tim Rowledge wrote:
And none of it stops me thinking that is a bad idea to photophysically emulate a bad way of working.
I wish someone would tell that to every organisation that attempts to chain it's employees to desks for 8 hours+ a day :-)
Back to the video, it is some months old now and I think all the criticisms that could be made have been. Still, on a superficial level it is excellent eye candy and I for one don't understand the general aversion of the Squeak community to eye candy. Image sells and that's a fact... and I think Squeak/Smalltalk could have done with some eye-candy style interfaces and marketing. It could also be argued that EToys is eye candy?
Regarding 3D, for a long time I believed that 3D was the future but eventually came to the conclusion that 2.5D is more suitable in most cases and this is an prime example. I agree it has flaws but I think it should be viewed as possibly appropriate for working at a particular level, eg, with a small subset of documents/data. Plus it presents an immediately familiar metaphor that almost anyone can relate to. I lost faith in full blown 3D metaphors because the examples I have seen overwhelm the user and/or abstract away any common meaning. A good metric for future interfaces is: do they even need explaining, let alone an operators manual (yuuuuk!).
...or should I just say: I like it!