Comment by btown | Hacker News Reader

Comment by btown | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo has a much more technically detailed article about the software, including a video showing the software in action. https://www.yahoo.com/tech/how-intel-helped-stephen-hawking-...

Direct link to the screen-capture video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPU6mnM2i-k

TL;DR Hawking only has a single reliable, low-latency binary signal (facial muscle movements), so his interface has been a constantly-moving cursor that he can "click" when it's over the next symbol/command he wishes to select. The innovations here are in the interpretation of those selections: he now has autosuggest for text (designed specifically for him based on the corpus of his works) and shortcuts for filesystem management.

I'm looking forward to seeing when the source code is released, or when a paper is written. Just looking at the data-entry video, for instance, there are interesting parallels between the timing specifications for Hawking's Yes/No dialog and GUI design for dialogs for non-disabled users - in both cases, if there's not enough spacing in between buttons, or orderings are unpredictable, it's much easier for someone to mis-click!

How has he written so many books considering the speed of the interface? Even in interviews, he seems to take a long time to respond.

Writing a book is not limited by typing speed, even with those kind of interfaces.

I believe his assistants help him articulate his thoughts. The article implies that he writes everything meticulously himself, but that isn't true. As far as interviews go, interviewers usually send him the questions ahead of time.

A book might be around 50,000 words. There are about 2,000 working hours in a year if you only work 9-5 M-F. Which means that writing a book a year requires only 25 words per hour, on average.

I think it's not only the interactive elements, but also the way information is displayed. I actually think he (and others) might benefit from a really responsive desktop environment, especially compared to the Windows floating window manager.

The videos you linked to show this very well in my opinion:

- In the longer one with Hawking and the System he's using it to type and read Wikipedia, all the while quite some screen estate is wasted with (for him probably unusable) title bars, partially hidden desktop icons in the background and the browser partially behind his input software.

- The "data entry" video shows Notepad being opened and being partially hidden by the input UI.

That does not seem useful. I would rather use apps that automatically fit themselves to available space and predefined layouts for multiple apps or a dynamic tiling approach.

Sounds a bit like the Metro UI, or any number of tiling window managers on *nix.

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