Wired: Despite the endless religious battles among users of Mac, Windows, OS/2, and Unix about which interface is the best, it's amazing how alike they all are and how little they've changed in the past 10 years. Why has there been so little progress?
Tognazzini: There's an urban myth about a clothing distributor who sent a sample of a sports jacket to an overseas manufacturer asking for 10,000 copies. Well, the copies were perfect ... right down to a cigarette burn on the left sleeve of the original. The original Mac interface was great for a 128-Kbyte machine with a 9-inch black-and-white screen. But there's no reason for today's machines to work that way. User-interface designers are still duplicating the cigarette burns on the original Mac.And your suggestion is to change basic features like the mouse and the icons?
Right. We're so used to being restricted by the up-down, left-right movement of the mouse that we haven't even considered some simple additions which would make the mouse much more expressive. For example, you could easily make a mouse sensitive to how hard it's being pressed into the mousepad.A super-sensitive mouse? Great for Doom!
Pressing down on a mouse would be a pretty natural way of expressing a going-under movement, and there's an important ergonomic reason for doing this. People find it much easier to move quickly to a button or a pull-down menu at the edge of the screen than to one somewhere in the middle. You can just shoot your hand in one direction and let the edge of the display stop you. To move to a target in the middle, you have to slow down to keep from overshooting. That takes more time.Imagine that whatever window you're in, your mouse pointer is trapped in there with you. No matter how wildly you move it around, it stops at the border. To get out of the window, you just press down and scoot under the border of the window.
Impressive. But that just adds one small capability to the mouse's extremely limited vocabulary: "Go left, now go right, now go under." You argue that the future holds in store much more flexible ways to instruct our computers. What will the vocabulary be then?
Gesture. You have more expressiveness in your little finger than the entire mouse has. Literally. Overall, the human body has more than 200 ways it can flex itself. Imagine you could use all that flexibility to communicate with your computer. Imagine you could move your hands over your computer's surface to manipulate an onscreen document or pull a spreadsheet into a report. Or that flicking your fingers over a passage brushes it away like crumbs. We already have a natural vocabulary of gestures, so the learning curve would be slight.Heresy! You're saying I'm going to have to move my fingers from the keyboard.
If your main interest is entering text into the computer, then you'll have a keyboard until speech-recognition software is perfected. But that's a pretty narrow view of the role computers are going to play.This keyboard-centric view of computers dissolves if you imagine computers being physically big. Envision your computer in 10 or 20 years looking like one of today's office cubicles, except the desktop and walls are capable of displaying computer-generated images. And the walls are touch-sensitive. And the system can sense your position in space so you can use gestures to communicate with it. How useful is a mouse in this environment? If you can use the same headset you already wear for your radio-telephone to dictate commands and short passages of text, how often will you be tempted to whip out the old keyboard?
So, we'll have a computer that's in some ways indistinguishable from office furniture or from the office itself? That leads you away from thinking about computers as tools you use and towards thinking of them as a space you enter.
Yes. Real-life tools are things that modify other things: hammers move nails; scissors cut paper. If you think of computers as tools, then you come up with a model that says computing is about applications modifying data. And you end up with huge, unwieldy "hammers" like today's word processors. Instead, computers will provide a space in which you interact with small, smart objects that have their own capabilities and behaviours.And will this space be connected to a physical space?
When I say at the beginning of my book, "All hell is about to break loose," I'm referring to the explosion in networking and "nomadics." The only time the physical location of your computer and your information will mean anything will be when the hardware fails and you have to fix it or grab someone else's. When it's working, you'll be able to access your personal information space wherever you are, from computer environments similar to your office and as commonplace as pay phones. There'll be a wide variety of computers to work with. You'll feel as if your information is always with you. And, except for security, the boundaries of where your computer ends and the universe of networked information begins will be wonderfully blurred.David Weinberger (self@evident.com) is president of Evident Marketing in Brookline, Massachusetts. He also edits The Gilbane Report.