UI thoughts

Being of a certain age, I have witnessed a progression of UI's: real paper, 80x24 terminals, WIMPs, and now, the web (a backward step as a UI, IMO).

At each stage, I saw resistence:

• Paper users treated the IBM XTs with Lotus 123a that landed on their desks as just more Spawn of Management, and ignored (or sabotaged) them as long as they could get away with it.
• DOS users took perverse pleasure in running one application at a time fullscreen in early versions of Windows. The idea of doing multiple things simultaneously was just more Spawn of Management.

WIMPs eventually won, and are with us yet. But what comes next? And how will it be resisted?

What WIMPs and the web don't do well is enable socialisation. True, there are blogs and IM and video conferencing and allsorts of other new methods of communicating; but more satisfying than them all is - well, some examples will make the case better than a bland statement:

Which is the more satisfying action:

• telling that annoying person spamming your IRC channel to FOAD, or
• fragging them into gory chunks?

Who feels more real to you:

• the barely lip-synced floating head of your boss in NetMeeting. or
• your companion avatars in a MMORPG?
  

OpenCroquet is one possible pointer to some of the features the next UI might have. There are valid criticisms of the paradigm; e.g. working on text-based objects in such an environment is awkward; but they generally miss the point.

{to be continued}