Computer Graphic-ishness
A Perfect Mess
I visited the Apple Store yesterday to try out an iPhone. As I have finally figured out how to do my email, shared-calendaring, address-book, etc. from my regular phone, I really had no intent of going out to purchase one. Peer pressure is a powerful thing, and hasn’t played its hand yet in this journey.
While in Shanghai recently, I had that awkward feeling one has when you’re not able to communicate in the native local tongue. Luckily my hotel bellman would slip me one of these cards as you entered the taxi. It was easy as pointing to where I wanted to go (from the limited set of choices), and I would magically be transported there. Sort of like having a touchscreen where you click on the choice you wish to make as on the iPhone. And much like the difficulty in typing on an iPhone keyboard, the taxi driver would stumble a bit figuring out which destination I was really pointing at.
The introduction of the phrase in the 80s of “point and click” was a radical idea with the mass adoption of the computer mouse. I remember that crazy feeling of being able to indirectly move the cursor around with the mouse in a time when mice were just beginning to roam the planet. Until then, all you could do is roughly move the cursor around with your keyboard — some of us were lucky to have a lightpen or otherwise technical oddity which was always rare. Now with touchscreens and other surface-based computing systems, to point has real meaning and zero levels of indirection.
One could say that the power of indirection, or an otherwise abstraction, is something powerful and necessary to all higher level thought. I guess that will be my ongoing philosophical excuse for not going out to get an iPhone. “The phone for the rest of us,” except for me.
3 Responses to “My Paper iPhone”
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Definitely, I think that point-and-click can transcend many interfaces and it is clear that the makers of the Wii have understood this principle completely.
Point and click is nice for simple systems, but it’s also quite limiting, as are many interfaces inspired by physical systems. They’re limiting because they also bring all the limitations of those physical systems.
Consider folders for example. A file can be in one folder. This is a physical limitation. In the computer though there’s no particular reason to impose this limitation. We impose it because folders are simple and familiar, but sometimes the simplicity of the organization system results in added complexity of using the interface. We build multiple interfaces on top of folders to deal with the limitations of folders: search, virtual folders, tagging, etc. Would it not be simpler to have one simple abstraction that can handle these needs?
Point and click and drag tends to work well when you have a small number of items you want to work with, but it becomes unwieldy with a large number of items. Babies speak with points and grunts and cries. As adults we use language instead. It’s simpler to communicate most things with language than to express the same thing with pointing and grunting. Command line interfaces are overkill for a small number of items, but they are nice when working with lots of items, or when working with more complex linguistic constructs, such as conditionals, past/future, and hypothetical statements. Try expressing, “next wednesday, if it’s raining, bring me a sandwich.” Sometimes a more complex interface (e.g., language) can lead to easier communication, but it does require some investment to learn.
The iPhone does look nice though.
Yes it’s hard to scale the whole pointing paradigm. It’s great for the simple things.
I had a student once that developed a system for selecting a bunch of things using a flashlight metaphor. By attenuating the intensity and spread of the light, it would select multiple objects in the flashlight’s focus.
Another of my favorite advanced selection paradigms are regular expressions. I’ve always thought that if there could be a visual language for regular expressions, that we’d really be in a different place on the computer.
Jeff Han’s done a nice job of building a kind of “grammar” for interacting with multiple objects on screen with his multi-touch work. Perhaps we are close to a more powerful means to pointing that even transcends the logic of our own two hands?