Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 13th Nov 2007 16:32 UTC
The past few weeks, as you surely have noticed, I have written a few articles on various usability terms [part I | part II | part III | part IV | part V]. I explain what they mean, their origins, as well as their implications for graphical user interface design. Even though the series is far from over, I would like to offer a bit more insight into why I am diving into these subjects.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
1) Animated desktop where the desktop is aware of you moving windows around.
-- This goes back to around 1997 or about ten years ago. Someone had created a program for OS/2 that had no borders and looked to anyone that didn't know, as if it were the OS/2 desktop. It literally copied everything off the real desk top and passed any commands onto OS/2 and then display what happened. It was buggy and the programmer ran into walls on OS/2, mostly due to ignorance of how some system things worked.
It was pretty cool though. One of the "desktops" he had was a forest with a bear that would stay hidden until you stopped working on your computer for whatever sleep period you had assigned. Then it would pop out above, below, or between windows. If there wasn't any room to do this it would take its paw and move windows apart so it could peak through. Pretty cool. Of course when you activated any input device the bear would hide again.
Moving windows did cause a little bit of tree movement but not much. He also experimented with having windows that were used fade into the back ground using OpenGL.
At the time of all of this, graphic cards and programming and the guy just weren't up to what he really wanted to do. I accidentally bumped into him on a message board and tried out different things he did. Once he ran into the walls he couldn't figure out how to get past he lost all of his steam and disappeared and didn't respond to e-mails after that.
Again it was really buggy and slow.
2) Moving windows around and having you feel that you are moving them over each other.
I can't remember which mouse company that did this. But one came out with a mouse that you could "feel" when you went over the edge of a window or over specific icons. Not enough people found it useful so I think it just died too.