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Comment by bobwaycott | Hacker News Reader

For my daily work of pounding out code, I'd certainly want none of this going on. I always disable silly OS animations. However, for my 2 kids who instantly 'get' my iPhone and iPad but feel less secure with my MacBook, I think Movie OS is the kind of thing that would convey useful meaning ... until they understood it all and the varnish wears off and they're asking how to disable the Movie so they can work with the OS.

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I completely agree - expanding the UI palette lets you use more varied, subtle (or less so) tools in different contexts for different audiences. People who already understand the consequences of their actions may not want/need to be constantly reminded.

Those of us who are perfectly happy to interact with our computers through a command line are a vanishingly small proportion of people who use a computer.

But those of us who dwell in a black screen with white monospaced text and a flashing cursor need to make more human interfaces if we are to make computers more accessible. Movie OS is possibly overkill, but devices like the iPad show promising signs of progress in HCI.

Yes. We need to get other people - people skilled in communicating to large audiences (and these people exist: they just exist as advertisers, graphic novelists, film directors, storyboard artists etc) involved in how we design our interfaces for everyone else, for the people who don't want to use a CLI.

Hmmm - varied At the moment I close my browser in the same way as I close my editor, with the little cross in top right.

But I close my new intuitive iPad app by stroking the background image to the top left? Or turning the window upside down? And of course it's different for each app.

For what designer interfaces do for you - take a look at all the non-standard, non-rectangular DVD/Mp3 player tools installed by random hardware makers.

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