(Sorry, posted with wrong subject line before.)

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 doesn’t 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 don’t 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 various 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 and to convey the extra 
information. They do this to compress a lot of “mentally imagined object” space 
into a sliver of time. 3D GUI’s don’t 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