Technology Review - The Next Computer Interface

"The desktop is dead," declares David Gelernter.

thanks, Dan!

Gelernter is on to something; the "chronological presentation of everything" seems to work basically like a blog-based desktop.

chronological presentation is still doomed as a desktop interface...I mean how many people are going to remember what date or time they were working on a specific document?

BTW, G's book "Machine Beauty" is really terriffic, although the sections where he begins to describe the chrono interface are less interesting than the rest of it.

Don't get me wrong, Gelertner's a terribly smart cookie. No matter how smart and innovative though, no information retrieval method works well everywhere...something I need to remind myself of in the glee of kewl new IA geek toys.

Side note: I used to subscribe to Technology Review, but found it was mostly uninsightful academic whining.

Different techniques have different purposes and knowing which one is best is based on understanding the user/audience of a project.

I'm not saying a chronological interface is bad, I'm saying that for a primary computer interface to be good, it should take advantage of all of our abilities (including recall via chronology and location).

My other issue with the current new interfaces is that many of the interfaces are reading or visually oriented. Again, they will improve and get there. I can not grab the information to use to help support and idea in a document I am compiling. Pulling a quote from the current new interface is relatively difficult. Many of the amazing zoom tools that are now years old that have come out of the University of Maryland labs that Ben Shneiderman has been developing, fall into a similar category. These tools allow a nice interface, but I can not yet use the information in a manner that I would like to use it.

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