Stand on your Desk

I’m reading Steven Johnson‘s Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate. I’m having trouble pinning these ideas directly to Johnson’s text. (The curse of reading lucid intriguing writing, you don’t want to stop to express your own ideas.)

He spends considerable time examining the computer interface as a metaphor. The dominate computer metaphor is the desktop. While there are a few computer specific innovations we still basically work by placing one document on top and working on it or placing multiple documents side by side.

At this point I’m reminded of my dad’s desk when he used to be a VP of a midsize company with a huge desk that consistently had piles 3 to 4 inches deep. In computer terms he was running an obscene number of different applications. He would of course sort of know where what he needed was and after some flipping through on his desk he could find what he needed. The time it took him to find an item was directly related to the amount of time last elapsed since using it. The more recently he used it the faster he could find it.

Fundamentally this carries over to the computer desktop, as you get more things piled up on the desktop the longer it takes to find something. Computer’s UI’s haven’t changed this much, all UI’s just give us different tools to flip through our stacks of windows. All the different tools essentially equate to an automatically updating list of what is running. If its the MS Windows taskbar or the Alt-tab interface, on Mac OS 9 its the menu in the upper right corner, on Mac OS X it gets visual with the dock, but for all intents and purposes they’re all just differently formatted lists.

This is not to say that these are the only ways to organize a desk. You could get multiple desks and organize each of them, by some predetermined theme. Various XWindows windows managers achieve the same effect by having multiple different workspaces and you can also connect multiple independently driven monitors to one computer and have as many workspaces as monitors.

The recurring concept is the continuance of the faithful persistence to the desktop metaphor over a large number of operating systems. You can get your computer anyway you want it as long as its a digital version of a desk. (At least there are more choices than just black.)

This is not to deny there have ben attempts at other metaphors most notably Microsoft’s Bob, which Johnson convincingly argues is not a metaphor but instead a simulation, he states this as one of the major reasons for its failure.

It is actually quite amazing that our primary computer metaphor is still the desktop. Admittedly there have been a few new ideas here and there, but fundamentally its just a matter of varying the number and size of desks and the way in which the program list is presented and utilized.

Apple’s new feature in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther, Exposé does not fit neatly into a list or a desk size category. AS demonstrated it is similar to a list because it shows all open windows on one screen, it is similar to obtaining a larger desk, but it also arranges everything on the desk one layer deep. In doing this it also creates a visual map or list of the running programs. Steven Johnson wrote that this capitalizes on people’s visual memory, something which none of the other list methods do to the same extent. (the others limit themselves to icons only on lists.)

I cannot wait to get my hands on Panther and try this out. But I’m not thrilled to shell out $129 for it.

Hmm, I wonder how long it’ll take Microsoft to come up with their mediocre version of Exposé.