There's a new cool pen-centric GUI out there called Bumptop. I just learned about it half an hour ago and it reminds me of Glasstop, my BI centric 'surface computing' multitouch metaphor.
But here's the real kicker. The more I think about Glasstop and reread it, the more I think about the possible conversion of computing to manual labor metaphors. Here's the short version of the thought. When the Wii came out, a bunch of people thought it would be a good idea to transform all of the gaming metaphor to that. I said no way. I now have a Wii and I don't like it but primarily because I haven't bothered getting a grownup game on it. But the real objection I had was that I like games that exercise fine motor control. There's something about a driving game or a first person shooter that allows me to be very precise with my thumbs and I like that. And of course if you talk to any PC gamer about consoles the first thing they will tell you is that there's no way they can exercise as much control over their avatars with their thumbs as with the combination of mouse and keyboard.
But most of this is, when you think about it, a very small subset of what hands can be trained to do. Which is why I think about assembly line workers and musicians when I think about the future of computer GUIs. If and when we perfect some fine and large and quick motion capture for the hands - which I think will happen first with multitouch and multitouch plus pens, we are going to really revolutionize the kinds of things we can do, thinking more like musicians do in dealing with data.
For me it's about dealing with data, with diving through and manipulating huge datasets finding patterns, sorting, simulating, issuing commands, putting together sparse pieces of information from a broad selection. It's what I do now, but with very simple typewriter & television metaphors in browsers, spreadsheets and query tools.
While I'm speculating about the future let me pull in one more idea which is something somebody said today about the problem with Google and generalized search. They keep trying to contextualize free text, and it simply is not going to work in the long run. In the end, we really want to be spoon fed by experts. Please keep that in mind. Google is a giant leap forward, but it's free for a reason. It can be. But debriefing a CIA agent will always be expensive and exclusive for the same reason sitting in a classroom with a real professor is more expensive than just getting the syllabus and the books. A lot of the computer assisted stuff is going to be free.
Search is commodity. Human structured data in KM domains with specific UIs is the high end future. Ask Bloomberg.
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