Back in April I ventured to Boulder to participate in a event called Startup Weekend, founded in 2007 by Andrew Hyde. The idea is for people with different backgrounds to gather together to form a startup company with the hope of having a working prototype to present by Sunday evening. The focus of the event is to pitch ideas, then form one or more startup groups and create a product or service based on the selected ideas. However, it also gives people an opportunity to network with other locals who share a similar interest in entrepreneurship, as well as with a few venture capitalists or other mentors and sponsors who are willing to share their expertise and experience, as well as ideas and comments on the various projects.
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Development
Radical UI Ideas – No Applications? No Desktop?
Aza Raskin from the humanized.com team spoke at one of Google’s Tech Talks about user interface design. He starts with talking about user interface and interaction and his ideas on things to avoid and what needs to change. One cool thing he discussed was how there needs to be services, and a universal access interface (basically APIs) that would allow any interface to be used for any service and thus would allow the focus to move from the tools to the content itself and what you are trying to do with it.
The rest of the talk is mainly about how the desktop is useless for the most part as it does nothing for you in terms of content. Content is key, it’s all we care about. We want to create and manipulate content.
He speaks about removing the idea of the application, as they are silos in terms of user interface and content interaction. He presented how Microsoft Word becomes bloated trying to be Mathematica for calculations, and Photoshop for editing images, as well as being a word processor, but it does so poorly. Applications also cause user interface to become stale and toolboxes come along to make development easy but non-innovative.
He showed of Enso a product they have developed that marries the graphical user interface (GUI) with the command line interface (CLI). Non-technical people are used to CLI whenever they use google to search for something. So what Enso does is allow you to select something, then hold down the capslock key and start typing commands to manipulate the content, such as spell check, calculate, flip image horizontally, and many more. It also has a navigation command set so you can open an application or document, or switch to a different window, etc. It’s tough to explain it all, much better to see it in action, so just watch the video. It’s long, but very informative for those interested in user interface and design.