A New Paradigm For Web Browsing 237
dsaci points out a New York Times article about how surfing the web may change to a more graphics-based endeavor. With the advent of devices like the Wii and the iPhone, the capability to directly control objects on a screen is becoming a popular and affordable technology. That, combined with immersive interfaces such as Piclens, could be the future of web browsing. Quoting:
"'I've wondered for a long time why the computer interface hasn't changed from 20 years ago,' said Austin Shoemaker, a former Apple Computer software engineer and now chief technology officer of Cooliris. 'People should think of a computer interface less as a tool and more as a extension of themselves or as extension of their mind.' Voice, too, is finally beginning to play a significant role as an interface tool in a new generation of consumer-oriented wireless handsets. Many technologists now believe that hunting and pecking on the tiny keyboards of cellphones and P.D.A.'s will quickly give way to voice commands that will return map, text and other data displayed visually on small screens."
Yeah good luck with that (Score:5, Insightful)
The keyboard works, 100% of the time. Its easily understood. Its robust. It fails gracefully - you immediately see if you've made a mistake before submitting a command.
Re:Yeah good luck with that (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Blue Screens (Score:2)
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Re:Yeah good luck with that (Score:5, Interesting)
But what REALLY gets to me is when the device just quetly hangs once it's gone into standby mode. With the phones, it meant I silently dissapeared off the cell network until I realised there was a problem, which is usuazlly when I try to use the device.
I have some friends with the newer HTC phones, and they report that WM6 seems to be more stable, but a few of them have reported serious problems with battery life.
I think there are a lot of things we need to sort out with mobile devices before we look at redoing the interface.
Re:Yeah good luck with that (Score:4, Informative)
* slide out keyboard, GPS, touch screen, simple USB laptop tethering, and HSDPA, so don't point that stupid toy "1 out of 5 ain't bad" iPhone at me!
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You missed option (c). One of those people who's BOSS grows desperately frantic at the notion that I might be unreachable at any single point in my life. In those days (a full 2 years back :-) I was a technical contractor, and if my boss didn't know where I was for 30 minutes he'd phone and ask.
It would be even worse these days, though
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That *crash* will not come as a surprise
It will be on a phone. I've never seen one crash. Then again, I haven't had much exposure to Windows Mobile.
My former Sony Ericsson cellphone (V600i I think, I've lost it anyway, which reminds me I'll have to get a replacement one of these days) had to be restarted every couple day or it would regularly ignore calls, refuse to dial or to ring, etc. It wasn't a smartphone and it didn't look like it ran Windows mobile although you can probably dress it up to look like a proper embedded system nowadays so maybe it was after all...
Whatever it ran it did crash quite a bit.
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Re:Yeah good luck with that (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Yeah good luck with that (Score:5, Funny)
Glad to be of service, but I'd rather use simple voice commands to control a portable device. My cellphone has the ability to dial by voice, recognizing both names and numbers. It's not perfect, but it is usually faster than typing or searching for contacts.
Voice control and other methods are only infants compared to keyboards, but just like the keyboard improved from a mechanical device on a typewriter into a simple multi-function electronic device, other input technologies will improve.
I'm just looking forward to the day when the computer interfaces with my brain and provides all inputs so that I can just lie in some tube and experience the reality that the computer determines is best for me.
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Just think about this for a moment.
Look around you, carefully and critically.
Do you really want that to be happening on a generalized basis?
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Off my lawn, you punks! And turn down that noise!
Re:Yeah good luck with that (Score:5, Insightful)
Glad to be of service, but I'd rather use simple voice commands to control a portable device. My cellphone has the ability to dial by voice, recognizing both names and numbers. It's not perfect, but it is usually faster than typing or searching for contacts.
Voice control and other methods are only infants compared to keyboards, but just like the keyboard improved from a mechanical device on a typewriter into a simple multi-function electronic device, other input technologies will improve.
I'm just looking forward to the day when the computer interfaces with my brain and provides all inputs so that I can just lie in some tube and experience the reality that the computer determines is best for me.
"Text-based interfaces have proven that most users can't read.
Graphic interfaces have proven that most users can't understand abstractions.
Mind reading interfaces will prove that most users can't think."
I have little doubt that it will happen that way.
Re:Yeah good luck with that (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: Correctly Transmitting faults... (Score:2)
Even funnier is when the keyboard demonstrates that the user cannot spell.
Re:Yeah good luck with that (Score:4, Insightful)
"T". "y". "e". "s"....
*5 minutes later*
"o". "f". "o". "Period".
No matter how fast the system responds, you can probably type the letters faster than you can dictate them. Similar things would happen when dealing with non-natural languages, such as programming languages. Can you imagine trying to dictate a regular expression?
A voice is a wonderful thing, but we should probably acknowledge that it's not always the most appropriate input method for the job. In some scenarios, such as writing a lengthy Word document or transcribing meeting minutes, dictation offers great promise (if we can ensure a high degree of accuracy), but it is virtually useless in others.
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"That double squiggle thing with a line through it!"
computer: ?
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Re:Yeah good luck with that (Score:5, Insightful)
Everything outlined in the article is leading away from integrating technology into your core capacities. It's about taking a tool and turning into a third party agent that you need to interact with as though it were some sort of person.
Making a more efficient computer interface means making the muscle movements involved more subtle, not replacing what efficiencies we have with new paradigms that require gross muscle movements and voice strain.
Integrating mouse gestures into the operating system and and moving to one-handed chording keyboards as a standard would be the right direction.
If the brainless masses want Fisher-Price toys, fine. But lets not pretend that Fisher-Price make better tools.
Re:Yeah good luck with that (Score:4, Insightful)
When a business analyst / investment "consultant" starts hyping up marginal advances as revolutionary and talking about coming "paradigm shifts" then you know that the bullshit is in full flow. Accelerometer interfaces are nice, they do feel more natural - I worked on one for an educational games project seven years ago. But the key point that you've captured is they are intrusive. Until the accuracy is high enough that we can make a twitch interface they are not a replacement for the traditional tools of mouse and keyboard.
What really pissed me off about the article was the insistence that these interfaces were a "direct manipulation" of images on screen. No, if you reach in and move an image (somehow) then that would be direct manipulation. If your physical gestures are translated into screen motion by accelerometers rather than a mouse then it is still an indirect interface. It is at most a minor increment on the user interface technology that we have already, the term "Paradigm Shift" is thrown about with abandon by too many suits without a understanding of what it implies.
Re:Yeah good luck with that (Score:5, Interesting)
People talk all day (ask my mother-in-law) without losing their voice or straining any muscles, but have you ever typed literally all day? It is unreasonable to expect someone to type as fast as they can dictate with the same amount of training in each.
On Vista saying "open notepad" is much faster than trying to remember where it is buried on the menu. People can pick up a mic with a list of key words in front of them and more easily use the computer than they could with a mouse. Other just touching what they want instead of determining the difference between left-click, right-click, double-click, drag, etc... This is the reason that programming languages that read closer to English are usually more popular, they're simply easier to pick up and understand. Nobody wants to remember syntax.
Maybe you shouldn't talk about things you have no experience in, let alone try to make analogies that bare no relevance to the discussion. Maybe your closed-mindedness is the reason that interfaces haven't changed much, but I'm willing to bet that you will get on your Iphone and call all your friends to discuss how stupid this poster named OMNI-something was on
Re:Yeah good luck with that (Score:5, Insightful)
In Windows 2000, it isn't. What's changed is added bells and whistles to the start menu, as well as an artificial delay (presumably to help those who aren't good at quickly and correctly moving the pointer). With Windows XP, the "dynamic" menu was also introduced, making the menu in its default setting hide what you haven't used recently, and at the same time preventing any kind of spatial memorization of where to find things -- it can and will change. With Windows Vista, there's a huge big mess of trying to replace menus with predictive breadcrumbs (yet another way to prevent spatial memory), and some of these design choices have even hit the innocent start menu. To the point that it now
That doesn't mean having menus is the slow choice.
And it's a hell of a lot faster than repeating yourself multiple times, or having to use a menu
What's needed, IMO, is a simplification of the UI, focusing on simplicity and consistency, and not done by trying to second-guess the user or provide a more "natural feeling". Saying "Enhance 224 to 176. Stop" might work in a movie, but in real life, it's by far easier to drag a mouse box over an area.
Anecdotes have it that the tree most common words said on voice operated telephone menus are "no", "dammit" and "operator".
Regards,
--
*Art
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I agree that touch interfaces, for example, are nice for small devices (even though they mean you get fingerprints all over your nice, shiny display), but they don't work too well for a 21" flatscreen display because the amount of arm movement would be tiring after a while. They also can't really replace a keyboard in terms of tactile response and typing speed (as many fast typists actually hit one key before releasing the la
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Maybe for now your muscle memory does common tasks with a keyboard better than with speaking, but I am c
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Why not? American Tool Toy & Invention Corporation makes toys and tools. And not just toys that are also learning tools. Is the Wii a toy? I mean, you can play games with it all day long. You can also surf the web, check weather forecasts, go shopping online, etc. That sounds like a tool. In fact, it seems that Nintendo also makes toys and tools.
You can't condemn the tool just because
Re:Yeah good luck with that (Score:4, Interesting)
True, but they should be focusing on other methods of input.
This could be anything from the one handed keyboard, ear canal senor that detects tongue movement, or mouse cursor that follows eye movement.
Personally, I'd wouldn't mind having an electrode in my arm or back if it means I could use small muscle movements to input text and mouse movement but that might be a hard sell to the average joe.
Re:Yeah good luck with that (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe it will respond... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Yeah good luck with that (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, the problem with that is that you have to look at the darned device to do anything. Speaker independent voice recognition works quite well already on a Nokia N95. You hold a button, speak a name from your address book, and it not only displays and speaks what it thinks you want for confirmation, but it also has a list of next best guesses. You're not going Captain Picard with the thing, but it works well with minimal input. In noisy areas, just hold it close and speak up. You can't say that with most "smart" phones like iPhone and it doesn't demand your eyeballs if, for instance, you really need to place a call while driving. I use it all the time in preference to the keyboard because it beats flipping through the hundreds of address book entries in my phone. I like that direction in UI and hope we continue to see more of it rather than dwell on how glossy and cool our phones look.
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I think that "glossy and cool" is the aspect that will win the day for voice recognition in phones. Usable keypads have a minimum size, and that size is too large to look good in the pocket of a pair of tailored pants or a suit jacket. It will be a simple matter for marketing to make having a Blackberry "brick" clipped to your belt passé. This isn't a concern for much of the Slashdot crowd, but it will be a driving factor for a significant port
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until you can nail 110% correct recognition, in a crowded area.. The keyboard works, 100% of the time. Its easily understood. Its robust. It fails gracefully - you immediately see if you've made a mistake before submitting a command.
Mr Keyboard, let me guess you wrote that sitting down at a desk.
The keyboard doesn't fit 100% of situations. You need space for it. It needs a surface and it needs two hands. You can't keep a keyboard in your pocket. You need to look at the screen for accuracy, but learners need to look at the keys. It takes a relatively long time to learn. You can't use a keyboard while walking, secretively, or holding something else. Oh, and RSI.
Alternative input devices are needed. The keys on your mobile phone are
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Visually impaired ignored? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Extension? (Score:2, Insightful)
Wow! I just discovered that my hand and my mouse are not one unit after all!
Doesn't bother me (Score:5, Insightful)
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Then you're already too late.
As long as a lot of people are still on dial-up... (Score:3, Interesting)
Not only that (Score:5, Insightful)
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The "social" networking possiblities are endless. More fun than that it is now to carry a cellphone jammer or a small backpack sized EMP device.
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Nor do I want to be sitting next to the person without a spam filter
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Or if I could make him watch 2girls1cup and be unable to turn away.
Voice is too slow (Score:5, Insightful)
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Interaction Language... (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, playing a little devil's advocate here. Perhaps the building bricks of computer interfaces and their basic interaction mechanics haven't changed because they are all right as they are now.
We have developed an interaction language that allows us to express interaction proposals and allows the users to understand those proposals and, therefore, to interact successfully with our systems. Why should we change that if it is working?
Change for change's sake, when we have an established language does not sound sound... I don't see no one complaining that we've been calling chairs "chairs" for so many years...
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I'll partially rebut you both. I think that his question includes its own answer. The interfaces are supposed to be an extension of our minds, right? Well, 30 years ago when the first WIMP-y interfaces were developed, the closest we could get was to approximate things that our brain had developed to interact with.
Our brains are perhaps the most plastic knowledge-based system we currently know of. Over those twenty years of widespread use, our minds have become accustomed to the interfaces available. W
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Hmmm.... I infer that you don't follow many "technology companies". I have heard many influential people in this field suggest that the they drive change first and foremost in order to help customers decide to buy new stuff (from them, preferably).
If these folks believe they can make more money by introducing less efficient interfaces, not only will they they assure you that these new interfaces will make you hea
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That's a difficult question, isn't it? I mean, I have an iPod Touch and it's quite awesome, but the lead-up to the iPhone's launch was ridiculous. I think Apple's engineers should be flayed for not offering a keyboard peripheral, or at least supporting bluetooth keyboards in some capacity, and on something that purports to be a smartphone.
That may change this year, though. I'm rooting for a new version of the iPhone based on the Atom processors (and with 1GB or more DRAM) that can support continuous spe
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I maintain a small collection of Palm III devices
Yeah, okay, sure... You go first. (Score:5, Interesting)
I have to admit that I didn't agree with his ideas, but Jef Raskin, RIP, (original concept for Macintosh, "Swyft", "Canon Cat") was one of the few designers who was brave enough to take a clean-slate approach to interface design and then *implement* it to see if the ideas stood up to real-world use.
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Even command-line users pretty much all run their terminals under a windowing system these days. Even if they use traditional editors like emacs and vi, most people default to using versions of those that take advantage of the features that GUI environments provide. And how many people do you think browse Slashdot from the command-line? Methinks the number is small.
S
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Even command-line users pretty much all run their terminals under a windowing system these days. Even if they use traditional editors like emacs and vi, most people default to using versions of those that take advantage of the features that GUI environments provide. And how many people do you think browse Slashdot from the command-line? Methinks the number is small.
On the other hand, windowed GUIs don't ditch the use of text altogether. For example reading your post and writing this answer are good old text-based activities, even though they look and feel slightly different from the old text terminal. Same goes for most office applications, IMHO. The GUI is also a convenient way of running text-based things, not a completely new paradigm.
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voice control (Score:5, Insightful)
"Computer, start, programs, Mozilla, fire fox , double you, double you, double you, dot, google, dot, com, search field, violent, asian, porn. I'm feeling lucky. click"
its a slow, painful, annoying as hell process that brings you back to the keyboard and mouse once the novelty has worn off, and only leaves the user feeling ripped off for wasting so much money on a fancy new inferior interface.
voice recognition won't be useful until it is intelligent. I should only have to say "Computer, google porn" and get my results. I shouldn't have to explain to my computer step by step how to open a freaken browser.
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voice recognition won't be useful until either
a) the computer understands what you're talking about, which will take forever to achieve or
b) the current paradigm, which you summarize so aptly -- voice being used to interact with items made specifically for interaction using your hands -- dies, and is replaced with an interface that is designed to supplement hands with voice. even the Orson Card's "vocalisation" interface makes more sense than what's
Re:voice control (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's an exercise (Score:5, Insightful)
handicapped accessiblity, localization (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, localization requirements often keep us from doing some bold new UI experiment.
Its not the tech, but the form (Score:2)
I prefer cross-platform standards. (Score:5, Interesting)
Want to use it on Linux? Sorry, you're out of luck, it's Win/Mac only for now; they say there'll be a Linux port one day; but as this is a proprietary technology, you won't get Linux support until they deign to implement it.
Want to use it with Opera? Sorry, you're out of luck, it's IE/Safari/Firefox only for now; and it will probably remain so, as they say they're not interested in supporting minority browsers; and as it's a proprietary technology, Opera can't add their own support for it.
Want to use it on an iPhone? Sorry...
This is not a step forward.
We'll see (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:We'll see (Score:5, Insightful)
I think one of the hinderances to practical voice recognition has been the telephone paradigm (described in the book "Being Digital" by Nicholas Negroponte) where the computer is supposed to understand anything that anyone says at any time. What might work for voice recognition is for the user to have a custom chip that will allow a device to be configured to understand that specific user. Move the chip to a new device and that device will understand you perfectly.
What might also work is if the user trains himself/herself to speak in a way that the computer can consistently recognize, much like the user of Palm's Graffiti handwriting system learned to write in a way that the PDA could consistenly understand. With training, speaking that would could become second nature, much like typing has become for many users.
He wondered for a long time why... (Score:4, Insightful)
more like a tool (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish people could learn to think of their computers more as "just a tool". Half the time I see people having problems with computer usage, it's because they're expecting the thing to read their mind. I have to explain to them just how dumb a computer is, and that you really have to tell it what to do because it's just a machine.
(The other half, of course, is due to shitty software.)
Speech recognition is gonna take over any day now (Score:3, Funny)
Now excuse me while I hop in my Moller. I'm late for a meeting at the Zeiss-Ikon factory.
One handed browsing (Score:3, Funny)
Baby steps first, then worry about how to best run (Score:5, Insightful)
Voice recognition still sucks badly, even after a lot of time investment into it.
Maybe if someone got around to fixing that somehow, then we would consider, you know, using it.
I'm not at all suggesting we give up that line of research, just suggesting we put the horse before the cart here.
Or at least don't lie and say "will quickly give way to voice commands" and call it what it is. Those people want it to happen, and there is nothing wrong with that! Each tech has people that would prefer it over others. To each their own!
But to out right lie and say that it will happen 'quickly' is just embarrassing for your career as a technologist.
Re:Baby steps first, then worry about how to best (Score:3, Funny)
You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
Re:Baby steps first, then worry about how to best (Score:2)
Take a look around you in a coffee shop or on the subway one day - now imagine that everyone with a crackberry or PDA is constantly yelling at said crackberry or PDA to overcome ambient noise.
I seriously doubt we'll see significant improvements in mobile UI until direct brain interfaces get
That explains it! (Score:5, Funny)
Piclens? (Score:2)
It's very much quite awesome, but...
It's really only, and only, for browsing pictures. I don't see that as an extension of my mind.. in my mind, I'd be able to right-click the image and copy/save it, for example. I'd also be able to zoom in as far as I'd like, for very high resolution images. I'd also be able to have it in a window, instead of taking over the entire FireFox (in my case) workspace. Perhaps, if I alt-tabbed to another application
Piclens is a Firefox extension only (Score:2)
(OK, XPI is no ActiveX, but it's a bad design because it still trains people to trust unsandboxed web content)
Long Way to Go (Score:3, Insightful)
Sitting alone in a room with no background noise whatsoever, speaking as clearly as an evening news anchor, I get about a 5-10% success rate.
If that's the best voice recognition out there for mobile devices at the moment, it's got a very long way to go before it could be useful for Joe Average.
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because text has advantages, duh (Score:2)
Simple answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it works.
Whereas all the attempts at shifting the paradigms to an extension of your soul (or whatever), just result in unusable exercises in masturbation (and not the kind the internet was invented for).
Remember how Flash was going to be the future of the web? Yeah.
What about the icon-impaired? (Score:4, Insightful)
Almost everything I do is on the CLI. I've been programming for nearly two decades, and I have no problems selecting textual tokens out of a field of similar-looking text. But give me a set of small, information-deprived graphics to decode, and I fall flat on my face.
I can't be alone in this. Surely others have this same cognitive disability.
The new paradigm is the tiny screen (Score:2)
The "new paradigm" for the internet is figuring out ways to make it look good on tiny screens. Current web design usually involves a small bit of content surrounded by banners, ads, menus, and similar dreck. None of that stuff fits on the small screen. The big screen is forgiving of bad layout. The small screen is not.
Navigation probably needs to be popup-based. You can't afford the screen real estate for keeping menus on screen all the time. A unified grammar for popup behavior is needed in web bro
Throwing accessibility (Score:3, Insightful)
The good news is that after this catastrophic mistake, 2018 will bring talks about the novel concepts of accessibility and portability of web pages, we might even end up creating a consortium to promote web standards that will allow you to, in theory see a page correctly in different devices and software without caring about silly things like multimedia support, fonts, current resolution in use, etc.
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Re:Give me some a$$, ... (Score:2)
"About to display Goatse
15% mild tech improvement, 85% eye-candy (Score:2)
I agree, a lot of it is just window dressing. It's basically a Google Images-like searchy-thingy with smoother transitioning for scrolling and zooming and some 3D horizontal "wall" projections to add some dazzle. The 3D effect doesn't add much functionality because things too far down the wall can't be seen anyhow. I'd prefer small thumbnails on a regular screen that enlarge to medium thumbn
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There might be a good idea behind why we've used keyboard-mouse-sc
An even better picture/comparison... (Score:2)