4 hours ago, Isaiah said:My issue here is not with the ideas themselves as much as Ross' contradictory positions pertaining to these ideas when criticizing the Windows GUI.
No, I think you're misunderstanding me. Ideally, I want accuracy to barely matter. Take that pie menu I demonstrated. Say I want the upper left, so I flick the mouse that direction. Maybe I flick it 10% of the screen, maybe I flick it 60%. Ideally, it won't matter. It detects I moved it to the upper left, so it draws a new menu where I am (or returns me to the center automatically). In other words, the GUI adapts to my movement and intentions, not the other way around. I don't see what's contradictory about this. When you press most buttons or a D-PAD in a videogame, does it matter EXACTLY how hard you pressed it, or just that you pressed it? It's a similar concept.
This is also why I got excited about mouse gestures. It opens up a wide world of possibilities where accuracy isn't important. I think you see what I said as contradictory, because you're looking at this in terms of hitting a target of a certain size across a certain distance. I'm talking about the potential of targets where distance and size are irrelevant. In other words, Fitt's law doesn't even apply for that kind of manipulation. It transcends it! Seeing how that concept isn't even USED in most modern GUIs is why I think it's woefully underdeveloped. I see that as a huge potential breakthrough. I would compare to the early days of FPSs, where keyboard aiming was dominant. The mouse rapidly displaced that because it was SO MUCH BETTER. I see that kind of potential in where we are now with GUI concepts. In my eyes, it's like we never left keyboard aiming, just made lots of refinements.
Now for more conventional GUI menus where that's simply not an option, I want what's fastest and feels best. That's where that Fitt's law thing people are talking about come into play. Tiny targets take longer to hit. Targets far away take longer to hit. You want everything semi-big and close-by, which is probably why I thought of that pie menu system. Truth be told, the Fitt's law thing I was never even thinking of consciously (nor aware of when I made the video), it was totally a subconscious understanding on my part.
2 hours ago, Collapsar77 said:I feel like it's a bit much to go after him for throwing out ideas that are at cross purposes, given that his thesis was essentially: "I know this is inefficient, and I need help figuring out what a more efficient GUI would look like". It's sort of like complaining that ideas in a brainstorming session don't all fit together. Pretty sure that if he knew what he wanted exactly, he wouldn't ask.
Yes, I think you get it. This video is essentially:
"what are the answers?"
"What are better ways of doing things than we have now?"
"I can imagine MANY different possibilities, but I haven't seen much information on this to know what's best, hopefully someone out there has all kinds of ideas on this, but hasn't had much of an outlet"
and I tried to show a FEW efficiency shortcomings as proof that what we have now is indeed, not the penultimate in GUI design. Instead, a bit many comments seemed focused on me not providing solutions. From my perspective, it's a little insane that's on my shoulders to begin with, but I plan to slowly figure out something for myself in the absence of other ideas. I'll detail what I plan to have / what I think could be better in a followup later on, but it's a little disappointing seeing how narrow the range of ideas have been.
"Criticizing a brainstorming session" is exactly how some of the commentary comes across, however, I was inflammatory in the video, so I expected a certain amount of that.