[Cuis] Fixing the Taskbar

[Casey Ransberger]

Some good thoughts. Thanks for your thoughtful reply, Ken. I particularly liked your AR/VR/Croquet comment; I think this stuff will really take off as soon as someone comes up with a headset that doesn't make one look hopelessly silly!

Iconic representation of "task" (or really, "activity," task is so age-of-productivity and we're quite over that for the most part I think) to my mind is still of value. The hard part is to decide when to use an iconic symbol and when to use zooming. Obviously if having zoomed out, one can't make sense of the zoomed-out thing by looking it, the zooming strategy has failed. Beyond that, it's hard to think about, because I've never used a zooming interface before. I'm stuck on the pink plane and I haven't got many blue ideas. 

I think the dock/taskbar idea is too wrapped up in "apps." Which to me are mostly an unwanted form of constrictive modality. It bums me out that the world seems to be moving into more modality when less (and instead more interoperability between computing activities) is so much more of an amplifier. 

I've reached out for interesting research in this department, because there are probably people who've thought about the problem a lot more than I have. We'll see if science bites. I love fishing for science. We'll see if I find anything fantastic.

On Oct 31, 2013, at 7:43 AM, Ken Dickey <Ken.Dickey at whidbey.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 30 Oct 2013 04:39:16 -0700
> Casey Ransberger <casey.obrien.r at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> This is something I've meant to address for a couple of years. Unfortunately my life has not been conducive to much volunteer work. 
>> 
>> I have a project on my disk with a rather noble aim: to make the Taskbar not suck anymore without adding a single new class to the system. I think it's doable but I haven't had time to tack the work. 
>> 
>> I have some ideas about how to do this, but there are some interesting questions... 
>> 
>> If we want to throw out most of the idea of "application modality," and still keep a system that's both usable in essence and familiar to newcomers, what might that look like?
> 
> Stepping back a bit, a user interface in general is about visibility and control.  The fundamental questions are; Where am I? What can I do here?
> 
> Thinking about scalable user interfaces I think about what I would want to be with me in a 2.5d to 3d (Croquet, the (sur)real world with me and "an electronic device" with Cuis).
> 
> Basically, I want to be able to "carry things with me in my pocket" as I traverse scales, landscapes, worlds, whatever.  I want map and compass and a weather report, basic communications, my swiss army knife (Cuis). 
> 
> In a scalable UI, this pocket (dock/taskbar) could be a place where the visible objects I want to remember and have with me are in the same scale and access location.  So I think of morphs (which could be windows, movies, worlds) just scaled to fit into a taskbar.  Live icons if you will.  In the Taskbar, the "iconized window" is just the full window scaled to fit rather than just a thumbnail.
> 
> We have the World menu, which is great for things which organize linguistically (cognitive structure based on concept hierarchies).
> 
> I think the Taskbar should be like this for the visual cognitive realm.
> 
> How do I visually distinguish scaled down things which look similar?  The Mac dock comes to mind, just enlarge slightly the image under the cursor.  How do I group things?  Squeak's world thumbnails come to mind.  How do I find things?  ...
> 
> 
> Just some ideas to play with..
> -KenD
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Cuis mailing list
> Cuis at jvuletich.org
> http://jvuletich.org/mailman/listinfo/cuis_jvuletich.org