Quote:
Originally Posted by chucker
Sure — but think back 30 years. I wasn't quite alive just yet, but supposedly, GUIs were mocked as toys. And yet, today, nobody would suggest that GUIs can't be very powerful. The move to touch UIs like iOS and Metro is somewhat analogous.
The Mac originally had no proper multitasking (DAs aside), didn't have any command-line shell, didn't have networking, and so on. iOS is on a somewhat similar trajectory of slowly evolving more features. We have yet to see this happening in Metro, as Windows Phone 7 is very young, but presumably, there's more to come.
|
Right, and someone (Xerox and then Apple building on those concepts)
was very, very smart to create the metaphors that allowed a reasonably intuitive GUI. The things the Mac lacked in the early days were really a matter of hardware and processing power, not that the mouse/menu interaction paradigm somehow mitigated against sophisticated tasks. In fact the GUI afforded opportunities to create software, along the lines of a Photoshop, that would have been nearly impossible (or so cumbersome to use as to be pointless) without it.
But the move to touch is a different kind of problem, I think, a problem of information density. It creates new opportunities for intimacy and fluidity in the user experience, but intimacy and fluidity don't engender a work flow that allows for rapid, fine adjustments to various parameters. Or tweaking things a pixel or a point. Touch is sort of clay to the mouse/menu's ruler and mechanical pencil. You can make great stuff with clay, but if you were planning on architecting a building you'll probably experience frustration.
However, I think we agree that there are solutions we haven't seen yet. There may be some fundamental metaphor for zooming in for fine control that when we see it we'll slap our heads and say "Of course!" (and if Apple gets there first everyone will call it obvious and get pissed if they try and patent it
)
Quote:
|
I, too, am doubtful of Windows 8's success as a tablet platform. But as for desktop apps, Microsoft is doing less and less to drive APIs forward. The argument can be made that they've matured sufficiently, but as a professional Windows desktop programmer, I'd vehemently disagree (WinForms is a poor wrapper around Win32, WPF, while somewhat improved in 4.0, still feels largely dead on arrival, and Silverlight, too, doesn't appear to have any future; meanwhile, Apple keeps churning out one great Cocoa improvement after another). Somehow, Apple has not only figured out what appears to be a better delineation between the devices (desktop/laptop vs. tablet/smartphone rather than desktop/laptop/tablet vs. smartphone), but also at the same time found a path to, mostly, share what's best about the two (e.g., Core Video eventually coming to iOS; now, Notification Center coming to OS X) and keep what doesn't belong separate (though they have misstepped at times).
|
Yes. iOS and OS X are like two tributaries of the same stream, sharing the same headwaters. By using modular underpinnings that can drive different UIs, I think Apple is getting it exactly right. I think Microsoft is once again falling prey to the "Windows everywhere" mantra, where they can't quite bear to make a hard and fast distinction between Metro and the desktop. I think that's going to be confusing and frustrating to their customers.