The Internet interface is dying. | Hacker News Reader

The Internet interface is dying.

lighthouseinteger.blogspot.com

20 pointsMrJagil17 comments

Please discuss!

  What if, in Windows or OS X or linux, whenever you wanted to go to a folder or open a new app, you had to write the name of the folder/app and it's path in the terminal. What a waste of time, right?

Actually, it's the opposite. I have been a fan of Launchy for years and I can't even imagine how I would manage so many applications with icons, or how I could open a program so quickly.

I keep my Finder windows in Column view, and usually navigate around by typing (the first few letters of) its name, not dissimilar to how I use the Awesome bar.

Actually I find my web sites by typing one or two letters, and awesome bar does the rest.

And it is already possible to put bookmarks to web sites on the desktop.

What is supposed to be the great new replacement for files - a grid of norm sized icons???

It's meant to address original findability issues with online apps, not launchability.

The wonderful thing about app stores like android Marietta and the iPhone appstore is not that they add an icon to tour desktop.

The wonderful thing they provide is a unified way to find, compare, purchase and launch apps. Something the web - and web applications - both have been missing for a while. It's the logical extension to Google's mission statement of indexing the world's data.

The only difference is this time it's adding applications to the mix; seeing as the web is slowly (but surely) converging with the desktop, this is actually a bold and brilliant move.

The phrase 'is dying' should die. It's not even used in the article itself -- why is it in the title here?

You are absolutely right, and I am sorry. I guess this was one of those cases where, if you see something enough, you subconsciously embrace it.

I apologize for the hyperbolic and sensationalistic headline.

What I thought the article would be about, though you did touch on it, is how the prevalence of APIs and data-driven, single-purpose apps have begun to put a dent in web access of major sites (social media, shopping, news). It's an interesting phenomenon, definitely something deserving some further examination.

I will miss it if it goes. It is one of those concepts I love internet for. Everything is leveled, and all websites are equal in some sense of identification.

Except things like Spotlight and search in Windows are great too. For apps you don't use often, it's much easier to find them by name, by task, or tag then by scrolling through a long list of icons. Chrome's omni-bar is exactly that.

The dock at the bottom of my OS X screen very rarely gets used, typing the name of an app in quicksilver seems much faster.

That's why I advocate the Dock on the left and auto-hide: to recover those previous few pixel rows. I have it shrunk down to the minimum size. It might as well be completely disabled.

There's a place for command-line and there's a place for shortcut. It all depends on the number of options in an interface.

If you only need to do a few things in an interface, shortcut is better because it's clean and intuitive. But when you have lots of behaviors (i.e. millions of potential websites to go to), shortcut just doesn't make sense. That's where an auto-completable search command-line becomes useful.

Plus, I rarely see people use the address bar the way it was "meant to be" or the way that the author described it. People either google the website that they want to go to or the address bar auto-complete it before one finished typing.

Even facebook has a global auto-complete search box.

Watch it, when the number of frequently-used apps in an iphone reaches a critical amount, it will make more sense to use app search/run interface.

"What's the advantage of "installing" an app from Chrome Web Store? When Google Chrome users "install" a web application from the store, a convenient shortcut is added for quickly accessing the app."

When I read that I say to myself, "wait, you mean a bookmark?"

This idea looks so much like the AOL of 1994 (or worse, the MSN of 95) I want to give up an move to the mountains.

The web is a wonderful construct, a thing we should treasure as it makes everybody equal. You can put up a site in a couple minutes, make your web app and put a dent in the universe, and be just a couple keystrokes away from everybody, just like Google.

It's really disappointing when people want so much a nice walled garden to be imprisoned within.

How is this different from Site-Specific Browsers like Fluid? http://www.fluidapp.com/

Imagine if del.icio.us was not bought by Yahoo and instead progressed to where we all thought it would be... Basically, it would serve the same discovery mechanism as app store. You could see what other people were bookmarking and quickly add it to your bookmarks. Discovery problem solved!

(Damn you Yahoo and your inability to do the MERGE in merger & acquisition)

The "page" may be less fashionable than the "store" these days but It ain't dying. No one is required to buy what "bundle sellers" are selling.

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