Have you all seen The Quiet Earth? It’s an 80s movie in which some loser wakes up to find (as far as he knows) that he’s the last person on Earth.
I have a fear that I, too, will one day awaken to my own “Quiet Earth.”
There’s this trend I’m seeing around the ol’ technosphere, and I think it’s really stupid, but it seems like the kind of thing that could really catch on. I’m afraid that it will, one day, catch on, and that I’ll be left walking up and down the empty streets of my own little world, shouting “HELLO – IS ANYBODY THERE?” and only getting my own echoes in response.
This trend is the result of the common geek’s inability to understand that progress does not necessarily have to mean really stupid change.
I’ve talked some smack about Project Looking Glass in the past on .NET Rocks, and I was afraid at the time that the day would eventually come when I would be talking smack about a similar project built on Windows.
That day has arrived, my friends (enemies?). SphereXP is here.
It’s a “3D” desktop for Windows, and I’m very much not looking forward to having it in my living room (if I had a living room, anyway, which I don’t). I realize that this might sound uber negative, but this is one of those things that I feel very strongly about.
It’s hard enough keeping track of application windows in current systems. How in the hell is life going to get any easier by adding a third dimension to the experience?
Human beings have 7 +/– 2 memory “registers” for short term memory. In other words, you can keep anywhere from 5 to 9 pieces of information in your short term memory before you run out of space and have to commit something to permanent storage (which, unfortunately, isn’t as easy as it sounds) or discard it to make room for new information (much easier than it sounds).
We do this every day, and any system which could make this lame-ass shortcoming of the brain a little easier to deal with would be quite nice.
That’s why I have to wonder about the advantages, if any, of stuffing even more information on the screen at the same time:
Has anybody seen my car keys?
I just don’t understand. I’ve heard it over and over, too. There’s a yabbo in every office who thinks he’s stumbled onto the Next Great Thing, and can’t wait to tell you about it. He swears you to secrecy before divulging the incredible details of his plan, like someone who has discovered the process by which we can convert cat urine to gold (by the way – if anybody wants to try this and would like access to an ample supply of cat urine, just get in touch with me).
Why does it seem so natural to some people that we move in this direction? Change, and big changes in particular, should really be for the benefit of the user. We need ways to simplify desktops – not clutter them with spinning windows and three-dimensional application surfaces that rotate in confusing ways. I mean, the only use I can see for this would be preventing old people from ever being able to figure out computers, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing. There’s a radar in the lower right-hand corner for chrissake. A radar. Will the next “advance” along these lines require a form of specialized GPS so that we won’t get lost when looking for files? Will there be laws against exploring alone? Will we have to wear safety harnesses when descending into the confusing and disorganized pits our computers will have become?
While we’re at it, why don’t we add depth to books? They’ve already got rows and columns. There’s an entire axis that’s being ignored here. Think about how many more words we could fit on a page if each page were a cube. We could even arrange the words in such a way that reading the cube from one angle would result in one book, and reading it from another would result in an entirely different book.
It’s just brilliant!
[sigh…]
A better idea (?)
Just off the top of my head, and in a completely different direction, I’ll offer this to the world of desktop usability…
Why don’t we allow users to group applications? I’ve found in recent years that, more often than not, I need to work with a group of applications to get something done rather than just one application at a time. For example, when blogging, I like to have BlogJet open alongside the Microsoft Encarta Dictionary. I also keep an instance of Notepad open for any scratch writing that I need to do.
It would be a great help to me if I could define a layout configuration for these items on screen, a launch configuration, and a profile to which I could save these settings. It sounds a little complex now, but it could be made very simple through a few mouse movements.
So, what I’d like in the end is this:
1. I navigate to Start —> Profiles (not “Programs)
2. From the “Profiles” list, I select the profile I’d like to start up
3. In the case I described above, I might choose to open the “Blogging Profile”
4. BlogJet, Encarta Dictionary, and Notepad would open up at the same time and arrange themselves in my preferred layout
5. At the end of the session, I can choose to shut down the entire profile at once rather than having to close each application separately
Optional: I would also be interested in defining my layout with “sticky” windows – that is, I’d like to be able to join several apps together into one Super-App that I could drag around the screen as one unit.
Put that in your techno-pipe and smoke it
It might not be Nobel Prize material, but at least old people could still use it.
I hate this faux 3D desktop crap. I’d rather poke my eye out with a bus than use one of these systems.