AI vs. UI? Which Way to Smarter Software?

In this month's Fortune magazine, Bill Gates is quoted as saying that he's finally on the verge of achieving a "digital workstyle." What he means by that, apparently, is two things:

1. He has an army of automated filters, vectors and human helpers whose job is to insure that he receives no more than about 100 emails per day.
2. He has a trio of big, interlinked screens on his desk, on which he runs email inbox, email compose, and a browser, side by side.

It seems churlish to note (but I'll note it, anyway) that Mac people have been able to do this sort of thing since about 1987 (Symbolics Workstation people even earlier, plus Symbolics ran LISP behind the paint application). That aside, what's significant about the insight into Gates' workstyle is that he's reiterating what "smart application" pioneers like Symbolics and Apple learned decades ago: that an awful lot of application complexity (and the need for a forced sort of 'cleverness' in application design) can be managed, ignored, or eliminated if you have enough room to move apps and documents around, view them simultaneously, interact with some of them peripherally (i.e., Gates keeps his inbox open so he can glance at it occasionally, not obsess over it), and assign transitory meaning to others by their physical position on the (virtualized) desktop. Microsoft is doing lots of research on this: their 'Touchlight' prototype, two-handed tabletop displays, etc., and the Flip 3D UI on Vista that (in lieu of infinite virtual desktop in the horizontal dimension, lets you inflect the "depth" of windows in a virtual 3D space — it's quite astonishing to see, and I'm eager to learn if it really enhances usability). In other respects, Vista is doing a lot of subtle things with UI that reclaim desktop real estate, including implementation of transparent overlay controls.

This is pretty cool stuff.

Posted by John Jainschigg at 11:09 AM  Permalink

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