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Comment by drb311 | Hacker News Reader

The best bit is the anecdote about LCARS in Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was all due to a budget shortfall:

"Star Trek also may have helped create the entire image-under-glass paradigm that governs our digital world. The interface, known as LCARS, is cool-looking. It’s distinctive. And it’s actually the result of a budget shortfall.

Star Trek: The Next Generation didn’t have as much money for set design as did the original series, which had panels wired with jewels and glowing buttons. Instead, they cut out film and put them over glass panes."

It's usually constraints, not the lack of them, that give birth to true innovation.

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Another thing: the original Star Trek brought the very concept of teleportation into mainstream attention and it was also due to a budgeting issue - they didn't have money to shoot sequences of Enterprise landing or sending shuttles down to the planet, so they invented a workaround...

It reminds me of The Lean Startup where IMVU couldn't roll out walking animation quickly enough, so they had avatars teleport and users thought it was more advanced than second life and the sims. Got to love work around a that really work

Either IMVU has changed massively since i poked at it, or the comparison to Sims is way out there...

Doctor Who beat them to that same solution some years before.

I'm not entirely sure, but the first show I remember having the budget to show the characters actually taking ships to their destination each time was Space: 1999, where the "Eagle" shuttles were ubiquitous. (It beat Battlestar Galactica by a few years.)

Space 1999 was preceded by UFO, made by (more or less) the same production company.

There was no teleportation - but there were ships flying a regular run to and from a moon base.

UFO is unbelievably good considering it was made in 1970. It's of its time socially, ahead of its time visually, and a lot of the scripts still stand up as excellent imaginative TV writing.

That's true; but Space: 1999 did it every episode. Most transportation in UFO via. that futuristic car, which they had a full-scale working example of.

I'm sure they showed the moon shuttle a few times, and of course they did lots of effects for the fighter jets and submarines blowing UFOs up, but it wasn't ubiquitous like in Space: 1999.

Didn't Babylon 5 have frequent CG sequences relating to ships docking and even landing on planets? (Granted they probably reused, maybe from different angles and with small changes, a lot of those sets).

B5 was CGI and literally decades after Space 1999 and BSG (the original series). The latter two would have used models like how Star Trek TNG did.

... yes?

But considering Space: 1999 came out literally 20 years earlier, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

Babylon 5's CG did not age well: they might have been served better by teleportation devices (left behind by the First Ones, naturally)

B5's CG looked like someone's dorm room povray animation at the time.

The LCARS display has a special place in my family. A few years back, my wife had a follow-up interview that landed on Halloween at Ubisoft. She was informed, "Don't be surprised if people are in costume and you should consider it too, if you feel so inclined."

She slapped on a TNG Combadge and re-designed her resume to look like a LCARS display and said, "Hey, it worked for their production when they were in a pinch." She accepted an offer a few days later.

The LCARS (and its various IRL implementations) is also among the least usable UIs, so I wouldn't exactly call it "true innovation".

The thing is: whenever you see it on-screen, the people using it are happy with it, not frustrated, not fighting it, and that is truly "good UX" (within the suspension of disbelief of the show).

In other words: it shows that, if people react to a UI like they do in the show, that's the perfect UI.

That's a critical assumption though and I'm not sure it holds. People in shows are scripted to react that way, it's not a natural reaction.

But that's just the point. If you have real-world users reacting to your real-world interface in the same way that TNG's scripted users (generally) react to their prop interface, you're probably doing something right.

Definitely. I agree. I just meant that you just can't go the other way: use the reactions from the shows as endorsement of the interface.

At least it's consistent and non-distracting, which is something you can rarely say nowadays about IRL user interfaces.

Imagine the logistics of pushing LCARS updates to God-knows-how-many starships and Federation installations.

That could make a fun fanfic.

Starfleet Tech Support.

Viz magazine (http://viz.co.uk/) recently did a strip wherein a thinly-disguised Enterprise and crew are obliged to beam up Captain Thomas T. Cook and his landing party in the face of danger, but his messages requesting help come through via email to Outlook Express...

They have had full natural language AI in every Star Trek franchise - except maybe the Scott Bakula one ( Enterprise? ) which I didn't watch . So I'd think updates would be largely a solved problem. Heck, the computer might patch itself.

I've only seen LCARS themes, but I do like the concept that everything is displayed on a screen, at once, with no overlapping windows.

Overlapping windows are the worst possible UI decision ever. I've been using tiling window managers for four years now and I never want to go back.

Overlapping windows in a cascade (so the bottom left corners act a bit like a tab selector) are my preferred window layout.

Random overlapping doesn't work particularly well. Any time you have to manage the z-index of more than one window, something has gone wrong. Thus cascading.

I can't stand tiling though. Either everything is too small, or you can't get enough stuff on screen at once.

> I can't stand tiling though. Either everything is too small, or you can't get enough stuff on screen at once.

Or everything has the wrong aspect ratio.

Why would you want cascading windows over tabbed interfaces (e.g.: any modern browser)? What does it actually buy you?

For me overlapping windows are better for using two applications at the same time - copy pasting, drag and dropping between them etc. This is because their position is deterministic. Tabs are better when I have a boatload of unrelated pages (e.g.: tabs). This is also why I find tabbed interfaces in code editors useless.

I find tabbed editors useful in that they allow you to open the current "working set" of files, and then disregard the rest of the project files. After I open up the working set, I usually close the tree view (Sublime, in my case) so my code has more room.

Different windows have different good sizes.

For example, I don't run my browser maximized, because I don't want web pages in landscape; acres of margin or very long lines - neither choice is good. The viewport of my browser is nearly square (1500 x 1300).

Terminals don't work great with very long lines either; man, less etc. adjust to terminal width making lines harder to read.

My scratchpad app I keep for notes is generally notepad shaped, i.e. taller than it is wide, but not as wide as a terminal window.

My password manager (KeePass2) is the only other really common app. I don't interact with it very often other than via hotkey.

I keep Emacs/IDE maximized on a different screen.

I use KWin, and it has configurable keyboard shortcuts for basically everything, so I have ones configured to effectively tile windows into halves or corners of the screen. This makes very good use of 16:9 monitors.

But sometimes an overlapping window is very useful. For example, I'm watching a fullscreen video, but I want to chat with a friend in an instant messaging app. I can put the conversation window on top of the video in a corner of the screen where it doesn't block anything important.

Or I'm doing some kind of graphical work, image editing, web design, etc, and I only need to see part of a window, but it needs to fill the height of the screen. I can put other programs on top of the parts I don't need to see.

Tiling is great, but overlapping windows have their place too.

Overlapping windows are wonderful in X-mouse style mode.

When your soul interaction with a normally large window is just a tiny strip on the bottom, it's like you've divided a single display in to something normally thin and wide (a console for example), and another thing on top that is slightly smaller but otherwise that you want to interact with.

The nice part about this layout over a purely tiling window one is that the console is entirely ready for you to switch to it being the full screen when you want to read the backlog or do more complex work with it.

How i have pretty much operated the GUI since the early days of Windows 95. Run everything full screen and use the taskbar as a kind of tab switcher.

The way i understand LCARS is that you would have a primary activity up front, and then a menu of other activities down the side.

It's true for real devices also: touch screens and other capacitive touch sensors are way cheaper than real buttons.

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