UI Trends

uitrends.com

58 points·restruct··6 comments

Why do people always feel the need to overgeneralize things ?

From http://uitrends.com/2009/09/03/command-line-interfaces-dont-... :

command line interfaces are back again, hiding under the name of search

No, they are not. Yes, it's also a box in which you type text, hit return and see results. But a command-line tells a computer to do stuff, a search box tells a computer (Google) to retrieve stuff. By stating that search engines are the new commandline, well, it's not as silly as claiming the web is the new OS, but it's close.

The only reasons I can see why they make these generalizations is either that they don't understand what a commandline does, or it simply brings them more attention. I suspect the latter.

Because thanks to a generation of marketing abuse, change can now only be understood in terms of revolutions and paradigm shifts. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to overthrow my oppressive hunger regime and bring about a new age of sandwhich eating.

I think that they mixed their message a bit, but I believe that the point they were trying to make about the Google search box is that there are more commands like "define" and "translate" that are getting integrated into the search box. The second have of the blog post was about Ubiquity which I believe most people would certainly define as a CLI.

Or just think of keyword searches in firefox. Or bookmarklets etc.

All those are power user features though. Most users don't even know they exist, and why would they, since they aren't very discoverable.

seem to have a bit of a chip on their shoulder wrt the iphone: http://is.gd/2X6U4

Reply on news.ycombinator.com