Tonya and PQBON's WebLog

I watched their demo (the YouTube one). I disagree with the basic assumption that letting people organize things the way they organize their physical office space is a good thing.

I know that the reason I stack documents in my office space is that it takes time and energy to label new file folders to organize them in a useful manner. The long-term outcome of this is that I just do what I did two days ago and sweep all the documents out of my office, accepting that I may be losing useful information in there.

I appreciate that my current GUI lets me quickly and easily make an organized file structure. I don't want to be pushing crap around and making virtual messy piles.

As pretty as that interface is, it feels rather as if I had a DSL-interface GUI that let me use a pen to dial a provider's number on an old rotary phone, or a library catalog UI that had me flipping through virtual cards.

I didn't see the talk when I was at CHI, but a co-worker of mine reported on it in his CHI talk.

It seems like it's a step in the right direction. Alex is right that you've gotta' scale up to the volumes of information that we deal with on our computers, which isn't quite on the same scale anymore as the volumes of stuff that are on our physical desktops.

That said, it does deal with some of those issues - you get the benefits of spacial memory/recognition (repeatedly shown to be powerful/effective in UI), while being able to do things that you wouldn't otherwise. I dare anyone to stack up 40 documents on their real desktop. Do you need to be able to "toss" a document across the desktop, and have it scatter a pile on the other side? I'm unconvinced. But, my curren computer desktop has become useless - I search for everything. Even things I use regularly. These kinds of tools will give me back some of the spatial features that are otherwise missing.

Of course, it's not "real" 3D - closer than many things like this which have been done in the past, and the physics model makes it feel more "real", but it's really just documents layered (with slightly more DoF than just x,y) on a single 2D surface.

GUIs are sooooo 1986.

seriously, I'm sick of GUIs and have been avoiding GUI research for the last couple years. Trying to improve desktop-based interfaces at this point is beating a dead horse. (in terms of research, at least. It seems that in practice, people still don't always do a good job with GUIs) bumptop is cute, but I can't bring myself to care much.

the desktop metaphor is/was just that: a metaphor to help people deal with an unfamiliar thing in terms the understood. a crutch. making it more literal is a silly idea. (like alex said)

And to bryan's comment, if searching works for you, and it's quick and painless... what's the problem? Spatiality is not one of the strengths of the desktop computer... even a big monitor is damn limited compared to the rest of the world. Dealing efficiently with huge amounts of data -- i.e. searching -- is what it's good at.

Of course, I am biased. my inclination is to make more things in the material world have computational abilities, rather than try to force an outdated metaphor about the material world onto the computer screen. why divorce space from movement, motor control, the body? bleah. we have the capability to do better.