The user interface and how a we WORK with the computer

Working with the current graphical interfaces is a way to strangle your imagination. We have to memorize positions of applications, use single point of focus, etc.
I've just found out about an initiative in this area. It is the continuum. Please go to http://10gui.com/video/ and see the video demostration. The ideea is realy nice. It's an evolution. Considering the folowing the iPhone interface draw it looks like this could have some success.

On the other hand I think that this is ok for small screen spaces.
It is also a nice aproach for a casual user the needs only 2-3 applications to work with.

What about the heavy duty area of the computer usage?
My backgound is in graphics, page layout and some sort of software development. For those areas such lite aproaches are ... well ... limited. Right now I'm working at a graphical interface for a vector application. I'm using a dual screen system. Sounds good but let me tell you that dual screen is stil limited. I have a screen to look at the code and a text editor with to do actions that have to be writen as I discover anything that has to be adjusted. The other screen shares an instance of the actual interface I'm working on, the web browser, an icon editor and for now that's all . If I look deeper I can also consider that the browser also has at least 10 tabs opened permanently. That makes for a very clutered screen space don't you think?

What can I do? Moving windows left and right is no better than tabbing throu the overlaped windows. A better aproach will be to increase the screen space and/or try to guess what the user want's to do at a specific moment. The second aproach sounds interesting but I can think about some situation when no system will be able to discern what I need from it.

So, we have to go back to the screen real estate we own. Some time I use two or three computers simultaneously and share the same keyboard and mouse using a very nice tool named synergy. That makes for a really interesting work station but also for a lot of noise and I hate noise.

Anyway the ideea of multiple screens and even complementing this with at least one more syncronized system is much more practcal for a heavy duty production station.

Improved reading

The following lines are in fact a reply to a forum post that tried to convince me that we can read the same on a device as our ancestor have done than on stones. As a reply I tried to image a few directions we can take in order to improve the way we communicate written information.

"Does there have to be a better way to read, besides scrolling and turning pages?"
If you consider reading just a repetitive action of understanding letters the current way of doing thing is OK.
If you consider reading as a method of acquiring information then the old fashion way has a lot of drawbacks.

Aren't you bored by the fact that after 7k years of evolution and 50 years of computer technology around we still read the same?

We have to change. Why do you use the airplane today when the horse was so good yesterday? Because is better.
Be sure that in 10 minutes we can find together better ways of doing things.

Think for a moment at the times when you open a book in order to learn something. At that moment you don't just read the characters. You have to link the ideas the you acquire with information coming from other sources. Compare things, check notes or supplementary materials, theorems, videos, etc. It's simply impossible to put everything in the space of a page and still keep it simple to navigate. And I'm not speaking here about small screens ... it's hard to do a good placement on a full page. I've done this for more than 20 years for newspapers, magazines and all kind of books. Believe me it's a hell to have good information architecture on a simple polygon of a given size and with a fixed amount of letters.

I am definitely not thinking at eye ball tracking. It is just about information architecture and marrying that with the capabilities of the support that now is dynamic not just a simple stone or sheet of paper.

My grandfather had to consider limiting the number of pages for economic reasons. On a display you don't have any limitation on size. And I'm speaking about any size (font, row, number of colors, etc).

Wouldn't be better if, for example, we will rethink the book so that we read not one page at a time but one phrase having around all the information related to it. It will be easier to have just a phrase on screen and all related info at hand than a page filed with side boxes, end notes, footnotes, headings, etc. I'm not saying that this is the way to go ... it is just an example of rethinking the book.

Now let's look at another aspect.
We all know how much the readability depends on the length of the row and the number of characters per row. The number of words on a row will influence also how easy it is to understand the idea.
What if we will adapt the layout to the current phrase.

Some ideas are hard to layout in a page and still transmit the importance of the fragment. We tend to extract them and place a duplicate as a side box or something similar. What if we will think the book as something dynamic not by placing a video betwen lines but having those lines adapt to their importance. Good design implies using a small number of font variations but if change helps in the process of communicating the idea be sure that every designer will understand.

It is not change for the sake of change. And we are not speaking about technology but about reading and information.
The name of the game is improvement and we have to improve the way we read (or the way we prepare information for reading).