Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Frankly, I'm not even sure it's possible to "drive off teh road to a new place" when it comes to desktop UX

Sure it is.

3d file managers[1] never took off. With todays hardware they'd be a lot nicer to use.

Users have been limited to quite small (sorry about my incorrect terminology here, I'm going to go read some man pages) total virtual screen size within which their windows were located. Now graphics cards, and system memory, are huge; this leads to possible radical new interfaces.

Imagine a "Zoomable UI" - documents open in their own full size window; any document opens in its own window tiled next to it; the user can zoom in as far as they like to do detail work, or out as far as they like to organise all these documents. Programs would open toolbars in their own windows. Any toolbar would be able to work on any document (because it's Unix, so all input and output is text, right?) - but the result wouldn't necessarily make any sense.

That's not particularly radical; tiling WMs exist already.

[1] (http://nooface.net/3dui.shtml) {my favourite is FSV.}

3D file management never took off because no one has yet found a meaningful and intuitive use for three dimensions that couldn't be accomplished with two.

The screenshots of FSV on that site show me a 2D interface that's been extruded into cubes and displayed isometrically. Usable, but the 3D is superfluous. All the other 3D file managers appear utterly unusable.

What on earth is going on in this screenshot of Tactile3D: http://www.tactile3d.com/overview/screenshot_orbis_9.jpg?

Or this one of TDFSB: http://www.determinate.net/webdata/img/TDFSB2.jpg?

Yes, 3d file managers were ugly, and hard to use, and didn't really serve any purpose.

But with modern hardware, and with a better HID, and with a better analogy / paradigm / idea, they could come back and be useful.

I don't know what that meaningful use for the 3rd dimension would be, but I'm pretty sure there is one.

(The tactile screenshot is awful. It appears to show a bunch of stuff ordered by name. The TDFSB2 screenshot shows someone "walking" through their home/leo/jpeg directory, with all the jpegs being displayed. Remember that these are tinkering toys, and that things like mice or GUIs were initially weird and horrid. Maybe getting a bunch of smart people working on them would generate useful results?)

Exactly - someone will have to design a new file management functionality that adds real value and also happens to leverage 3D technology.

Window management certainly has benefited from using the GPU, e.g. with real-time thumbnails of applications and enhanced virtual desktops. But these are solutions that were enabled by the GPU, not features that were tacked on simply because GPUs were around to use.

If someone comes up with a new and revolutionary file management paradigm, or even just a useful innovation on the margin of existing file management, and it's one that 3D makes sense for, then great. Until that happens, it's a solution in search of a problem.

To me, the clearest mandate for using three dimensions for file management is in creating a space that people can become as mentally familiar with as they can with a house.

We already know that one of the most powerful methods for creating a lasting memory of intangible items, the "memory palace", is basically walking around a three-dimensional space.

It seems clear that there is a possibility here to create a fully-functional three-dimensional metaphor. However, it is not an evolutionary step. It would be something so foreign that it would be better to teach it to people who never managed files before. And to be honest, with apologies to Dropbox, the numbers of such folks is back on the rise because file management itself is an increasingly irrelevant task, not just on iOS but on Chromebooks and just about any non-desktop computing device.

And so although there is a very interesting potential, I have to wonder if the quest for better file management is even worth fretting over anymore. Hasn't being "ready for the desktop" largely been an exercise in skating to where the puck has been? Maybe a revolutionary file manager would have been strategic ten years ago, but now?

So I welcome Canonical's focus on touch devices. Yet I'm concerned about the sheer inertia of maintaining an identity, in being Ubuntu, on a significantly different platform. We saw how well the Windows Tablet PC succeeded at being Windows, and in so doing lost the platform. I sure hope that's not what happens here.

But a file manager's principal function is to organize things. And people don't think three-dimensionally when they're organizing things. They don't even think two-dimensionally. It's always a single dimension, some kind of vector, and they compose things into one-dimensional vectors that may contain other one-dimensional vectors, but they're always looking for one dimension at a time.

If you're looking for a quotation from your favorite author (assuming Google wasn't helpful), you're not going to nevigate a three-dimensional conceptual space to find it. You're going to first iterate through your list of bookshelves, and find the appropriate shelf (assuming you have lots of books and sort them into shelves e.g. by topic or alphabetically). Then you'll sort through the books on the shelf and find the book you need. Then, you'll go through the chapters of the book, etc.

The mind organizes information into categories, and groups categories within categories. Visual mnemonics are great, but they help us to find the specific item we're looking for at the appropriate level of abstraction, and they work just as well in organized, two-dimensional spaces as well as three.

I agree that there may be a lot of potential for some major breakthrough, but having to remember that your Economics paper is stored in an inventory slot in a chest in the inn in that logging town outside Stormwind isn't it.

I agree, its way easy to drive off the road. Not as easy to navigate the resulting underbrush.

Aza Raskin's THE stuff is pretty interesting in that regard, there are varieties of menu systems, where do menus appear, how do they appear? (I've always thought the pie menus were cool) And of course how do you switch between manipulating the space (app selection, desktop, themes) and manipulation within the app itself.

Strangely (for me at least) is that the Windows 8 previews have some interesting stuff in them (after years of not changing much) more interesting in concept than some of mainstream UIs on Linux. Again not that a tiling WM is particularly new but the blending of the icon/status bar presence/window/launcher feels pretty fresh.

I do run Kubuntu on my desktop but I continually try out different schemes with virtual machines when I can to see where things are going. My netbook runs XFCE which reminds me in a strange way of Suntools.

Raskin sounds similar to what you describe for a "Zoomable UI".

http://www.raskinformac.com/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com