If not WIMP interfaces, then what?

Cafe Society
1

I’m posting this here because it is chiefly a question of aesthetics.

This isn’t a Linux vs Windows vs Mac thread, although we’ll be talking about all three, and more besides…

OK, consider the WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointing) metaphor, so familar now from Windows, Apple Macintosh, Linux desktops such as KDE or Gnome, as well as earlier devices and operating systems. I’m not particularly interested who copied whom (if at all), but rather, could it have been any different?

As a metaphor for a desk surface untidily cluttered with documents that are able to be moved around, edited, thrown away and left covering/overlapping each other, the WIMP environment seems almost inevitable.

But lets cast our imaginations backward in time and try to envisage *an entirely different way of doing things; what event or watershed in the past might have flipped the other way and, while still allowing us computers, might have resulted in us interacting with them in a way that is radically different from the way we do now?

Or is it simply the case that for sighted, bidextrous users of the printed page, it is an inevitable conclusion?

2

For the technology we have now, the WIMP interface is very natural, and it’s difficult to imagine anything else. As new technologies come along, it’s hard to say what’ll happen next.

I’ve recently been involved in porting a product from old to new technology. If you had shown me the design that we’ve settled on at the beginning of the process, I probably wouldn’t’ve known what to make of it. UI will be similar in the future.

3

Well, Jef Raskin (arguably the “father of the Mac,” though I’d disagree) came up with the Canon Cat after he left Apple. Applications were pre-loaded, and you switched between your work context by using “leap keys” and chording (pressing several keys together).

Not sure if it’d be something I’d want to use for general-purpose computing, but I suppose if you had a known suite of tools you wanted to use (say, the equivalent of MS Office), it might be a way to go.

4

Of course, there’s also this option.

5

But why does it have the second button?