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From: cory@gloom.UUCP (Cory Kempf)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.misc,comp.sys.next,comp.sys.mac,comp.cog-eng
Subject: One Step... (part 2)
Message-ID: <264@gloom.UUCP>
Date: 27 Dec 88 18:34:55 GMT
Reply-To: cory@gloom.UUCP (Cory Kempf)
Organization: Alloy Computer Products, Framingham Mass.
Lines: 57

The other article that I wrote gave a nice discription of how I
envision the next generation of userinterfaces to work.  It was a nice
fluffy type article, but it was a bit long.  This one should be much
shorter.  

Like I said in the last one, I have not yet seen the article on Rooms
(I am going to look it up 'Real Soon Now!'.  But first, I wanted to
throw another $2.00 into the pot (inflation you know).  

There have been a lot of interesting points that have been raised
since my forst post on the idea of a new interface design... I wanted
to answer them from the perspective of the design that I proposed
(mostly in the hopes that someone will either impliment it or give me
the bucks to (fat chance].  

On the subject of teleportation, of course there would be macro's to
get you from point 'A' to point 'B' without going the long way... to
the point that you would never have to go know just where you were
going through to get to commen points.  

On security, user verification is still necessary, although it can 
be implemented in a much better fashion (I hope) than the old password 
scheme.  One idea that I like is to have the system give you a phrase, 
and you speak it (or possibly complete it) out loud.  The computer would 
then identify you based on that (A bit harder to fake I hope!).  

On control of resources, what would you normally do?  You would call
up the Master Control Pannel, and kill that person's access/usage/etc.
The result is that the owner of the resources have more privileges
than other users do.  

Filesystems (networked).  Some people have commented that they would
like to see the filesystems made transparant... Thats OK for a LAN, 
but when you start to think in terms of WANs (like Banyan for example), 
I think that the problem will soon break down... either you need to
have a map in your head of a large portion of the filetree (like a lot
of us have with unix already) or something new needs to come about.  I
have seen some hardware designed to work on mini's that has broken the
TeraByte barrier... what's going to happen in 20 years?  How many
levels deep is the tree going to get?

On the need for the metaphor.  I see the idea of a metaphor'd GUI as
having the same relationship to csh as {C,Pascal,Fortran, etc) does to
assembler... yea, you can do it in assembler, but why?  Compare
programming in Hypercard with writing a program to do the same thing.
Ya, the program will run faster than the stack, but to write the
program, you need to know a lot of other things.  Also, it will take
longer to write.  To create the stack will take MUCH less time, and
will be more flexable.  People who don't want to spend the time
writing an C program are creating stacks to do the same things.

+C

-- 
Cory ( "...Love is like Oxygen..." ) Kempf
UUCP: encore.com!gloom!cory
	"...it's a mistake in the making."	-KT