Discussion
This video from Eric Morrison poking fun at "highly agentic bros" and their sweet inference wrappers was very funny. Of course the angle here is "sign up for my discord, buy my course and I'll show you how to set it up"
Even in a demo however the future feels a little thin.
This video made me realize something, though...
@futurebird I will say modern laptop touchpad gestures are actually pretty nice to use, though they're still very much touchpads at the end of the day. Being able to scroll and drag things by just adding a second finger is so much nicer than the old "slide your finger up the right-hand side and hope it registers it as a scroll" design. Abstract 3d gestures though? Yeah no. Unless it's literally a VR game using it as a fun mechanic, there is zero reason for those when we have proper physical controllers.
And yeah, the fancy visualizations that look like someone just discovered emissive textures and wants to use them for everything? Those are awful if they're actually used like they're intending to convey information.
Gestures were an under appreciated feature of the NeXT UI. The current app’s menu floated and was vertical. This meant that you could also tear off submenus and have them as floating pallets. But you could also summon an ephemeral version of the menu with a right click. Hold the right button and move it to submenus and release would invoke a submenu action. The menus were arranged with common operations at the top and app-specific ones at the bottom. This meant that the location and the path to things like open, save, copy, paste, and so on was fixed across apps. You could quickly learn muscle memory for these operations if you had a hand on the mouse. Importantly, you also had visual feedback if you were getting it slightly wrong and could slow down and correct it, unlike most mouse-gesture systems.
@david_chisnall @becomethewaifu @futurebird
The right-click behavior you're describing for NeXT was pretty common by about 1992, as were common menu actions. There were of course still inconsistencies (where are settings? what's the diff between settings & configuration? etc), but by mid-90s, CUA had inspired enough consistency that I was able to teach my intro to tech students at a small college to look for those parallels in new applications.
That's degraded someone in years since.
Install bonfire.cafe
Get the full app experience
My standards for "good UI" and "impressive software" are possibly unhealthy high.
Like I forget that people can be impressed by ... image recognition or the human suffering that is gesture based interfaces.
Gotta have those "space style" data visualizations that no one ever really used for anything important.