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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: Idea for KDE 4 - global, smooth zoom feature.
From:       "Aaron J. Seigo" <aseigo () kde ! org>
Date:       2005-05-25 23:18:29
Message-ID: 200505251718.29853.aseigo () kde ! org
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On Wednesday 25 May 2005 16:57, Diego Moya (a.k.a. TuringTest) wrote:
> Infinite zooming is your 3rd Dimension.

no, it's a view on a 2D space. it would only be a 3D dimension if i could 
utilize that dimension to order things.

> The only thing you could miss 
> from a desktop is the overlapping, and why do you need that? You can

my argument is not about overlap versus non-overlap. my argument is that the 
question of whether to overlap or not overlap is inconsequential. a "ZUI" 
would end up with the exact same limiters we have with our current WIMP GUIs.

> You can have embedded documents - they are actually 2D now, they're
> "inside" the container. Being able to see them bigger doesn't change
> anything.

what dimensionality does a hyperlinked document have? 
if an embedded document has scrollbars, where is it scrolling?
2D metaphores fail at anything more complex than a sheet of paper.

>  (And what do you mean by presence? Isn't that a box with
> your buddy list floating somewhere?)

no, it isn't. have you ever noticed how kmail uses presence information in 3.4 
and beyond? have you ever noticed how your buddy list isn't static, but 
changes over time w/out you doing anything to or with it?

> > not to mention you'd need one hell of a plane section to show the files
> > on my system ;)
>
> No problem, it's infinite... :-P

and given infinite time i'm sure i'll be able to find everything t hen. ;)

> > > The concept of "clones" (similar to soft links) could be used to have
> > > different, alternate mappings at the same time.
> > >
> > > The advantage of Zooming User Interfaces over windows is that they're
> > > truly "spatial", you can use positional memory to remember where
> > > things were located.
> >
> > spacial tops out. do you remember where everything in your house is? i
> > know i don't.
>
> You don't have "Google for my keys" in your house when your memory
> fails. But you can have that in your computer. And for when you
> remember the location, can you imagine having to blindly type:
>
> /doorway/hall/right-wall/chest-of-drawers/drawer1/key
>
> instead of just "i can see my keys from here, just zoom there"?

you don't need a zooming interface for this. you're now describing a search 
interface. spatial is a different concept altogether. if one relies on 
search, what does spatial give you exactly?

all you've shown is that you can fix the problems with spatial by relying on a 
non-spatial solution. um. heh.

> Autocompletion is not enough. In Konqueror you can't see anything but
> the current folder, the rest of the hierarchy is hidden.

agreed; yet this is not solved by making things spatial, it's solved by making 
things self-locating. make an infinite space to zoom around in and you STILL 
need means to locate things. it's not easier enough given the normal amount 
of information and how we use it. we need to make organization conceptual and 
get rid of all these bad metaphores to the physical world. because only once 
we make organization conceptual can we make items self-locatable and 
self-organizing.

> In a ZUI you see everything at once

this is exactly my point: we have too much to make "seeing everything at once" 
useful. moreover, "everything" is no longer files, it's also the 
relationships between files and the temporal nature of things (e.g. 
presence). the world has moved on since 1984.

> - except if it is very small, but 
> then you can see -and visually remember- the surrounding context. And

no, actually, i can't remember it, visually or not. i have too many things. i 
can remember concepts and ideas about what i'm looking for (e.g. who it 
belongs to) but those things do not map to a static 2D space. period. it 
constantly amazes me how people who use computers every day fail to notice 
how non-static our data is and how vast the ocean of information is.

(and let's not even get into the issue of making this work for the visually 
impaired or spatially challenged)

> > spacial is great for small sets of data, not the
> > data warehouses that our PCs (let alone LANs) have become.
>
> Spatial is not intended to *replace* all other methods of access but
> mainly make sense of them. Now system objects are "somewhere inside
> the hard disk". Not very intuitive. In a ZUI you could remember "I
> left that document near the box of trailer previews, just after I
> downloaded the teaser of Episode III".

just like i remember where i put my keys down the last time i put them. not.

unless you have an unusually precocious memory and/or use everything in your 
computer constantly, you have more objects than you can remember and you have 
collections of objects you've probably even forgotten about completely due to 
disuse.

and to say that the answer to the hierarchy is to smear it all out into one 
directory is, honestly, insane. go ahead, put all your files in one directory 
and zoom in an out. yeah, that's useful. =(

> Actually, can you think of *anything* that you can do on a desktop and
> you can't do on an infinite desktop? (other than hide things under
> other things and lose them from view).

that's not the relevant point here. the relevant question is how usable it is.

> > in this case, i think Raskin was out to lunch.
>
> Actually he did what we aren't doing here. He tested his designs on
> real users, and his proposals are the result of several iterations.

i really wonder what his test conditions were. if they are anything like the 
demos the project release, they don't map to reality in the least.

> > everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler (- Einstein).
> > IMHO Raskin was trying to make things simple beyond "possible".
> > thankfully simplicity is not the only route to usability.
>
> The Humane Interface (now called Archy) is no more simple than the
> command line (what could be simpler than that?) and is equally
> powerful. Actually is almost the same idea as Emacs, only with better
> interface design. Isn't Emacs prepared to manage the complexity of our
> current PCs and networks?

you're joking here, right?

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
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