I'd love to use a modern GUI that adopted this aesthetic. Even though the content of documents would be in color, having the UI itself restrained to a simple monochrome palette would be very enjoyable to use.
Another great part of this particular interface is also minimal cruft. All you have is data text, descriptive text, and a bunch of small graphics, all but one meaningful (the sine wave representing communication seems to be just a gimmick, though it still carries a few bits of relevant information). No useless animations, no useless framing, no "material design", no nonsense.
I fondly love all the work you can find in the portfolio.
( edit: oh, with dark and light themes! )
Fuck it. Slater is magic software...
and it's interface is like a tiling 'window manager' for any number of screens (anything with a browser), for threads of interaction, that are modeled as a story, like a conversation... but composes natural language with rich controls, forms, and stateful widgets. and super monochrome... but also controls your browser and TV and stuff...
I'm really inspired by the design work on the LightPhone 2, btw.
Super lame, early video: https://youtu.be/_m1zEbQieYQ
I'll probably throw away the waveform. I'm just looking for ways to use the audio to pace the text output, and also to tie the speech and text together as much as possible, so there's never a gap between them for your focus to jump between.
How are you synchronizing to each word?
I wonder if Google would consider expanding their TTS a bit to provide syllable data and other rich breakdown information.
I like the waveform, btw.
I'm using Polly for the moment, and it provides word and viseme boundaries. Enough to animate face poses. I'm not taking full advantage of the visemes here: it's only affecting the saturation of the waveform color. Too subtle to notice, with the way things kind of flicker with this one.
I have other ideas I want to play with, but don't really have time, and I may just have to drop that line of thinking, because I plan to move to one of the wavenet implementations, which don't provide speech marks data.
This sort of design fits nicely into css and html without much hackery but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to design.
I suppose you could view source or inspect element.
Graphic design principles are what make the difference...
The old mIRC was mostly like this, a core/backend functionality with a very skin-able frontend.
Almost all the value is in the UI. For the user, it's the place where they interact with the system, and in software tools, UI design can make orders of magnitude of difference in value delivered to the user[0]. For the vendor, the UI is where they shove ads at people, track them, and lock them into the product.
The problem is that Internet companies today no longer operate under "earn money by delivering value" model. They operate under "extract as much value as possible from the customer", which means any value delivered is incidental. Examples of those two models in action:
- "earn money by delivering value" - customizable interface with power-user features, and/or good API allowing users to interact with the product from third-party UIs and scripts; users pay for the product/service
- "extract value from user" - dumbed down, shiny interface, no power-user featuers; locked down SaaS little to no API access; sometimes paid, but more likely free in order to maximize user growth, which leads directly to the company being acquihired, product being shut down, and users being left in the cold
(Yes, I'm pretty bitter about the state of things, and I generally refuse to use most SaaS products because of the dominant approach of such companies.)
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[0] - as a real-world example, consider software for managing products in ecommerce. Take away batch-processing capabilities, and your user's productivity will drop hundredfold. Which directly translates to a) frustration, and b) the need to hire more people for the same task.