Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog

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Thursday, July 8, 2004
02:59 - 3D! For God's sake, 3D! http://wwws.sun.com/software/looking_glass/index.html	(top)
Wow. Look at what Sun's doing. They're reinventing the desktop! Wooooo! They're making everything three-dimensional! It's called "Project Looking Glass", and it's.... well, look for yourself, I guess. It's an environment where your desktop is actually a 3D environment, where windows are objects that float in 3D space and can be arbitrarily moved around, rotated, and pushed back into perspective, with traditional window z-ordering transformed into actual 3D layout with arbitrary movability. Look at the demo video... and tell me that this is designed to solve any real user problems at all. I applaud the effort, but... I think this is a pretty clear case of "changing things because we can". Do users want to be able to flip a browser around in 3D space and jot a note on its back? Do users find themselves constrained by the inability to push a playing video off to the side of the screen, or to rotate several active windows around in 3D space so they can see them backwards? Does it help the user to be able to hear chirping birds if they've got their interactive 3D environment set to a bunch of flowers and trees? Further, is there anything here (that the audience is oohing and aahing at) that we haven't already seen before? Translucency�ooh, yay. Videos that play in the minimized icon�oohraw. Active application panels mapped onto oblique surfaces�ho hum. Cubic VR environments�uh huh. Flipping windows around to access stuff on the back�funny, people are already putting that one into play. No, none of this is new technology; though the guy presenting it, while projecting no charisma at all, evokes shock and awe from the developers in the audience, by simply pointing out that "the dominant company that provides the desktop doesn't want to show you" what he's showing you, that "innovation is possible on the desktop". This stuff might seem impressive to someone used to Windows XP, but to me it just looks weird. Look: I understand that this is just a technology demo and all; I grasp that it's all in Java and it's all open-source and everything, which is spiffy. But all this does, from a user-interface standpoint, is demonstrate that Sun really doesn't understand what UI design is all about. It's not about flashy effects for the sake of flashy effects. Really, it's not. UI design is about solving problems. It's about allowing people to access their data and applications in ways that are intuitive and simple�and extrapolating the computing experience into a VR universe, just because we now have the computing power to do it, makes about as much sense as 3D movies did. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you have to. Nor does it necessarily mean you should. The presenter says, "If you have a 3D environment, why wouldn't you use it to present all your applications?" Um, well, maybe because it's not necessarily better? Seriously, guys, more power to ya. I wish you luck. But this smacks of what happens when a bunch of UNIX geeks are finally coaxed away from telling everybody that the command line is the future of the world, and now want to spite everyone by showing off how much like a video game the computing experience can be, with all the zeal of the recently converted. It doesn't show any understanding of UI design philosophy�just a determination to one-up Microsoft without ever mentioning Apple. Via Dean Esmay.