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Comment by Grumbledour | Hacker News Reader

"Task: Earn $100 in BTC - Write a review of this post." Am I the only one who finds that incredibly alienating? What is this dystopian hellscape of a website?

The article itself presents really interesting thoughts of course. While not really new, I feel spatial software is really not studied enough. Simply rearranging videos in only conferencing would make the experience so much more pleasant. I really dislike it if I need to rejoin jitsi for example (which sadly happens far to often) and suddenly everyone in the call has switched places.

I was a bit surprised not to see Jeff Raskin mentioned though when so many examples are ZUIs.

I am looking forward to check out Nototo. I have often thought of this kind of interface for a filesystem might be an interesting experiment.

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> I was a bit surprised not to see Jeff Raskin mentioned though when so many examples are ZUIs.

Jef (not Jeff) was not ever a GUI fan (either before or after the Mac). The Mac profoundly reflects a lot of his philosophy, but that philosophy was “a computer for the rest of us” (not his slogan, but Apple marketing’s): an appliance that was easy to use for “ordinary people”.

But he didn’t see the GUI/WIMP interface as part of that vision.

Oh, sorry for the misspelling.

I would not say I am really well versed in his work, but the Zooming Interface Paradigm was what really stuck in my head from The Humane Interface and these canvas based UIs discussed in the article seem to be pretty much this.

Of course something like the Canon Cat takes an entirely different direction, but then I am also not sure that the line between GUI and Console Interfaces should be drawn this sharply. I think there are many examples were they blur together and can augment each other instead of being opposing concepts.

Yes, I feel the Mac grossly overdid it in the 80s.

In general we still suffer from two terrible conventions from the 80s: the choice of application-centric silos rather than the document-centric model, and the bias towards the mouse (which was really a sop to fearful baby boomers) only recently partial broken by the iphone interface.

If you like the Nototo concept then you may be interested in Reach who are applying Graph organization to personal knowledge management [1].

As for the issue of Spatial Software, my feeling is the author should do a survey of WebXR which opens up a lot of spatial realestate for development [2].

[1] https://rea.ch/ [2] https://twitter.com/ianpetrarca/status/1433437798602772489

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