Filth Interface

Imagine a UserInterface that works like a web page or the WikiUserInterface. Unlike the WimpInterface, with its windows, menus, icons and programs, which might be a broken idea (See: WimpIsBroken), why not use FILTH instead?

Formatting, Images, Links, Text and Hypermedia.

(Hasn't this already been invented? EmacsEditor?)

Formatting: Text formatting, with a cursor and a mouse, highlighting text, a clipboard and a WYSIWYG interface. The user can arbitrarily edit, save, load and delete content generated by programs.

Images: Pictures, loaded from separate files. Since there are already a wide variety of conveniently available image formats, reinventing the wheel here might be a bad idea.

Links: Hyperlinks between pages, locally, globally, and among different programs. Like in a web browser, there will be certain buttons available to all parts of the system, such as back, forward, reload, save, load, etc.

Text and Hypermedia: Essentially all other content that the interface despools (displays ?) without thinking too hard, like text, line drawings, etc.

An operating system with a FILTH interface would have a much shorter learning curve than one with windows, icons, menus and programs, while maintaining a certain degree of usability one expects from computers. Third party software would not look nearly so un-unified (and occasionally ugly) as the stuff available for Xwindows and Microsoft Windows [Can't agree with that. Every looked around in the web? unified looks? nope --TyberiusPrime?].

Thoughts, opinions, matters of intellectual heresy follow:

Well great for some apps. But ever tried to just rearrange a list of items in a filth interface? No way without adding at least some in page scripting abilities.

It's filthy all right, and not a significant advance over the WimpInterface. Some of the stuff (save and load buttons) is just plain wrong. Other stuff (arbitrary editing) is only an insignificant consequence of a much more powerful idea.

It's hard to see what the description above means since even a bullet point listing of features in a GUI would run to several pages. There are more fundamental principles in GUI design than there are features listed above.

In any case, the idea of basing all interfaces on web browsers is old hat. It's also stupid since web browsers have horrible interfaces. The best of the lot, OperaBrowser, is still generations behind what you can cobble together from existing research.

Care to elaborate on "existing research"? Oh, and Opera? Puh-leeeze.

Look up CHI on the ResearchIndex. Twenty minutes' browsing will net you dozens of papers that have investigated ZoomableUserInterfaces, 3D, and many other concepts.

CategoryUserInterface