If there’s one thing I’ve learned about working with inexperienced graphical designers over the years, it’s that they hate corners and angles. Grids, being made of corners, are things they will never ever touch with a bargepole.
Blob, swoosh, lozenge, circle, arc, curve, fluiiiiiid! Not only is this not how computers think or work, it’s not how we do either.
But ours is not to reason why, ours is just to implement the design. And sometimes, joyfully, get to work with a designer who really gets it, so well that when they ask the impossible, we’re willing to make it happen because it actually makes sense.
A voice UI is still a UI (he does admit later in the article that he’s just trolling with the term ‘Zero UI’, just means getting away from screens). And a very imprecise slow UI depending on what you’re doing.
On the other hand I do talk to my watch to do things like setting alarms and simple searches. Sometimes it’s even faster than using my fingers would have been.
Windows often does this and it drives me nuts! It is trying to ‘help’ but causing more problems than not. Good example is trying to drag ‘n’ drop something only to have the target folder expand at precisely the wrong moment. I say this as a Windows user.
Then again, if you’ve ever learned a set of shortcut keys instead of clicking ad nauseum, you understand why we need both. Even though the essay “The Anti-Mac Interface” is old, I think it’s still applicable. Not everything can be easily done with gestures.
Not to mention it is laughably false that straight lines don’t exist in nature. It is like she’s never seen a crystal before (which is ironic considering her pseudo mysticism) or a spider web or a snowflake or hell… light. Outside the confines of a gravity well, objects will happily move in a straight line forever and considering the size of the universe, that is probably most things.
Considering that spacetime itself seems to be curved, and all matter physically discontinuous - it doesn’t seem like to much of a stretch to say that straight lines are more likely an artificial idealized form.
The universe is very nearly perfectly flat, if not perfectly flat, at the largest scales.
In fact the curvature of spacetime is so tiny (if it actually is curved) that we don’t even know if the curvature is positive or negative. Our best measurements either say “curvature not detected” or “curvature so small, it could easily just be noise.”
Of course it will, by utterly disempowering the user. The alarm has been raised about this for at least 5 years. Invisible interfaces aren’t just annoying, they’re dangerous.
Without reading the digital alongside and against the analog, the present slips from view, for the contemporary computing industry, which is accelerating its drive to achieve perfect invisibility, desires nothing more than to efface the interface altogether and so also efface our ability to read let alone write it. As Alex Galloway puts in in the chapter epigraph, the more user-friendly an interface is touted to be, the more invisible it as it attempts to erase ever trace of its own functioning. An example of such an effacement occurred during one of the most well-known unveilings of a multitouch interface, at which creator Jeff Han proudly declared, “There’s no instruciton manual, the interfaces just sort of disappears.” Another example comes from the Natural User Interface Group, who define NUI as “an emerging concept in Human/Computer interaciton that refers to an interface that is effectively invisible, or becomes invisible to its users with successive learned interactions,” and they user “natural” to mean “Organic, unthinking, prompted by instinct.” But whose instinct is directing the shape of these interfaces. But more to the point, why would we - whether we identify as a user or creator, a reader, a writer - want our interactions with interfaces to be “unthinking,” such that we have no sense of how the interface works on us, delimiting reading, writing, even thinking?
The whole book is basically a mindful media-studies oriented discussion of computer technology, in a similar vein to what people like Lev Manovich and Janet Murray have been saying for some years, but more rooted in comparison to other media and creative expression. It’s dense and difficult in the way only academic humanities types can be, but one of my favorite pieces of nonfiction I’ve read in years.
I was surprised, years ago, when the GNOME desktop interface, widely used on Linux, stopped featuring an icon for the gnome-terminal application in a prominent place on the default desktop. If I recall correctly, this was before the release of GNOME 3.0, which remains widely reviled for simplifying the interface, hiding many elements, and making it difficult to discover them. It’s trivially easy to add an icon for gnome-terminal to the desktop (or the Dash, or whatever), and it’s one of the first things I do when setting up a Linux PC – but it’s not necessarily the first thing everyone thinks of.
Usually, people who use Linux on their personal computers chose to install it deliberately, and in general are people inclined to tinker with things rather than just going along with the defaults. A major reason to use Linux is that it’s readily, extensively customizable. And much of that is accessed through the command line, and in a GUI environment, that means using gnome-terminal, or xterm, or one its kin. And yet access to it is now slightly obscured, and it seems that it’s increasingly common for Linux users to be unfamiliar with the command line.
