feranick writes "There have been a lot of articles on Slashdot about the OLPC project, most of
them regarding the hardware, the social impact or the cost of the
operation itself. However the software development,
specifically in the GUI didn't get so far much attention. This
blog summarizes some of the OLPC
global interface guidelines. You will see that what is really
new in the laptop is not the laptop itself, but the completely new idea
behind the design, where instead of applications you have activities,
documents are now journals,
'application bundles can be signed by
whoever works on them — because
there is a view source key on the keyboard,
anybody can modify an app
and distribute it'. It really looks like if this is successfully, we
could see a new breakthrough in GUI design also in mainstream PCs: "This
UI is quite simply one of the deepest and most interesting redesigns of
the desktop user interface ever produced. It makes MacOS look like what
it is — boring and unoriginal.""
Now, personally, I see this as a minor evolutionary improvement on the 'tool palette' interface [adobe.com] made popular by Adobe Systems' Photoshop and Illustrator appliations, but that's just me.
Tabs for UI panels containing new buttons has been available for a very long time for 3D applications - Blender 3D has had it from about its inception. Look at the bottom of our screenshot at the wiki here. How does calling it 'ribbons' make it innovative? I'll be kinda peeved if they tried to take a patent on it.
> "This UI is quite simply one of the deepest and most interesting redesigns of the desktop > user interface ever produced. It makes MacOS look like what it is -- boring and unoriginal."
Wrong answer.
If something is good, it *is*, of its own accord. There is no need to assert *something else is bad* - unless you're feeling insecure.
Yeah... not to mention, anyone making something brand new can easily "shoot fish in a barrel" by pointing at a design that's years older, complaining it's "boring" or "unoriginal" by comparison.
Are the latest changes coming out for OS X Leopard "boring and unoriginal"? Heck, we don't even know about half of them yet!
Nonetheless, many of these "unoriginal" ideas are actually "conventions" adopted by all major OS's because there was some agreement that they were "best of breed" ways to illustrate or accomplish something. That's not always a "bad" thing!
You could also read that phrase as "This thing must IMHO be incredibly cool because it's even cooler than MacOS". Which makes it a compliment instead of an attack.
I made that (throwaway) comment because I had recently written about a few parts of the Mac GUI that annoyed me, and because the Mac is usually touted as being innovative in the UI space. I disagree, I don't think it's all that innovative compared to the OLPC, hence the comparison. Of course, the one sentence that mentioned the Mac got picked for the Slashdot front page and now the article itself is Slashdotted, nobody will read the full thing. C'est la vie;)
True, but to be fair, many articles/posts promoting MacOS do so by saying something else (usually Windows) is bad;) ("Windows crashes, therefore MacOS is better!")
Applications are activities, documents are journals...hell, why don't we call the laptop a leg-sittin' typing machine? To call the renaming of anything a major GUI change is absurd.
Agreed, but this seems a bit more than JUST renaming. On the other hand its also not exactly new. There are many OS GUI interfaces which have tried similar things. Even MS had something that at least sounds similar from a high level (Microsoft Bob [wikipedia.org]). Since OLPC is aimed at children around the world who may not even know what a "folder" is and not businesses, this "more friendly metaphores" could work well.
Anyway, seems a bit more than just renaming but certainly not new.
Considering "Folders" are a totally Windows metaphor, why should they know (or care) ?
Folders is a real-world desktop metaphor.
As far as I'm concerned, they are called directories, and always will be.
Directories is a real-world text-based metaphor. Interestingly enough, the term is used primarily for text-based interfaces (such as CLI's). Call them what you want, but folder is the better metaphor for more people. Additionally, the fact that the icon is an image of a folder certainly helps the metaphor. What would a directory icon look like? A phone book? A mall directory?
Filesystems are journals, and primarily keep track of the things a child has done.
That fact that documents get saved, and can be access via the journal is almost secondary.
It's a shift in emphasis, and a restructuring of the storage metaphor in order to make the
system more accessible to young minds.
Of course, it may turn out to be cosmetic - almost certainly will unless they're using
something really exotic for the file system - but if the result is a better way to think
about computer tasks it could
Because there's a difference, and it's very familiar to any old Mac hand as OpenDoc. [wikipedia.org] Read up on OpenDoc and Publish and Subscribe and then go back and read the OLPC design requirements until you see what I'm thinking. Also, look up the UI concept of Lifebooks. Activities are identical to OpenDoc components, and the Journal is a Lifebook.
The OLPC isn't doing anything new, per se, but it's bringing together a lot of old UI design concepts that have been sitting on the shelf untried for years and years.
Not only is the idea of "activities, not applications" old, it is not even a good idea. It puts a very important kind of choice in the hands of the person with the least information about what the user wants to do, which is extremely bad design.
People have heirarchies of goals. For example, I want to pass some course so I need to edit some document so I need to start... What I want to do at each level and how it relates to the other levels is entirely up to me, and no one else is going to be able to figure out what the appropriate choices are for me because they lack almost all of the relevant information about my heirarchy of goals. The "activities not applications" idea ties these levels together in a way that cannot be generally appropriate because the person doing the tying is perfectly ignorant of what the user actually wants to do.
To take a hardware example, a nail gun is not a replacement for a hammer, as it is almost completely useless for many of the functions that hammers are routinely used for, like smashing things. Frequently, I want to use a hammer for something other than driving nails, and if some idiot developer handed me a nail gun because they presumed they knew what I was going to do with the hammer it would be annoying to say the least. Why should a developer be choosing what tool I use? And what business does a developer have in deciding what "activities" are legitimate? I want a toolbox that I can do with what I please, not a finite, static list of "activities" that are tied to a bunch of tools that are unrelated to those activities except in some developer's imagination.
There is a role for guidance in UI design--a system that suggests a tool for a given job--but to design the whole UI around the notion that the UI designer personally knows what activities a user will want to perform and that the UI designer personally knows how the user will want to perform them is simply a mistake. There are some tasks where the association is sort of clear, but the fact that "some A are B" does not imply that "all A are B", now does it? To defend this kind of design one needs to be able to prove that in the majority of cases the UI desiger, who has no clue about the user's actual goals, is more likely to make appropriate judgments about how to achieve them than the user ever will. This is a tall order.
The fact is that a lot of what users do is ill-defined and amorphous and not easily subject to classification. For example: what "activity" am I engaged in right now? Posting to/.? Editing a text field in a form? Editing a document? Maybe I type all my posts off-line and then paste them to the form so I maintain a local copy, and thankfully I am not limited in my choices by the bounds of someone else's imagination.
But it could also be seen as a way of grouping things. Put your nail gun and your hammer together in your toolbox so that you can either easily when you want to put a nail in something. Keep them with your nails In fact have a whole section for fasteners where your rivot gun and ball hammer are grouped together with your rivets.
The metaphor isn't about using less tools it's about using them together. MacOS has an applications folder where everything goes. People might have 4 or 5 programs that can view/edit photos depending on their needs. Why not keep them separate (at a UI level) from your compilers.
To take a hardware example, a nail gun is not a replacement for a hammer...
I don't think your example is great. You're suggesting that in your analogy you would say "I want a hammer" and the developer would give you a nail gun. Well you didn't ask for an activity, you asked for a tool. If you're asking to start an activity, you would say "I want to drive nails" and then you would get an appropriate tool. If you just want to smash something and not drive nails, then you should have said "I want to smash
As far as I can tell, an "activity" is just a fusion of application+document. It means you don't have weird states like an application that's running but can't be used because it has no document loaded, or a document you can't open because you don't have the application.
What if I want to run an application that does not open documents? What if I want to view metadata about a document in a proprietary format that I can't decode? Maybe I'm just not understanding this revolutionary new concept, or maybe it
The OLPC hardware is very nice actually. I've held it in my hands, and it is sturdy and looks nice. The worst part is the keyboard, which is dire - hopefully this is something they will work on in the future to improve. Sadly it had run out of battery when I got my mitts on it, so I cannot comment on the user interface, and the operation thereof.
However there are some interesting points in the blog post - it just depends on whether they are valid for the OLPC.
Fitts Law in corners for example works well when you have a mouse you can fling into the corner. But the OLPC has a trackpad, and we all know they're not so good for flinging the cursor into the corner. Something localised would be far better, for example a double-tap + pop-up directional menu for actions. Also Mac OS X lets you assign the corners to actions, contrary to his post. Many people disable these because they're annoying!
Fitts Law in corners for example works well when you have a mouse you can fling into the corner. But the OLPC has a trackpad, and we all know they're not so good for flinging the cursor into the corner. Something localised would be far better, for example a double-tap + pop-up directional menu for actions. Also Mac OS X lets you assign the corners to actions, contrary to his post. Many people disable these because they're annoying!
(sneaking off topic. mod me down!)
And because they violate everything a reasonable UI person holds dear. I'll grant that OS X didn't originally make great use of the corners. One is for the Apple menu, which is rarely needed, and the other is for the clock's menu, which is almost never needed. However, keeping those in the corners and then adding an option to have the corner respond to other actions is a bit annoying - now there's no easy way to know exactly what the corner will do until you try it. That, or discover it automagically because none of the Exposé actions require a click.
Which gets to the next problem. These corner actions are generally things that radically rearrange the screen, start a screen saver, etc. Without a click. This is extremely undesirable when you consider that Fitts Law cuts both ways - the corners are such easy targets that most users will frequently hit them even when they don't intend to. For example, it's common for me to fling the cursor off toward a corner when I want to get it out of my way so I can read a document more easily or whatever. With hot corners enabled, I'll often end up hitting one of those corners, which ironically massively re-arranges the screen, usually in a way that makes it completely impossible for me to continue my reading. Just about the exact opposite of what I was intending to do. Similar problems for when I'm trying to use a UI element that's close to a corner (window resizing controls, Apple menu, etc.)
The only hot corner I like and use is the one which keeps the screen saver from activating. It's also the only one that doesn't have a nasty habit of mucking with the screen when I don't want it to.
But the OLPC has a trackpad, and we all know they're not so good for flinging the cursor into the corner.
Actually, it depends on the touchpad's drivers and how they handle acceleration, etc. I've found that the some drivers work very well in this regard, in particular the Synaptics Windows drivers. The drivers that come with X.org (at least on Xubuntu) aren't bad, either, but they're not nearly as configurable.
Sorry, those secretaries can hope all they want, but barring a major reengineering of the Word format, Reveal Codes will never happen in Word, ever. The best explanation of why is here [mvps.org]; in summary, WordPerfect uses inline marking (think HTML), where Word uses nested containers with formatting info in binary blobs at beginning and end of the document. So Reveal Codes implemented literally in Word would just mark off the containers and parse the leading and trailing data for you; you'd still have to mentall
"It makes MacOS look like what it is -- boring and unoriginal."
The new GUI might be revolutionary, and useful, and create the new paradigm. Just like MacOS did.
OLPC might make the now mature MacOS look boring. But if it makes MacOS look "unoriginal", just because so many have copied it, then the audience must be a world of children with the first laptop they've ever seen. Because MacOS originated the features that MacOS still keeps the cutting edge - until something like OLPC maybe replaces it. Even if so many others have copied it, MacOS is the original.
Unless you want to dig into MacOS's roots, like the Apple Lisa, or the Xerox Star. Which were prototypes, even the failed release Lisa. All PC design has been evolutionary, however big a leap one subsystem (like a GUI, or a LAN, or a laser printer on it, or an input peripheral like a mouse) makes. But those seminal roots just show how original was the MacOS, which made it work with its original improvements and integrations.
We should replace the ancient Mac GUI paradigm. It was revolutionary in the home and office, because it finally put the home and office on the screen, replacing the algebra classroom and typesetter formes. The original. Now it's over two decades old, and we're all more familiar with PCs than with file cabinets and document scrolls. So when we improve the paradigm, it's good to target the original. Pretending that MacOS isn't original makes it harder to beat it.
The new GUI might be revolutionary, and useful, and create the new paradigm. We should replace the ancient Mac GUI paradigm. So when we improve the paradigm
You don't happen to be in management, do you? I believe you now hold the slashdot record for number of reoccurring uses of the word "paradigm" in a single non-Babylon-5 related post.
We're talking about a paradigm. So the name of the subject pops up a lot. Are you charging by the word you read? You don't happen to be in accounting, do you?
There's a VMWare image of the OLPC system (forget where...found the link on OSNews.com) and I downloaded it and played with it a bit. The "Sugar" interface is one those things that presumably works better on the intended hardware, because moving the mouse around to get to the "desktop" or whatever it was got old really fast.
The other issue, which I can appreciate is a very non-trivial task because it has to work with non-computer savvy kids (and presumably adults) in a variety of languages, is that the icons didn't make any sense to me, nor did most of the interface. I got that the globe icon was a browser, but that was pretty much it. A couple of apps I still don't understand what they do.
Being that it's Linux underneath, the standard ctrl-alt-backspace killed the interface and I was able to log in as root (no password) and poke around. The one programming language they include is Perl, and that got me thinking about why not give the kids an interface or some capability to develop their own software too? The next killer app could be written by a kid on a OLPC machine. It looked like they also included a version of Squeak (Smalltalk) as well, but I only saw the interface come up once and wasn't able to get back to it again. Would they ship the docs in all languages as well?
from http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ask_OLPC_a_Question [laptop.org] "There is very little public information about requirements gathering, usability and user testing. In other words, how do you know whether the OLPC (i) will meet your users' needs and (ii) is easy enough for them to use? Have the target user groups been characterized? What ongoing plans do you have for this? I`d Like test the OLPC in Argentina, Please contct with me to know how. Thanks.
As far as I know, there are two local groups in Argentina with test boards (don't know if anybody has the 2B1/XO prototypes though). They are Ututo and Tuquito. I know Ututo had some explicit arrangements to let other people use/test the boards. If anybody knows about other groups (or about any local XOs) please let me know (or post in the OLPC Argentina pages. --Xavi 07:23, 6 December 2006 (EST)"
Before you go off spouting that you've designed a radical new UI that's better than anything else you might want to usability test it. Now I couldn't find anything on the link to Ututo and the link to Tuquito doesn't seem to have any English content but from the answer to the question it doesn't sound like there's a real plan for user testing a radical new UI that will be given to people who, according to the HIG are young and inexperienced.
To the designer's credit both of those criteria (young and inexperienced) give you the best possible scenario for introducing a new UI since children are more willing to play around and experiment and inexperienced computer users don't have the legacy of using an OS that worked any different from what you're giving them. Even with those advantages I'd hope that a project that is intended for a global audience would have more substantial usability testing plans than "lets give a couple to some people in Argentina and see what they think". I'm certainly not going to go all gaga over an untested UI that starts by throwing out decades of learning about how people interact with software.
For a couple of seconds there, I thought "Wow! The same amount as the original 1984 Macintosh." My, how times change...
Remember when John McCarthy said (sorry, I don't have the exact quotation... if anyone does I'd love to have it and the source) that there were no theoretical barriers to artificial intelligence any more, they knew how to do it and the only thing they needed was a "million words of memory?"
The link to the OLPC Human Interface Guidelines [laptop.org] shows a horizontally oriented graphical table of contents - colored table cells to contain links to each section. And then whole page is rendered with with all of the editable sections rendered to show visual containment inside a bunch of DIVs, w/forward/backward nav, etc. Does anyone know if that is core, or some type of mediawiki extension? I'd like to experiment with it further. Can someone point me to the source of that extension for mediawiki? Its ver
This is a refreshing new take on computing, and quite possibly a necessary and due one, too... but I can't help wondering if this is a case of "hey mac, this new gadget of yours looks GREAT....but you try it first and we'll see how it works out, mmkay?" I agree that it is creative and ballsy and everything, but has it even been tested? Wouldn't it be even more ballsy to test it on ourseves before peddling it as an educational tool to the poorer part of the world? I know I'm being rather critical here, and
Giving food will only sustain a larger famine. It actually makes the problem worse. Just so you know as well, there is a world food shortage. Food is basically oil in terms of scarcity and world-wide production. We don't have the food to feed the world. The world needs to learn how to do it themselves. Therefore if we spent all our time and effort giving people food the world would actually be a worse place. Giving people the ability to learn how to do things for themselves, as opposed to only teaching them how to put out their hand and beg for food is surely a much better approach to the problem.
There was another obvious point: You can still give them food at the same time. The OLPC project does not prevent aid! Also, I love how everyone is so specific to "omg teh children". Because as soon as people become adults we really just couldn't care less, huh? Perhaps if they had some/any education before they became adults they'd be able to take care of the children themselves. Also, let's just skip the arms trade arguments altogether and blame the OLPC project for the proliferation of the problem.
Food is good and all, but the fact is that in most of the countries this laptop is aimed at, people eat well. They're frankly some of the oldest cultures around (Arabic, Thai, Nigerian) and have survived because they know how to make and produce and eat food. That's not the issue. I spent a month working in the villages of rural Thailand. These people eat well but they have nothing to do. They just sit around during the summer and talk, as there is no extra water for farming, no economy to support, and no need to do anything other than talk. Everyone is doing just fine.
What is needed is education, access to the world beyond their village and the "city" miles away. These laptops will possibly (though again, efficacy has yet to be proven) encourage such interaction, learning and initialization into the modern world. Furthermore, the people are not stupid. The one computer that was in the government office was used regularly by middle and high-schoolers downloading music, reading up on the latest news from Bangkok, the weather, or various other games. But creation of original content, for access within the village, is another issue altogether.
As a side - those people were some of the happiest people I have ever met. They were not hungry, were not in a hurry, never spent much time indoors, never needed anything more than what they had. By connecting them to the capitalistic global society with these laptops we take away their status quo. They will be hungry, not for food, but for education, for money, for placement within the larger world. And it will destroy the villages as they know it. For better or worse.
These people eat well but they have nothing to do. They just sit around during the summer and talk, as there is no extra water for farming, no economy to support, and no need to do anything other than talk. Everyone is doing just fine.
As a side - those people were some of the happiest people I have ever met. They were not hungry, were not in a hurry, never spent much time indoors, never needed anything more than what they had.
THIS IS MORE URGENT THAN I THOUGHT!!! WE MUST SEND THEM LAPTOPS SO THEY STOP SITTI
I personally hover between your view that this whole thing is a huge waste of time and money that could be better spent elsewhere and the view that OLPC is going to help end poverty because of the educational opportunities of the platform. At this point I think that the upside is bigger than the downside. OLPC has no place in areas with famine conditions and money should be spent for found but there are many, many places in the world where people are poor but not at immediate risk of death. I think one of t
Typical american view of the world: everyone is starving out there. FYI: the OLPC is not intended to starving people, it is *not* food... It is intended for people who get their *basic* needs met already with the idea of helping themselves get out of poverty and hopefully improving the general economy of the country as well. Gee, what's so difficult to grasp? Following your argument we should not give any education to the poor either since what they need is food? What huge nonsense.
If humans would spend as much time, money, and effort with feeding children as they are with giving third world countries hand cranked computers with pretty picture interfaces, the world would be a better place.
A smart businessman looks for return on investment. Right now many countries spend huge amounts providing food to other countries. This investment is much larger than the OLPC project. The food donated in this way destroys the local market for food, decimating the remains of the agricultural secto
You can't permenantly brick the OLPC laptops, they are designed to have a hard reset function that wipes the system and restores it from the original image. The idea is you can play around with your hearts content but it's trivial to undo the damage if you do somehow temporarily brick it.
You are describing an old Yugo (real cost 10$), which left the road (hence it flies) while running on rakia-gazoline mix (rakia is local balkan brandy which is often made of garbage, shit and a few other similar ingredients). So the only missing feature is the nag-vigation system. Well, that is easy to achieve. All you need is to put the biosat nag-vigation system you picked up in one of the local mehanas in control of the vehicle. If he/she has drunk as much as local nag-vigation systems can drink, you ha
Endless Submenus (Score:4, Interesting)
there should be some way to work this out
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the other options are (in a convenient menu format, that is easy to read and available without extra training):
a) get rid of options
b) use a programmable input device, like a keyboard
c) use voice command
d) add other options here
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, personally, I see this as a minor evolutionary improvement on the 'tool palette' interface [adobe.com] made popular by Adobe Systems' Photoshop and Illustrator appliations, but that's just me.
Re:Endless Submenus (Score:4, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Blender_node_s
LetterRip
Parent
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So why slag off MacOS? (Score:5, Insightful)
> user interface ever produced. It makes MacOS look like what it is -- boring and unoriginal."
Wrong answer.
If something is good, it *is*, of its own accord. There is no need to assert *something else is bad* - unless you're feeling insecure.
Re:So why slag off MacOS? (Score:4, Insightful)
Are the latest changes coming out for OS X Leopard "boring and unoriginal"? Heck, we don't even know about half of them yet!
Nonetheless, many of these "unoriginal" ideas are actually "conventions" adopted by all major OS's because there was some agreement that they were "best of breed" ways to illustrate or accomplish something. That's not always a "bad" thing!
Parent
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So? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Anyway, seems a bit more than just renaming but certainly not new.
Re:So? (Score:4, Informative)
Directories is a real-world text-based metaphor. Interestingly enough, the term is used primarily for text-based interfaces (such as CLI's). Call them what you want, but folder is the better metaphor for more people. Additionally, the fact that the icon is an image of a folder certainly helps the metaphor. What would a directory icon look like? A phone book? A mall directory?
Parent
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That fact that documents get saved, and can be access via the journal is almost secondary.
It's a shift in emphasis, and a restructuring of the storage metaphor in order to make the system more accessible to young minds.
Of course, it may turn out to be cosmetic - almost certainly will unless they're using something really exotic for the file system - but if the result is a better way to think about computer tasks it could
OpenDoc & Lifebooks (Score:3, Informative)
The OLPC isn't doing anything new, per se, but it's bringing together a lot of old UI design concepts that have been sitting on the shelf untried for years and years.
Pers
Flame bait... (Score:2)
We didn't really need this as part of the discussion.
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New (Score:4, Insightful)
This is new? The people from Xerox Parc are going to disagree.
Re:New (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only is the idea of "activities, not applications" old, it is not even a good idea. It puts a very important kind of choice in the hands of the person with the least information about what the user wants to do, which is extremely bad design.
People have heirarchies of goals. For example, I want to pass some course so I need to edit some document so I need to start
To take a hardware example, a nail gun is not a replacement for a hammer, as it is almost completely useless for many of the functions that hammers are routinely used for, like smashing things. Frequently, I want to use a hammer for something other than driving nails, and if some idiot developer handed me a nail gun because they presumed they knew what I was going to do with the hammer it would be annoying to say the least. Why should a developer be choosing what tool I use? And what business does a developer have in deciding what "activities" are legitimate? I want a toolbox that I can do with what I please, not a finite, static list of "activities" that are tied to a bunch of tools that are unrelated to those activities except in some developer's imagination.
There is a role for guidance in UI design--a system that suggests a tool for a given job--but to design the whole UI around the notion that the UI designer personally knows what activities a user will want to perform and that the UI designer personally knows how the user will want to perform them is simply a mistake. There are some tasks where the association is sort of clear, but the fact that "some A are B" does not imply that "all A are B", now does it? To defend this kind of design one needs to be able to prove that in the majority of cases the UI desiger, who has no clue about the user's actual goals, is more likely to make appropriate judgments about how to achieve them than the user ever will. This is a tall order.
The fact is that a lot of what users do is ill-defined and amorphous and not easily subject to classification. For example: what "activity" am I engaged in right now? Posting to
Parent
Re:New (Score:5, Interesting)
The metaphor isn't about using less tools it's about using them together. MacOS has an applications folder where everything goes. People might have 4 or 5 programs that can view/edit photos depending on their needs. Why not keep them separate (at a UI level) from your compilers.
Parent
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I don't think your example is great. You're suggesting that in your analogy you would say "I want a hammer" and the developer would give you a nail gun. Well you didn't ask for an activity, you asked for a tool. If you're asking to start an activity, you would say "I want to drive nails" and then you would get an appropriate tool. If you just want to smash something and not drive nails, then you should have said "I want to smash
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As far as I can tell, an "activity" is just a fusion of application+document. It means you don't have weird states like an application that's running but can't be used because it has no document loaded, or a document you can't open because you don't have the application.
What if I want to run an application that does not open documents? What if I want to view metadata about a document in a proprietary format that I can't decode? Maybe I'm just not understanding this revolutionary new concept, or maybe it
OLPC Hardware (Score:3, Informative)
However there are some interesting points in the blog post - it just depends on whether they are valid for the OLPC.
Fitts Law in corners for example works well when you have a mouse you can fling into the corner. But the OLPC has a trackpad, and we all know they're not so good for flinging the cursor into the corner. Something localised would be far better, for example a double-tap + pop-up directional menu for actions. Also Mac OS X lets you assign the corners to actions, contrary to his post. Many people disable these because they're annoying!
Re:OLPC Hardware (Score:5, Insightful)
(sneaking off topic. mod me down!)
And because they violate everything a reasonable UI person holds dear. I'll grant that OS X didn't originally make great use of the corners. One is for the Apple menu, which is rarely needed, and the other is for the clock's menu, which is almost never needed. However, keeping those in the corners and then adding an option to have the corner respond to other actions is a bit annoying - now there's no easy way to know exactly what the corner will do until you try it. That, or discover it automagically because none of the Exposé actions require a click.
Which gets to the next problem. These corner actions are generally things that radically rearrange the screen, start a screen saver, etc. Without a click. This is extremely undesirable when you consider that Fitts Law cuts both ways - the corners are such easy targets that most users will frequently hit them even when they don't intend to. For example, it's common for me to fling the cursor off toward a corner when I want to get it out of my way so I can read a document more easily or whatever. With hot corners enabled, I'll often end up hitting one of those corners, which ironically massively re-arranges the screen, usually in a way that makes it completely impossible for me to continue my reading. Just about the exact opposite of what I was intending to do. Similar problems for when I'm trying to use a UI element that's close to a corner (window resizing controls, Apple menu, etc.)
The only hot corner I like and use is the one which keeps the screen saver from activating. It's also the only one that doesn't have a nasty habit of mucking with the screen when I don't want it to.
Parent
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Actually, it depends on the touchpad's drivers and how they handle acceleration, etc. I've found that the some drivers work very well in this regard, in particular the Synaptics Windows drivers. The drivers that come with X.org (at least on Xubuntu) aren't bad, either, but they're not nearly as configurable.
View Source Key (Score:5, Funny)
Reveal Codes in Word (Score:3, Informative)
OG: Original GUI (Score:4, Informative)
The new GUI might be revolutionary, and useful, and create the new paradigm. Just like MacOS did.
OLPC might make the now mature MacOS look boring. But if it makes MacOS look "unoriginal", just because so many have copied it, then the audience must be a world of children with the first laptop they've ever seen. Because MacOS originated the features that MacOS still keeps the cutting edge - until something like OLPC maybe replaces it. Even if so many others have copied it, MacOS is the original.
Unless you want to dig into MacOS's roots, like the Apple Lisa, or the Xerox Star. Which were prototypes, even the failed release Lisa. All PC design has been evolutionary, however big a leap one subsystem (like a GUI, or a LAN, or a laser printer on it, or an input peripheral like a mouse) makes. But those seminal roots just show how original was the MacOS, which made it work with its original improvements and integrations.
We should replace the ancient Mac GUI paradigm. It was revolutionary in the home and office, because it finally put the home and office on the screen, replacing the algebra classroom and typesetter formes. The original. Now it's over two decades old, and we're all more familiar with PCs than with file cabinets and document scrolls. So when we improve the paradigm, it's good to target the original. Pretending that MacOS isn't original makes it harder to beat it.
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You don't happen to be in management, do you? I believe you now hold the slashdot record for number of reoccurring uses of the word "paradigm" in a single non-Babylon-5 related post.
BBH
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I've played with it (Score:5, Informative)
The other issue, which I can appreciate is a very non-trivial task because it has to work with non-computer savvy kids (and presumably adults) in a variety of languages, is that the icons didn't make any sense to me, nor did most of the interface. I got that the globe icon was a browser, but that was pretty much it. A couple of apps I still don't understand what they do.
Being that it's Linux underneath, the standard ctrl-alt-backspace killed the interface and I was able to log in as root (no password) and poke around. The one programming language they include is Perl, and that got me thinking about why not give the kids an interface or some capability to develop their own software too? The next killer app could be written by a kid on a OLPC machine. It looked like they also included a version of Squeak (Smalltalk) as well, but I only saw the interface come up once and wasn't able to get back to it again. Would they ship the docs in all languages as well?
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The best UI in the world.... (Score:3, Insightful)
from http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ask_OLPC_a_Question [laptop.org]
"There is very little public information about requirements gathering, usability and user testing. In other words, how do you know whether the OLPC (i) will meet your users' needs and (ii) is easy enough for them to use? Have the target user groups been characterized? What ongoing plans do you have for this? I`d Like test the OLPC in Argentina, Please contct with me to know how. Thanks.
As far as I know, there are two local groups in Argentina with test boards (don't know if anybody has the 2B1/XO prototypes though). They are Ututo and Tuquito. I know Ututo had some explicit arrangements to let other people use/test the boards. If anybody knows about other groups (or about any local XOs) please let me know (or post in the OLPC Argentina pages. --Xavi 07:23, 6 December 2006 (EST)"
Before you go off spouting that you've designed a radical new UI that's better than anything else you might want to usability test it. Now I couldn't find anything on the link to Ututo and the link to Tuquito doesn't seem to have any English content but from the answer to the question it doesn't sound like there's a real plan for user testing a radical new UI that will be given to people who, according to the HIG are young and inexperienced.
To the designer's credit both of those criteria (young and inexperienced) give you the best possible scenario for introducing a new UI since children are more willing to play around and experiment and inexperienced computer users don't have the legacy of using an OS that worked any different from what you're giving them. Even with those advantages I'd hope that a project that is intended for a global audience would have more substantial usability testing plans than "lets give a couple to some people in Argentina and see what they think". I'm certainly not going to go all gaga over an untested UI that starts by throwing out decades of learning about how people interact with software.
"A modest 128MB of memory" (Score:3, Informative)
Remember when John McCarthy said (sorry, I don't have the exact quotation... if anyone does I'd love to have it and the source) that there were no theoretical barriers to artificial intelligence any more, they knew how to do it and the only thing they needed was a "million words of memory?"
Horizontal ToC mediawiki extension? (Score:2, Informative)
Let "them" test it...? (Score:2)
I agree that it is creative and ballsy and everything, but has it even been tested? Wouldn't it be even more ballsy to test it on ourseves before peddling it as an educational tool to the poorer part of the world? I know I'm being rather critical here, and
A picture of food isn't nourishing (Score:2)
So is giving children tools to teach them, and bring them up from poverty. Both efforts are important.
Re:Mod me whatever....but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Just so you know as well, there is a world food shortage. Food is basically oil in terms of scarcity and world-wide production. We don't have the food to feed the world. The world needs to learn how to do it themselves. Therefore if we spent all our time and effort giving people food the world would actually be a worse place. Giving people the ability to learn how to do things for themselves, as opposed to only teaching them how to put out their hand and beg for food is surely a much better approach to the problem.
There was another obvious point: You can still give them food at the same time. The OLPC project does not prevent aid! Also, I love how everyone is so specific to "omg teh children". Because as soon as people become adults we really just couldn't care less, huh? Perhaps if they had some/any education before they became adults they'd be able to take care of the children themselves. Also, let's just skip the arms trade arguments altogether and blame the OLPC project for the proliferation of the problem.
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Re:Mod me whatever....but... (Score:4, Interesting)
What is needed is education, access to the world beyond their village and the "city" miles away. These laptops will possibly (though again, efficacy has yet to be proven) encourage such interaction, learning and initialization into the modern world. Furthermore, the people are not stupid. The one computer that was in the government office was used regularly by middle and high-schoolers downloading music, reading up on the latest news from Bangkok, the weather, or various other games. But creation of original content, for access within the village, is another issue altogether.
As a side - those people were some of the happiest people I have ever met. They were not hungry, were not in a hurry, never spent much time indoors, never needed anything more than what they had. By connecting them to the capitalistic global society with these laptops we take away their status quo. They will be hungry, not for food, but for education, for money, for placement within the larger world. And it will destroy the villages as they know it. For better or worse.
Something to think about.
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THIS IS MORE URGENT THAN I THOUGHT!!! WE MUST SEND THEM LAPTOPS SO THEY STOP SITTI
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oh... there we go again (Score:5, Insightful)
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If we were to spend the same amount of resources feeding people as we did on this (and similar) projects things would be far worse.
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If humans would spend as much time, money, and effort with feeding children as they are with giving third world countries hand cranked computers with pretty picture interfaces, the world would be a better place.
A smart businessman looks for return on investment. Right now many countries spend huge amounts providing food to other countries. This investment is much larger than the OLPC project. The food donated in this way destroys the local market for food, decimating the remains of the agricultural secto
Re:Letting 4 year olds mess with the code? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Vaporware (Score:4, Insightful)
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