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by azinman2
715 days ago
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I’m not sure how this puts things now to shame. Yes it’s very playful and neat, but it’s wildly impractical. It doesn’t really “do” anything by itself. Instead you’ve to build up all interactions, most of which are physical, and know how to do so. And what’s the result? Some spring interactions and markers on a bitmap? Compare this to how the web or apps are used today. They’re task/purpose driven, and all of the UX has already been thought out. It’s a far more simple and straightforward approach to build the functionality you want which you refine over time than to give a blank canvas that does everything and nothing and tell people to go figure it out themselves. It seems to me this is really just wanting to take the underpinnings of small talk and turn it into a physical UI representation. That’s fun… but now what? I’m zero percent surprised this hasn’t lasted. |
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I couldn't disagree more strongly. Part of the vision in PARC (and Alan Kay's life work) was to create learning environments for children, and this demo is set in that realm, so having kids figure it out themselves is enormously empowering. Obviously not what you want if you're trying to sell widgets, but the widget-sellers themselves could benefit from this kind of environment to develop a usable widget-buying experience.
> The UX has already been thought out ... [and] ... refine[d] over time.
In such an impoverished way, in my experience. One of the things Alan Kay has said (elsewhere) is that the environment at PARC allowed them to experiment with radically different user interfaces in the afternoon, after thinking about it at lunch. This implies an in-depth knowledge of the tools, yes, but developers need that in any environment. I'm doing volunteer work now and having to learn to use several software systems (EventBrite, MailChimp, Salesforce). The difficulty of using these systems is in range for me as a retired software engineer, (although endlessly annoying), but other volunteers need extensive training. There's is nothing 'refined' about them, in terms of ease-of-use to the end users. The current tools for developing the interfaces (HTML, CSS, SQL, Javascript, etc.) are also primitive compared to the environment shown here. Again, it's a lengthy task to become a power use of the system demo-ed here, but no more so than to become a power use of the 10 or more technologies you need to learn to make a modern web site.
As a web site developer, with these kinds of tools, you'd develop your own tools and abstractions (an intermediate layer) to build with, none of which would appear anything like the physical world manipulation tools that have been built here.