Dynabooks

Looking at the history of todays interface paradigms. And the future. ----------------------------------------------------- [email protected]

[jumbomodena]

Zooms From Nowhere

[p-dpa]

An instant classic added to the archive: Elektrobiblioteka by Waldek Węgrzyn (2012) +  interview with the author by Francesca Coluzzi.

[prostheticknowledge]

Eagle Mode

Desktop interface plugin developed from 2011 by Oliver Hamann has a file management system which requires zooming in and out the folders you wish to access - video embedded below:

Eagle Mode is an advanced solution for a futuristic style of man-machine communication in which the user can visit almost everything simply by zooming in. It has a professional file manager, file viewers and players for most of the common file types, a chess game, a 3D mines game, a netwalk game, a multi-function clock and some fractal fun, all integrated in a virtual cosmos. Besides, that cosmos also provides a Linux kernel configurator in form of a kernel patch.

By featuring a separate popup-zoomed control view, help texts in the things they are describing, editable bookmarks, multiple input methods, fast anti-aliased graphics, a virtually unlimited depth of panel tree, and by its portable C++ API, Eagle Mode aims to be a cutting edge of zoomable user interfaces.

Eagle Mode is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 3.

There are versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux (and possibly one for Android too).

You can find out more at the project’s website here

[dynabooks]

〰 ZUI (zooming user interface) example.

[dynabooks]

〰 Ivan Sutherland, Sword of Damocles rare footage, late 1960ies

[prostheticknowledge]

The Nexus Browser

Jim Boulton of Digital Archeology demonstrates the first web browser on the system it was developed on, the NeXT Cube:

Tim Berners-Lee made the first website, and the first web browser, on a NeXT Cube running the now obsolete NeXTSTEP Operating System. As a result, very few people have seen the first website in its true environment.

The first web browser, called WorldWideWeb and later renamed Nexus, was a browser-

editor. It could be used to create pages as well as browse them. Not only that, it allowed user-centric and document-centric browsing.

Usually technology dates very quickly but though twenty-five years old, the NeXT computer and its operating system have aged well. In fact, the GUI looks very similar to modern desktops. In particular, the dock on the right hand side looks very familiar and this is not a coincidence. When Steve Jobs left Apple and set-up NeXT, he took a few key employees with him, one of whom was Susan Kare, who designed the Apple Macintosh GUI. When Apple bought NeXT, one of the key assets they bought was the NeXTStep O/S, which formed the basis of Mac OS X.

You can find out more at Digital Archeology here

[dynabooks]

〰 Showing menu and artwork of and made with Richard Shoup's SuperPaint (1973) which is the father/mother of the Photoshops and After Effects' of todays media landscape.

〰 The second image is actually a still from an animation made for TV in the late 70ies using the SuperPaint system.

"Eventually, the menu evolved to look like this.  Functions included Paint, Move, Copy, Store, Load, Video In, Text, Lines, Gridding, Fill, Shrink 2x, Expand 2x, and various forms of color table animation.  The various brush shapes are displayed at the bottom, and the color sliders at the top."

  http://www.rgshoup.com/prof/SuperPaint/

[prostheticknowledge]

The Sword of Damocles

Early pioneering tech from 1968 is a stereoscopic headmounted display created by Ivan Sutherland, the first Virtual Reality technology:

Computer graphics pioneer Ivan Sutherland models a stereoscopic display he created at Harvard using miniature TV tubes. An early application showed a three-dimensional wire-frame virtual room that users could explore by moving their heads.

I couldn’t locate a demonstration of the wireframe rooms (but if anyone knows … let me know!)

Images above are from the Computer History Museum here and here

Papers written by Ivan Sutherland from 1965 on the subject can be found here and here

[dynabooks]

"Mobile is dead."

〰 Interview with Matias Duarte, main honcho responsible for Web OS back then and Android nowadays.

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〰 The iPad in 1972. Interesting read.

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〰 Alan Kay interview, 2013

http://techland.time.com/2013/04/02/an-interview-with-computing-pioneer-alan-kay/

"The interesting thing about this question is that it is quite clear from the several early papers that it was an ancillary point for the Dynabook to be able to simulate all existing media in an editable/authorable form in a highly portable networked (including wireless) form. The main point was for it to be able to qualitatively extend the notions of “reading, writing, sharing, publishing, etc. of ideas” literacy to include the “computer reading, writing, sharing, publishing of ideas” that is the computer’s special province.

For all media, the original intent was “symmetric authoring and consuming”.

[dynabooks]

GRaiL from the 60ies.

〰 The pen based text input system that might have caused the first wave of mobile computing (PenPoint OS, Newton) to be almost unusable.

〰 Steve Jobs' aversion towards the stylus as text input method is based in this too, I think. Try to use a Newton where you have to use a stylus to write. Its frustrating how the OCR system gets you wrong all the time.

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〰 And the short version as music clip.

[dynabooks]

Alan Kay: Doing with images makes symbols, 1987

〰 A bit lengthy, but very interesting. Listing (and showing) all the important interface projects that led to the Desktop GUI as we know it.

〰 Alan Kay was one of the guys who did work out the Desktop GUI while at Xerox PARC.

[e-erik]

The way in which [the internet] will dissolve boundaries is by making us transparent. To each other. I mean, I can imagine a child of the future, we all bring home our drawings to stick on refrigerators, and things like that—in the future we won’t stick them on refrigerators, we will stick them in our website. And everything will go into our website. And by the time we’re 25, or something, our website will be the size of the American Museum of Natural History. And you can wander through it. And as a gesture of intimacy you can invite someone else to wander through it. Well that’s who you are—it’s your imagination. And, I think, in a sense, I’ve said, at times, that: The cultural enterprise is an effort to turn ourselves inside out. We want to put the body into the imagination, and we want the imagination to replace the laws of physics. With these technologies we can probably do that. But it’ll have to run on psychedelic design principles, or it’s certain to be a mess.

Terence McKenna, ~1995 (via yumyab)