Re: Article about "The Post-OOP Paradigm"
I think that it is important to not generalize about the way "the human mind" thinks.... Hence, some people think verbally, in terms of words; other people think visually, in terms of pictures.
I agree.
The CLI vs. GUI dichotomy that seems so prevalent in discussions like these... Then, I read a couple of weeks/months ago a paper on an exciting new UI paradigm - command-line assisted GUI's. The paper went on describing exactly the kind of interface that Emacs and VI people have come to love.
Fast input vs. Fast understanding I guess.
(am I the only one here using pie menus?)
I believe the Alias/Wavefront's Maya 3D modeling/rendering package uses them extensively now.
Marco Paga says -Computer langauges went from machine code to OOP. -GUI's went from text-based to 2D.
The problem is that computer languages have not yet gone from OOP text-based to 2D.
2D engages more cognitive information processing, information chunking, and information juxtaposition.
Class object browsers give language a 2D illusion but not beyond the method level.
Debug call stacks give languages a 2D illusion but not beyond the statement level.
UML give languages more of a 2D representation, but not beyond the method level.
Traits goes to the expression level, but doesnt juxtapose all related meaningful data together.
Time & space seem to be the enemy of the user interface. If you have infinite amount of ether, you dont have to make clever shortcuts.
Because of occlusion, 3D is best used for simulations and/or presenting information in a narrative format. It takes time when you have to move things in & out of the view pane (while walking lets say). The irony of a 3D GUI is that you only have one camera, one perspective, one focal point, just like the movies. That forces a linear travel through the 3D space. (Some exceptions to this are tools which have multiple view panes are CAD software, 3D modeling software, and the (unremarkable) movie Timecode.) Movies use techniques to convey more information from 3D into 2D through cut scenes, head shots, perspective, façades, etc. Remember, most movie/TV views or shots are only about 10 seconds in duration before you get an entirely new well planned view into that 3D world of information. They also use techniques such as color, illumination, depth of field, sweaping pan shots, and motion to direct our attention within the one scene to convey the extra information. They do this to compress a lot of mentally imagined object space into a sliver of time. 3D GUIs dont do any of that yet.
"Envisioning Information", "Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative", and "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information " by Edward R. Tufte are the seminal works on the subject.
Cheers, Darius