Monday 5pm - Death of the Desktop
Interesting but somewhat prophetic. Elsewhere in the conference I heard someone say that the best way to prevent the future is to predict it. Raskin is definitely predicting his version of the future.
He had a few good ideas and many that I didn’t agree with. The good ones involved getting rid of the barriers and making things easier for the user to find. The exact methods he stated didn’t seem like they accomplished all of that.
He did come up with 3 laws of user interfaces and likened them to Asimov’s three laws of robotics. The rules were:
- An interface shal not harm your content o, through inaction, allow your content to come to harm.
- An interface shall not waste your time or require you to do more work than is strictly necessary.
- An interface shall not allow itself to get into a state where it cannot manipulate content.
Noble rules but not always practical.
I had originally thought this would be a talk about the death of the desktop and the rise of the web application but it was nothing at all about web design or development and all about replacing the windows desktop with something that looks a lot like a predicting command line.
Of course those of us running Linux or OS X already understand the power of the command line and if we’re geeky enough we can even have context sensitive completion. I’m sorry if I’m not impressed, but I don’t think it will catch on. Raskin inadvertently demonstrated a shortcoming of the command line. He was trying to enter a command and had to try three times before he spelled it right enough for the computer to figure out what he wanted.
Moderator: Aza Raskin Pres, Humanized
Aza Raskin Pres, Humanized