user interface babblings

a couple of weeks back i tried out "enso", a software made by aza raskin and his folks at humanized.com". its a small tool which allows to handle several common tasks on windows via the keyboard (and the keyboard only). its in a way the same that "we" over at #fluxbox advise people to better work on their keybindings for fluxbox instead of wasting their time on the menu or on fancy icons on the workspace.

there is a joke about the only purpose of a xserver is to be a shell multiplexer (aka more than just one xterm open at the same time)... which is basically true :) at least i prefer to type in a set of commands into the good old command line instead of having to click myself through a deep hierarchy of items just to do the same. and even "shortcuts" placed visually on my desktop don't help because after a short period of time they become so many that things become messy.

on one hand the new fancy looking interfaces from mac os, vista or compiz and its companions are interesting but they don't solve the fundamental problem of how to present a lot of graphical items on the display. at least i don't need my 3 or 4 windows being rotated around on a cube, i doubt thats useful for anyone. the same goes for, as how i would call it, the "transparency hell". it is completely insane to write in a transparent gvim.

but on the other hand i tend to see user interfaces coming along which mostly allow to focus on just a couple of items and then allowing the user to zoom very fast to related items. and for those new interfaces all these play and gaming toys like rotating cubes with a firefox mapped onto it (which is very easy once you are able to use opengl textures :)) are going to be the shoulders of giants someone else referred to some time ago.

expect things like this to come. all the local search engines like google desktop, spotlight and others already show the way. i expect bigger screens with less simultaneous open windows but at a much speedier way to find related information.

btw, aza gave a little presentation at google, check it out.