Top 8 Reasons HCI is in its Stone Age

UltimaGuy writes "This Editorial describes 8 reasons why HCI (Human Computer Interaction) is in its stone age. It laments about screen corners, filesystem, GUI Design and also 'spatialness'. "

The four corners of Mac OS X...

[shawnce]

Just to clarify what is built into Mac OS X by default...

In Mac OS X, built into Mac OS X 10.4, you can trigger any of the following from any of the four corners of the main screen.

1) Expose - All Windows
2) Expose - Application Windows
3) Expose - Desktop
4) Dashboard
5) Start Screen Saver
6) Disable Screen Saver

Also on the main display (the one with the menu bar) you can slam the mouse into either of the upper two corners and click. On Mac OS X 10.4 the upper left corner brings up the "Apple" menu and the upper right corner brings up "Spotlight". The later allows typing for spotlight search without having to click to gain focus.

Re:computers: still not for lay people

[cerelib]

Install Microsoft's Antispyware program. It is a good app that I did not use until I put it on the computer I was giving my dad. I had installed it and then went to install another app that wanted to load something at startup. Microsoft Antispyware popped up a dialog informing me that the app was trying to register a new startup program and asked me to confirm. This impressed me and prompted me to put it on my own computer.

Re:computers: still not for lay people

[pg133]

  Google is your friend [google.com]

Removing Balloon PopUps in Windows XP [personal-c...-tutor.com]

Re:'useless' screen corners

[Cloud 9]

In the lower left corner of the screen for 99% of out-of-the-box systems when they are on there's that little start button, which does have something remotely to do with apps & docs

Try moving your mouse all the way to the corner of the screen and click. See what happens? Nothing.

Also: what about the menu bar at the top? Upper right-hand corner: close window..

Again, try moving your mouse to the top-right corner and click. Again, nothing.

Also from TFA, the author addresses this issue. Maybe you should go back and take a look.

Re:And here's the answer of an amarok developer

[litghost]

Actually, I just tested it, and throwing the mouse to the lower-left and clicking does infact bring up the Start menu.

Re:computers: still not for lay people

[Txiasaeia]

Start -> Run -> msconfig -> Startup tab. You're welcome.

Re:Pet peeves...

[TheRaven64]

I don't know how many times I've accidentally erased my latest diatribe by inadvertently paging backward on Slashdot. Good grief, at least put the function behind a modifier key.

This is not a problem with the existence of forward and backwards buttons, it's an issue with their implementation. With Safari, I can hit back, then hit forward and still have the text I entered in this text box remain here when I get back. Remember Raskin's first law:

A computer shall not harm your work or, through inaction, allow your work to come to harm.

Re:GUI's suck at iteration

[dragonman97]

Actually, you can do that in Windows. If you do search for files, you can select the files in the results page, and do any sort of action you would do to typical files. I use this to remove entries from lists of e-mail addresses when they change - I do a search on a given location (recursively) for a certain pattern, and when the results appear, I select the search results, and drag it onto the vim icon. I then do a little bit of editing magic in vim, and it's all done. If I was doing it on my own workstation, I'd probably just do it with perl/awk/sed via cygwin, but the machine I'm working on doesn't have very many goodies on it. :-/

There's no doubt in my mind that a shell is the fastest way to get most things done, but unfortunately, the majority of people refuse to learn how to do things efficiently, and want a dumbed down interface for everything. The trick is to learn the best way to use the available tools, and hope to get somewhere near the efficiency of a CLI.

*sigh* Only ~>2 hours before I can return to my *nix boxen at home. :D

Re:'useless' screen corners

[ivan256]

Actually, most machines run Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, or XP with the "classic" theme. In all of these cases the start menu is offset from the corner by a few pixels, making a quick movement to the corner useless. Even if you have XP with the ugly ass default theme, the bottom corner opens the Start menu, which has nothing to do with the application that currently has focus.

Not that clicking anywhere else on the screen in Windows is guaranteed to do what you expect should a modal dialog pop up right before you click...

Also, unlike systems like MacOS and many Linux systems, the menus are hooked to the window, and even when maximized, the upper left and right corners of the screen don't do anything at all.

Use the 4 corners!?

[gg3po]

From TFA:

"After more than 20 years of research, development and competition in the field of HCI, not one single leading operating system developing company has come up with an OS that utilizes the four corners of the screen."

This guy's obviously never used Symphony OS [symphonyos.com].

Re:computers: still not for lay people

[ScottyUK]

Designate the laptop as the primary screen, unlock the task bar and simply drag it across to the secondary screen. Then Alt+Tab should appear on the Laptop (now primary) screen and you still get rid of the annoying taskbar.

Re:Pet peeves...

[Anonymous Coward]

The one that erases my diatribes is the Windows feature where you click a link in an e-mail or Word doc and it opens in your current open browser rather than starting a new browser

This isn't a Windows 'feature', it's IE. If Firefox is your default browser, you can elect to open links from external programs in a new window, in a new tab in the current window, or in the currently open tab/window. The same is true of Opera.

Field Research on Point #3

[Anonymous Coward]

i know others have already pointed this out, but i thought i'd add a graphic to go along. this is a breakdown of the original article based on the frequency of each character used. i thought maybe he'd like to take a look and see wy the spacebar is a big key...
http://homepage.mac.com/fizzwinkus/forums/spacebar .jpg [mac.com]
(CR stands for carriage return)

Re:computers: still not for lay people

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't have to go into MSCONFIG. Just right-click the taskbar and choose "Properties". Go to the "Start" tab and click on "Customize". Go to the "Advanced" tab and uncheck "Highlight newly installed programs". Still, too much work to turn off a pointless feature. I think you're going to know when you install a program unless you have malware.

Re:Pet peeves...

[Haeleth]

This is not a problem with the existence of forward and backwards buttons, it's an issue with their implementation. With Safari, I can hit back, then hit forward and still have the text I entered in this text box remain here when I get back.

Yep, same in Firefox. In fact, Internet Explorer is the only browser I know of where this is not the case. And after all these years, I have to say that anyone still using Internet Explorer, when they don't absolutely have to, frankly deserves all the pain they get from it.

Re:Not so great? But what about focus-stealing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry. Not quite true. I use XP every day, and the only windows that do the flashy thing in the task bar are windows that show up in the task bar. Dialogs not associated with one of those windows pop up overtop of everything and steal keyboard input. Aside from that, some poorly behaved apps pop to the front rather than just letting XP alert you that its status has changed by doing the flashy thing.

Re:computers: still not for lay people

[RidiculousPie]

http://www.sysinternals.com/utilities/autoruns.htm l [sysinternals.com]

Shows you everything that loads on startup, and all internet explorer extensions (BHO, etc.)

Invaluable when dealing with spyware.

HTH. HAND.