslow.thepimp.net/?page_id=18
>
> (To me, they seem only marginally better than MS Bob.)

Indeed.  They remind me of many of the mistakes IBM made in their
RealThings UI experiments:

   http://homepage.mac.com/bradster/iarchitect/phone.htm
   http://homepage.mac.com/bradster/iarchitect/realcd.htm

Some UI designers seem to forget that the ways we do things in the real
world are constrained by the laws of the physical universe.  We don't
have nearly as many limitations when interacting with a computer.  Why
would I -want- pictures of documents that I have to drag around and
arrange and stack into piles, when I can organize projects into
directories and then sort those directories by nearly any criterion that
interests me at the moment?

Windows Explorer (when you turn off all the candy and mind-numbing
stupidity) has a -very- good implmentation of this.  The Finder isn't
horrible, either, but it tends to do unexpected stuff[0] more often.

I suspect, though, that "typical" computer users don't take nearly as
much care to organize[1] their data.  That's really unfortunate.  The
biggest boon of using a computer to organize data is that the user can
sift through monumental amounts of information very quickly, provided he
set up a sane hierarchy beforehand.


[0] Changing directories unintentionally (especially in "columns" view),
     putting items into a directory one level above the one I wanted
     because I drug the files outside the boundaries of the name of the
     target directory, -stomping- on a directory rather than merging
     contents when I drag a directory into another directory that happens
     to have a child with the same name as the directory I was dragging,
     and just generally trying to be "cute" and "helpful" rather than
     doing exactly what I want.
[1] "What do you mean?  'Where did I save it?'  It's in the computer!"
-- 
Jonathan Patschke    )   "A man who never dreams goes slowly mad."
Elgin, TX           (      --Thomas Dolby, "Valley of the Mind's Eye"