Category

Graphical user interfaces have been around for a while now. In the last thirty years the available resolutions to the developers has gotten greater and this inevitably has spawned prettier and cleaner themes, however there is very little in the way of innovation Whilst looking into GUIs, the same tried and tested methods are there. They focus on chiefly on static, menu driven systems and desktops that vary in implementations and design, but rarely innovate.

The Early Years, between 1980 and 1990s was the .com boom for GUI interfaces. For us now its a fascinating time because its strange to think of Microsoft has being anything other than a massive monopolistic corporation that is shoving Vista down our throats. Sure we compute in a world safe in the knowledge that the 'cool' guys use Macs and that Linux is that sexy broad thats always just out of reach of the ordinary guy. But it was not always like this, in the very early years of command line interfaces and dodgy shells the GUI really started in earnest with the Apple Lisa Project. It featured drop down menus and desktop icon spaces and was definitely ahead of its time.

From 1984- 1988 the Operating system market was very healthy, with no fewer than 5 different Operating Systems being released and updated. In the few years since then, several contenders have battled it out trying to assert dominance over the Operating System scene. Some emerged 'victorious' (e.g. Apple, Linux, Microsoft) and others faded into distant memory (e.g. Geoworks, Amiga, IBM's OS/2, QNX, BeOS, Acorn, NeXT and others.) It is not until the early 1990s that things started to get interesting, Windows 3.0/3.1 and NT 3.1 were all released within a few years of each other adding a much need update to the old DOS mode graphics.

Throughout all of this, the basic way in which a workspace environment is structured had not changed, no new interface ideas come forth during this era. The operating systems were very different on a code and design level, but the basic menu / desktop point and click interface was well and truly established by this stage. Recently hardware 3D rendering has taken center stage and is most commonly seen with Vista's Aero Glass effects. Linux is the platform on which the greatest innovation is taking place and this of course is as a result of the openness of the platform - the ability to code / implement anything. Whilst the main two desktop managers (Gnome and KDE) are most widely known and recognized there are many fringe desktop mangers from minimalist (e.g. XFCE, flux/busybox) to the specialist (e.g. enlightenment). Whilst providing a great degree of flexibility and variety, they do not really innovate. An exciting project on Linux, originally started by Novel, forked in 2003 and in March remerged back into Compiz Fusion. This was the Linux answer to 3D rendering and whilst the variety and flexibility of Compiz / Beryl (now Compiz Fusion) are astounding, they still offer very little in the way of innovation, just a LOT of eye candy.

And now, finally, I get to the point of this article - desktop managers and the future (check back in five years for a laugh) of desktop interaction. There are three projects which potentially offer new ways to interact with the desktop are Bumptop's physics enabled desktop, Microsoft's Photosynth and Sun's Project Looking Glass.

Physics - on a desktop?!? Madness?

Bumptop is primarily a desktop icon manager, but its main selling point is that every icon (or groups of icons) can be moved / rotated / thrown around the desktop like a chip on a poker table. An obsessively neat person? No problem, stack your icons by file size, document type or by content.

Having a stressful day a the office? Throw your desktop clutter around until you feel better!

The flexibility of this manager is astounding, but whether it will need a new level of human-machine interaction before it takes off remains to be seen. If you have not yet seen their demo on youtube you definitely should.

Photosynth - Surprisingly innovative

Whilst not normally one to be particularly impressed by Microsoft and their 'technology', I am fascinated by Photosynth. The ability to create 3D objects from a series of photos is definitely an interesting concept, but its the way Photosynth presents the documents that could revolutionise the way we store and view documents in the future. To me, this is what I had in mind when Microsoft were talking about a journalised database filesystem back in the days of longhorn. Whilst this is the main focus of the technology, I was simply stunned at the way in which this project groups media. Regardless the size / dimension or media type, a 3D rendered wall is created of all your documents at the same time. Opening one is as simple as zooming into the image or pdf document. Of particular note was the ability to render books in their entirety and zoom from the outset into a single chapter.

 

The presentation is ten minutes long and there is no excuse for not watching it! :)

Project Looking Glass - Beware on a Sun-ny day.

I came across this project today and was quite taken with it. Initially it looks like a series of snazzy extension to Compiz, however when you dig a bit deeper you find that there are a handful of rather cool features. Rather than windows minimising to a taskbar, they rotate and stick in a 3D fashion to the sides of the screen.

This gives you not only a stack of windows occupying the minimum of desktop real estate, but a preview of each window at the same time making it the ultimate cross between Alt-Tab and the 'live' preview that hovering over the window gives you in Windows Vista and Compiz Fusion. Whilst the taskbar is used as a window dock, rather than being docked as tabs, widgets with window previews are used to further add to the experience.

Also demonstrated is a media player that allows track / album selection through a slew of rotating CDs with cover art. This looks a really clean way of quickly and easily selecting your music rather than searching through a long list.

Another interesting feature is wallpaper that is different on each desktop space (but part of the same overall picture). In the youtube video, the default deskspace is in the center, when you look at the left or right screens, you see the left or right part of the panoramic wallpaper, a very neat feature.

Credit: Some images from http://toastytech.com/guis/