[HN Gopher] Past and Present Futures of User Interface Design
___________________________________________________________________
Past and Present Futures of User Interface Design
Author : sedboyz
Score : 199 points
Date : 2025-03-17 23:35 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.datagubbe.se)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.datagubbe.se)
| tony-allan wrote:
| I know that most developers prefer keyboard shortcuts when
| developing software but I prefer using the mouse mostly because I
| cannot remember all of the shortcuts in a range of different
| environments.
|
| Given my preference it would be interesting to explore a more
| tactile interface. - a series of physical knobs
| to skip back and forward by function, variable reference, etc
| - a separate touch screen with haptic feedback for common
| functions and jump to predefined functions in my code - a
| macro-pad with real buttons to do the above
|
| Other thoughts
|
| When watching videos physical buttons and knobs would be good. I
| know professional video and audio engineers already use these
| technologies but i've never tried them myself.
| lolinder wrote:
| > I prefer using the mouse mostly because I cannot remember all
| of the shortcuts in a range of different environments.
|
| This is why one of the greatest changes in power user tooling
| in recent years is the "find anywhere" hotkey, which is now
| available almost everywhere.
|
| Mouse interaction is slow and hardly a panacea for finding
| features buried in menus. "Find anywhere" type interactions
| with fuzzy search allow you to use they keyboard and highly
| mnemonic abbreviations to turn up what you're looking for. With
| a few exceptions, I tend to lean on them even for things that I
| use regularly, because it's easier to learn which few
| keystrokes will turn up the option I'm looking for than it is
| to rebind a fresh hotkey in each environment or, as you say,
| memorize the built-in one.
| skydhash wrote:
| > _one of the greatest changes in power user tooling in
| recent years_
|
| Alt+x in Emacs was here for ages. Even the command prompt in
| vim follows the same pattern. And while it's useful, I still
| prefers to bind commonly use commands to keybinding,
| especially if there can be prefix.
| lolinder wrote:
| There's a reason I didn't say "innovation"--I knew that
| people would immediately point out it's been around
| forever. What's new is that it's in mainstream tooling.
| RossBencina wrote:
| > "find anywhere" hotkey, which is now available almost
| everywhere
|
| Almost everywhere? I'd love to see a list of other examples.
|
| The only place I can name is the vscode Ctrl-Shift-P thing,
| and in that case it's a wholesale replacement for an
| explorable/discoverable UI (i.e. traditional menu bar).
|
| Sure there are search boxes in other places, but usually
| that's literally for finding things, not for performing
| application domain commands/actions/manipulations, which is
| what I understood the parent to be describing.
| fifticon wrote:
| I wish the 'find anywhere' instead expanded and highlighted
| the correct place of that command in the menu. In that way,
| it would teach me gradually a mental map of the shape and set
| of commands I have available, ie I imagine it would let me
| notice 'neighbour commands'. I realise this is not the most
| efficient way to do this, but it would be 'incremental on the
| job learning'.
| csb6 wrote:
| macOS does this when searching for a command in the Help
| menu - it will open up the context menu and highlight the
| place where the command is so you know where it is next
| time.
| vincnetas wrote:
| Fun anectada. Was launching Remote desktop app which was
| unsurprisingly called:
|
| "Microsoft Remote Desktop"
|
| by just typing "Remo" in to a spotlight. Then one day it
| stoped working. I thought i was going crazy, because i dont
| remember that i uninstalled it. Spotlight was returning no
| results. Then i found out that someone at microsoft thought
| that it was a great idea to rename the app to ...
|
| "Windows App".
|
| What the hell were they smoking?
| zombot wrote:
| And what is the "find anywhere" hotkey that works everywhere?
| swah wrote:
| OP is talking about the "Cmd + P" aka "Run command"
| command. Ideally it should list the shortcuts of the
| commands you run so next time you can do that directly.
| lolinder wrote:
| The MacOS-wide equivalent is Cmd+Shift+/, which searches
| all menu items. KDE has a similar idea built into the
| global menu.
| swah wrote:
| If OSes were optimized like RTS games, maybe the mouse could
| be plenty fast. Something like https://charmstone.app/ but
| for many actions.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| I use the mouse a lot, even for (typing) coding.
|
| I'm pretty "fluent" with navigation shortcuts, things like
| Ctrl/Alt/Shift combined with arrow keys, PgUp/PgDn/Home/End
| etc. and I do use them extensively. And yeah, constantly
| switching between the keyboard and mouse with my right hand is
| a bit annoying.
|
| But still, in many cases, using the mouse is just faster. For
| example, jumping to a specific position in a source code file,
| scrolling and clicking gets me there much quicker than
| navigating with the keyboard alone.
|
| (This is also one thing I _really_ hate about using terminals:
| you can 't just click to move the cursor quickly! Editing part
| of a long string without spaces is a pain in the ass, and it's
| something I have to do surprisingly often.)
|
| When it comes to shortcuts, I prefer one- or two-key
| combinations whenever possible. Three-key shortcuts, however,
| depend on their layout: many just aren't that convenient.
| Sometimes I'll just click through the menu manually, even if I
| know the shortcut.
| snide wrote:
| > For example, jumping to a specific position in a source
| code file, scrolling and clicking gets me there much quicker
| than navigating with the keyboard alone
|
| I say this with the intention of providing context, not to
| say the way you do things is bad. It's all user preference in
| the end and there is no wrong way.
|
| Lots of folks consider your "fast" example with a mouse as
| their "slow" example that forced them into learning more
| advanced features of their editor. For example. Most Vim
| users can get to any character or partial string, or
| parameter, or line, or paragraph, or function start or what
| you have within three quick keys on their home row. They do
| this quickly, and can immediately start doing other things
| right after because their hands never moved.
|
| The mouse is fast because people don't need to memorize
| things. The keyboard is fast because the keyboard is fast.
|
| It's like the old joke from the movie Heist. "What do you
| mean you don't like money? That's why they call it money".
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| No offence taken; there's always room to learn. Just
| curious, since I never use Vim, how exactly one navigates
| to (and/or selects) "aaa" part in the following string with
| just three keys in Vim? url =
| "https://example.com/keyword=aaa&name=john"
| snide wrote:
| So many ways!
|
| fa;
|
| (f)find (a) (;)repeat
|
| That would be the generic vim way. I could mash on
| semicolon to get to each instance of "a" in the line.
| Here's another.
|
| 2fa
|
| 2 (2nd instance) f (find) (a)
|
| Most people use a plugin called easy motion instead.
|
| You type some two character key command to start it. For
| me it's "ff".
|
| After ff, i type any two characters. It will then
| highlight each place in the document that start with
| those two characters (think an inline table of contents)
| that I can then select.
|
| https://github.com/easymotion/vim-easymotion
|
| I write all this knowing it looks and sounds like
| madness, so again, don't take this as anything other than
| someone explaining their madness, but once you learn all
| this stuff (it takes about a month) you realize your
| mouse is actually the slowest way to do it.
| lelanthran wrote:
| I'd do `/aaa<enter>cw<replacement text>`
| affinepplan wrote:
| > I really hate about using terminals: you can't just click
| to move the cursor quickly!
|
| alt-click?
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| Doesn't seem to work for any emulators I have (cmd, Windows
| Terminal, Git Bash, etc.) :(
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| Use a different terminal and/or editor. Mouse support is
| absolutely a common feature and has been for a while.
| xterm, konsole, tmux, emacs, GNU screen, etc., etc. all
| let you do a variety of things with the mouse.
|
| For instance I use helix and can move the cursor with the
| mouse just fine in WezTerm, iTerm, and Apple's
| Terminal.app. tmux has a mouse mode where you can select
| and scroll with the mouse.
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| Pretty superficial.
|
| And no mention of the much-hyped "Minority Report" UI that failed
| spectacularly for obvious reasons.
| furyofantares wrote:
| This is a lot of fairly interesting build up and background
| leading to a very short and shallow takedown of voice control
| that's all about audio as IO for a couple practical reasons.
|
| No discussion of whether natural language will be a powerful
| addition to or replacement of current UI, which of course can
| just be text you type and read.
| gyomu wrote:
| I once worked in a design research lab for a famous company.
| There was a fairly senior, respected guy there who was determined
| to kill the keyboard as an input mechanism.
|
| I was there for about a decade and every year he'd have some new
| take on how he'd take down the keyboard. I eventually heard every
| argument and strategy against the keyboard you can come up with -
| the QWERTY layout is over a century old, surely we can do better
| now. We have touchscreens/voice input/etc., surely we can do
| better now. Keyboards lead to RSI, surely we can come up with
| input mechanisms that don't cause RSI. If we design an input
| mechanism that works really well for children, then they'll grow
| up not wanting to use keyboards, and that's how we kill the
| keyboard. Etc etc.
|
| Every time his team would come up with some wacky input demos
| that were certainly interesting from an academic HCI point of
| view, and were theoretically so much better than a keyboard on a
| key dimension or two... but when you actually used them, they
| sucked way more than a keyboard.
|
| My takeaway from that as an interface designer is that you have
| to be descriptivist, not prescriptivist, when it comes to
| interfaces. If people are using something, it's usually not
| because they're idiots who don't know any better or who haven't
| seen the Truth, it's because it works for them.
|
| I think the keyboard is here to stay, just as touchscreens are
| here to stay and yes, even voice input is here to stay. People do
| lots of different things with computers, it makes sense that we'd
| have all these different modalities to do these things. Pro video
| editors want keyboard shortcuts, not voice commands. Illustrators
| want to draw on touch screens with styluses, not a mouse. People
| rushing on their way to work with a kid in tow want to quickly
| dictate a voice message, not type.
|
| The last thing I'll add is that it's also super important, when
| you're designing interfaces, to actually design prototypes people
| can try and use to do things. I've encountered way too many
| "interface designers" in my career who are actually video editors
| (whether they realize it or not). They'll come up with really
| slick demo videos that look super cool, but make no sense as an
| interface because "looking cool in video form" and "being a good
| interface to use" are just 2 completely different things. This is
| why all those scifi movies and video commercials should not be
| used as starting points for interface design.
| kurthr wrote:
| I may have worked for that company, but I came away with a
| different take.
|
| People are User Interface bigots!
|
| People get used to something and that's all they want. The
| amazing thing Apple was able to do was get people to use the
| mouse, then the scrollwheel, and then the touchscreen. Usually,
| that doesn't mean that you get rid of an interface that already
| exists, but when you create a new device you can rethink the
| interface. I used the scroll wheel for the iPod before it came
| out and it was not intuitive, but the ads showed how it worked,
| and once you used it 20-50x it just seemed right... and
| everything else was wrong! People would tell me how intuitive
| it was, and I would laugh, because without the ads and other
| people using it, it was not at all.
|
| Now we're in a weird space, because an entire generation is
| growing up with swipe interfaces (and a bit of game
| controller), and that's going to shape their UI attitudes for
| another generation. I think the keyboard will have a large
| space, but with LLM prediction, maybe not as much as we've come
| to expect.
|
| I could go on about Fitts testing and cognitive load and the
| performance of various interfaces, but frankly people ignore
| it.
| RossBencina wrote:
| > People get used to something and that's all they want.
|
| It's more than "getting used to." Learning to type (or to
| edit text fast using a mouse) is a non-trivial investment of
| time and energy. I don't think wanting to leverage hard-
| earned skills is bigotry, seems more like pragmatism to me.
| Unless the "new way" has obvious advantages (and is not
| handicapped by suboptimal implementation) the switching cost
| will seem too high.
| dxdm wrote:
| It's not just that people don't want to waste an investment
| into learning something; that investment can actually
| enable you way more than a more easily accessible
| interaction method, and you stick to it because it's
| _better_.
|
| Once you've learned to use the keyboard property, it's
| simply faster for many applications. Having buttons at your
| fingertips beats pointing a cursor and clicking at a
| succession of targets. For example, I can jump through
| contexts in a tyling window manager and manipulate windows
| and their contents much faster with a keyboard, than wading
| through a stack of windows and clicking things with a
| mouse.
|
| It all depends on what you're interacting with, and how
| often. I mostly have to deal with text, and do not need to
| manipulate arbitrary 2d or 3d image data.
|
| But suggesting that I am simply too set in my ways to ditch
| the keyboard in favor of poking things with a pointy thing
| or talking into a box is just too reductive.
| pmontra wrote:
| I add to your point and to parent's one.
|
| I do use touchscreens when I've got one on a laptop or on
| a tablet with keyboard and desktop apps. The reason is
| precisely what you wrote: pushing buttons in front of us
| at close reach is faster than reaching for a mouse,
| aiming and clicking. When the screen is at 50 cm or less
| from our belly it's not hard to raise a hand and use it.
|
| That also builds on a lifelong investment on pushing
| buttons, physical and on screen with mice. Using the Tab
| key to navigate a UI, or shortcuts or hjkl is something
| that only a few people (comparatively) did so it's can
| not become mainstream.
|
| The last time I truly learned something new was swyping
| on my phone keyboard, some 15 years ago. It's extremely
| niche. I'm the only person doing it among everybody I
| know. I invested some time but the reward is great,
| especially when holding the phone with one hand or when
| there are many vibrations and the screen moves a little.
| A swiping finger never loses contact. And it's faster for
| me than two fingers tapping.
|
| On the other side, that's another way to cement the
| qwerty layout because I swype on it and I would have to
| adjust to a different layout, so why bother?
|
| Finally, voice. I realized that I used to dictate text to
| my keyboard on the early 10s, then I stopped. It worked
| well even back then without all the new technology. I
| don't remember why I stopped but if I did it means that I
| didn't lose anything. I wouldn't start again now because
| I think that there are very few keyboards with only local
| speech to text.
| wagglecontrol wrote:
| > Unless the "new way" has obvious advantages
|
| I agree with this. The cases are rare. Still there are
| cases like the current sad state of motion control in video
| game consoles, where I have to agree to the opposite.
| Pretty much everyone who's put the time to play with motion
| controls outperforms those who don't and can play to
| satisfaction even without aim assist (which is relentlessly
| ubiquitous, for those unaware). But the tech started out
| kinda ass, and the Xbox still don't have a built in
| gyroscope, so the adoption is artificially stunted. The
| result? The masses still call it "waggle" with disdain.
| skydhash wrote:
| The scroll wheel is a step up over both d-pad and touch
| screen. I also had a Creative Zen which has a scroll lane and
| it was great too. Why? Because interaction was a factor of
| motion control and it has great feedback. Same with Apple
| touchpad. Yep you still have to learn it, but it was
| something done in a few minutes and fairly visual.
|
| There's a reason a lot of actually important interfaces still
| have a lot of buttons, knob, lights, and levers and other
| human shaped controls. Because, they rely on more than visual
| to actually convey information.
| m463 wrote:
| Strangely, apple sucks at mice. A multi-button mouse with a
| scroll wheel is way better than any apple mouse I've used
| (especially the round one).
|
| That said, the touchpad on some of their laptops is pretty
| good when you can't carry a mouse, but nowhere near a good
| mouse.
|
| (I have owned all their mice, all their trackpads, etc)
|
| Their keyboards have gone downhill too. I like the light feel
| of current keyboards, but the lack of sculpted keys to center
| and cushion fingers and arranged keys for the hands has
| really replaced function with form.
|
| all the people who knew these kinds of truth have probably
| retired. sigh.
| juliendorra wrote:
| The multiple-button mouse predates the one-button Apple
| mouse by 2 decades.
|
| The one-button mouse paired to a GUI was an innovative
| solution: Xerox couldn't find a way to make a GUI work with
| one button only, as per their design 1983 article on
| designing the Alto UI. They tried, did a lot of HMI
| research but were trap in local maxima in terms of GUI.
|
| Jeff Raskin and others from PARC who moved to Apple (Tesler
| if I recall well) had seen how three buttons brought
| confusion even amongst the people who were themselves
| designing the UI!
|
| So Raskin insisted that with one button, every user would
| always click the right button every time. He invented drag
| diagonally to select items, and all the other small
| interactions we still use. Atkinson then created the
| ruffling drop down menus, a perfect fit for a one-button
| mouse.
|
| They designed all the interface elements you know today
| around and for the one-button mouse. That's why you can
| still use a PC or Mac without using the 'context' command
| attached to the secondary button.
| kurthr wrote:
| Yeah, the Alto had a mouse. The Chipmunk had a
| scrollwheel. LG Prada phone had a touchscreen. Few
| remember them though.
| m463 wrote:
| I think that's all purist nonsense. It's like tesla
| removing the turn signal and drive selector stalks from
| their cars, or people that use super-minimalist
| keyboards.
|
| Sometimes dedicated buttons for certain functions are
| GOOD.
|
| People playing FPS games use two buttons to great effect.
| Maybe one button for aim, another for fire. People with
| MMOs can use as many buttons as the mouse allows.
| Creative types in tune with their environment can assign
| buttons to frequently used functions and flow through
| their tasks.
|
| Yes, there are ways to double up functions and use less
| hardware. In macos you can use control + single mouse
| button for a context menu.
|
| And I understand that poorly designed products use
| buttons willy-nilly and create a mess. Many remote
| controls are rows and columns of identical dedicated
| buttons that are lazy designs.
|
| But why extra-minimal? I think it is a kind of designer-
| induced technical poverty.
| skydhash wrote:
| I was recommending laptop to someone and the only criteria he
| had was a number pad and a big screen because he mostly use
| Excel. I think input method is fairly context sensitive. Touch
| is the most versatile one as it acts directly on the output,
| but I still prefers a joystick for playing game, a midi
| keyboard for creating music, a stylus for drawing, and voice
| when I'm driving or simple tasks. Even a simple remote is
| better than mouse+keyboard for an entertainment center (as long
| as you're not entering text). We need to bring the human aspect
| of interface instead of the marketing one (branding and
| aesthetics).
| m463 wrote:
| > Even a simple remote is better than mouse+keyboard for an
| entertainment center
|
| where you going to find a simple remote anymore?
|
| The only things simple are the giant keys marketing dedicated
| to partners (like the youtube or netflix buttons)
|
| I want a skip forward button!
| plastic3169 wrote:
| Apple TV remote has it's problems but at least it strives
| to be simple. Magically it also controls enough amplifier
| and projector (I don't know how, hdmi signals?) so I don't
| need to touch any other remotes on daily basis.
| m463 wrote:
| probably hdmi-cec
| SSLy wrote:
| apple tv itself can be controlled over HDMI-CEC with TV's
| remote, if the TV supports the mappings
| inhumantsar wrote:
| I'm 100% with you on this but I will admit there was one
| concept / short run project that actually looked like it was on
| the right track: The Optimus Maximus keyboard[1].
|
| The keyboard itself was not good for a bunch of reasons, but
| the idea was gold. Individual, mechanical keys which could
| change their legends to suit the current context. You wouldn't
| have to memorize every possible layout before using it, and you
| could change the layout to suit whatever you're currently
| doing.
|
| The closest equivalent I've seen would be the pre-mouse-era
| keyboards which could accept laminated paper legends for
| specific applications. The next closest, tho in the opposite
| direction, would be modern configurable keyboards with support
| for multiple layers layers.
|
| 1: https://www.artlebedev.com/optimus/maximus/
| gyomu wrote:
| There's this great article on the Optimus Maximus, and how it
| directly lead to the now popular Stream Deck (by Elgato, not
| the Steam Deck by Valve)
|
| https://www.theverge.com/c/features/24191410/elgato-
| stream-d...
| warp wrote:
| The flux keyboard seems to be a modern attempt at the same
| concept. They're taking pre-orders, I don't know if they've
| shipped any yet or how close they are to shipping.
|
| https://fluxkeyboard.com/
| regularfry wrote:
| The fundamental problem with a dynamic layout is that you
| need to look at it to know what the keys are. The one _huge_
| , underrated benefit of a static layout is that it's constant
| across the environments that you use it in, so it's (always
| to some degree, rarely perfectly) memorised. Qwerty doubly
| so, because _so many people_ have it memorised. It avoids the
| problem with the Maximus that in order to take advantage of
| the dynamic layout, you really want to be able to see through
| your fingers. Your fingertips by default block the
| information you need.
|
| I can see the Maximus being useful for switching between and
| learning new layouts - so if you want to give colemak a try
| you can, without needing to swap all your keycaps (even if
| that's possible on your keyboard), or swapping to blanks and
| forcing yourself to learn everything by heart. But I think
| the reason you don't see this idea repeated much is that it's
| self-defeating.
| taeric wrote:
| Do you have to be looking at it? My keyboard has blank
| keys. I used to use vim, which had a modal input scheme. My
| music keyboard has modes where different keys play
| different instruments.
|
| I agree that having the legends are good for affordances
| when learning. But they oddly hurt training. Specifically,
| they make it harder to remove the visual from the feedback
| loop. When training typing a long time ago, you wouldn't
| even look at the screen til you typed it all.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| That's exactly the opposite scenario though: the reason
| you can get away with having blank keys on a keyboard or
| a modal input in vim is that the inputs never change, you
| can commit them to muscle memory and then never
| consciously think about it. That all gets blown away if
| the interface is dynamic.
| taeric wrote:
| But they do change? Depending on the mode of my editor,
| they do different things.
|
| There is some stability, but not absolute.
|
| Similarly, if I play a game using me keyboard, which keys
| control my character will be in contrast to what is
| displayed on the keyboard.
|
| Now, constant change would be bad. But I'm assuming that
| isn't what is being proposed?
| mncharity wrote:
| > you really want to be able to see through your fingers
|
| As when graphic artists draw on, and interact with, a
| tablet, while watching a screen, rather than using a tablet
| display. Similarly, while I enjoy the feel of a thinkpad
| keyboard, I do wish it did whole-surface multitouch and
| stylus and _richly_ dynamic UI as well. So I tried kludging
| a flop-up overhead keyboard cam, and displaying it raw-ish
| as a faint screen overlay, depth segregated by offsetting
| it slightly above the shutter-glasses-3D screen. In
| _limited_ use (panel didn 't like being flickered), I
| recall it as... sort of tolerable. Punted next steps
| included seeing if head-motion perspective 3D was
| sufficient for segregation, and using the optical tracking
| to synthesize a less annoying overlay. (A ping-pong ball
| segment lets a stylus glide over keys.)
| bgan7 wrote:
| Thanks for sharing the keyboard story!
|
| I agree that keyboards can be improved, but I think gradual
| changes--like making them split and wireless--are a better
| approach. I use a split keyboard myself and can comfortably do
| development with just 34-36 keys.
|
| If the interface changes too much in a short time, it can
| become quite a hassle.
| metaphor wrote:
| Paraphrasing UX expert Johnny Lee: UX =
| P_Success*Benefit - P_Failure*Cost
|
| ...and yet with every new generation of tech, it's never
| surprising how the hype cycle results in a brazen dismissal of
| the latter half of this fundamental relationship.
| ninalanyon wrote:
| Before anyone bothers reinventing the keyboard I would rather
| that it were made practical to easily and reliably type
| accented and other characters on a UK keyboard in all
| applications. I use English and Norwegian regularly with the
| occasional French, German, or Swedish word. I have been unable
| to find a simple method of configuring Linux Mint to support
| these other than by switching layouts every time I need an o or
| and e acute, etc.
|
| I did once get the compose key to work but the settings didn't
| survive an upgrade and I have been unable to get them to work
| again in Firefox.
| ehecatl42 wrote:
| `~/.XCompose` is your friend.
|
| I frequently input International Phonetic Alphabet glyphs,
| some polytonic Greek, some Spanish and some Old English.
| Nothing is more than three key-presses away after an AltGr.
| wooque wrote:
| Use character composition. You then type those characters buy
| pressing compose key (I've set it to Caps Lock) and then
| sequence of characters. Much easier than switching keyboard
| layouts, and you can type other non-usual characters like
| deg, u, EUR
|
| o = Compose -> / -> o
|
| e = Compose -> ' -> e
|
| deg = Compose -> o -> o
|
| u = Compose -> m -> u
|
| EUR = Compose -> = -> e
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key#Common_compose_com.
| ..
|
| https://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libX11/plain/nls/en_US.
| ..
| agumonkey wrote:
| takes a bit of time but you end up being fast enough
| without changing keyboard layout, pretty great
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| The Compose approach is extremely handy if you need to type
| several languages (e.g.: Spanish, German and Pinyin).
|
| A wrote a short article on it a while ago:
| https://whynothugo.nl/journal/2024/07/12/typing-non-
| english-...
|
| I also keep a handy alias to quickly find how to write new
| symbols: alias compose='fzf <
| /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose'
| alexanderchr wrote:
| MacOS developers have solved this problem pretty neatly:
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-qa/guide/mac-help/mh27474/mac
| jiriro wrote:
| This is cool!:-)
|
| How come this is not the first "tip" on a fresh Mac?
| jiriro wrote:
| Is there a similar trick for non-letter characters ?
| ben_w wrote:
| Yes, for some of them, but not all.
|
| I've not been able to find a convenient online image
| showing the characters you get from holding down alt
| while typing, it may vary by layout, but for me this lets
| me type:
|
| Number row: !EUR#C/[?]SSP*ao-[?] with shift:
| /(tm)<>fifl++deg*,--+-
|
| First row: oe[?]'(r)+Y="^op"' with shift:
| OE,,%0AEAEEO[?]"'
|
| Home row: ass[?]f(c).[?]@!...ae<< with shift:
| AIIIIOOOUAE>>
|
| Bottom row: `O[?]c[?][?]~u<=>=/ with shift: YUUC*i^~-V?
|
| But of those, I only remember EUR, # (both printed on the
| key!), [?], f, (tm), p/[?] (thanks to growing up with
| MacOS classic -- Marathon Infinity for [?], f for
| folders, (tm)/p/[?] no idea why), and -/-- (en-
| dash/m-dash, not sure why I learned them, but was one
| surprise source of compile-time errors around 2010
| because they look exactly like - in a fixed-width font).
| salgernon wrote:
| If you ever used MPW shell, a lot of those characters
| were part of the syntax of commands and the regular
| expression parser so it was common to learn to compose
| [?],(r) [?] etc. The debugger TMON also used them, so
| they just become second nature, like !@#.
| ben_w wrote:
| Neat, did not know that. At the time MPW shell was used,
| it was a little bit too advanced for me -- I was only as
| far as working my way through C For Dummies (or something
| like that) with a limited student edition of CodeWarrior*
| around the time REALbasic came out.
|
| * Possibly bronze edition? Whatever it was, it was 68k
| only.
| miniBill wrote:
| It's very useful but it's sloooow
| whstl wrote:
| This is cool!
|
| But I thought you were going to recommend pressing "fn" to
| switch layouts (I believe you can use either fn or
| ctrl+space on macOS).
|
| I use to switch from German (for chat/documentation) and
| English (for coding), and it's quite instant and second
| nature to me.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| My experience with people trying to replace a keyboard is that
| they forget about my use cases and then they're surprised that
| their solution won't work for me. For example:
|
| 1. I'm in a team video conference and while we are discussing
| what needs to be done, I'm taking notes of my thoughts on what
| others said.
|
| 2. I'm working as a cashier and the scanner sometimes fails to
| recognize the barcode so I need to manually select the correct
| product.
|
| Now let's look at common replacements:
|
| A. Voice interface? Can't work. I would NOT want to shout my
| private notes into a team video call. The entire point of me
| writing them down is that they are meant for me, not for
| everyone.
|
| B. Touch screen? Can't work. I can type without looking at the
| keyboard because I can feel the keys. Blindly typing on a touch
| screen, on the other hand, provides no feedback to guide me.
| Also, I have waited for cashiers suffering through image-heavy
| touch interfaces often enough to know that it's easily 100x
| slower than a numpad.
|
| C. Pencil? Drawing tablet? Works badly because the computer
| will need to use AI to interpret what I meant. If I put in some
| effort to improve my handwriting, this might become workable
| for call notes. For the cashier, the pen sounds like one more
| thing that'll get lost or stuck or dirty. (Some clients are
| clumsy, that's why cashiers sometimes have rubber covers on the
| numpad.)
|
| I believe everyone who wants to "replace" the usual computer
| interface should look into military aircrafts first. HOTAS.
| "hands on throttle-and-stick". That's what you need for people
| to react fast and reliably do the right thing. As many tactile
| buttons as you can reach without significantly moving your
| hands. And a keyboard already gets pretty close to that
| ideal...
| SilasX wrote:
| >Voice interface? Can't work. I would NOT want to shout my
| private notes into a team video call. The entire point of me
| writing them down is that they are meant for me, not for
| everyone.
|
| Heh, I had a weird nightmare about that. I was typing on my
| laptop at a cafe, and someone came up to me and said, "Neat,
| you're going real old-school. I like it!" [because everyone
| had moved to AI voice transcription]
|
| I was like, "But that's not a _complete_ replacement, right?
| There are those times when you don 't want to bother the
| people around you, or broadcast what you're writing."
|
| And then there was a big reveal that AI had mastered lip-
| reading, so even in those cases, people would put their lips
| up to a camera and mouth out what they wanted to write.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| Don't forget MFDs from military/aviation/marine interfaces.
| Buttons on the edges of the screen, and the interface has
| little boxes with a word (or abbreviation or icon) for what
| the button does just above each button on the screen. When
| the system mode changes, the boxes change their contents to
| match the new function of the buttons. So you get the
| flexible functions of a touch screen with the tactile
| feedback of buttons.
|
| Some test equipment (oscilloscopes, spectrum analyzers, etc.)
| has the same thing.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _As many tactile buttons as you can reach without
| significantly moving your hands. And a keyboard already gets
| pretty close to that ideal..._ "
|
| The DataHand came even closer:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DataHand
|
| but I'm not sre that's good; moving your hands to reach more
| keys, without looking, brings even more keys into reach. I
| can hit the control keys with the palms of my hands - and
| often do that with the palm of the knuckle under the pinky
| finger - and feel where they are by the gaps around them,
| similar with ESC and some of the F-keys, and backspace from
| its shape, etc. I don't know of a keyboard which is designed
| to maximise that effect, or how one would be.
| SSLy wrote:
| https://store.azeron.eu/azeron-keypads does this in a bit
| different (better?) way
| stanac wrote:
| Windows Phone (or was it Windows mobile) had an excellent
| keyboard with caron/accent keys. So e.g. if I they `C` and then
| caron key it will replace first `C` with `C`. I was looking for
| an Android keyboard with same functionality but didn't find
| one.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| My personal prediction is that nothing will replace the
| keyboard except direct brain-to-computer interfaces. The
| keyboard is an incredible tool that people take for granted.
| alt219 wrote:
| > Imagine having to raise your arm to swipe, pinch and tap across
| an ultra-wide screen several times per minute. Touch works best
| on small surfaces, even if it looks impressive on a bigger
| screen.
|
| I regularly find myself wishing pinch zoom were available on my
| large multi-monitor setup, even if i only used it occasionally,
| i.e. to augment interactions, not as a replacement for other
| input methods. As a (poor) substitute, I keep an Apple trackpad
| handy and switch from a mouse to trackpad to do zooming. Sadly
| I've found not all macOS apps respond to Magic Mouse zooming
| maneuvers.
| awesome_dude wrote:
| I, for one, am glad we didn't end up with monkey hands/minority
| report screens that we interact with by flailing our hands and
| arms in front of.
| ojschwa wrote:
| I'm actually working on a voice controlled, tldraw canvas based
| UI - and I'm a designer. So I feel quite seen by this article.
|
| For my app, I'm trying to visualise and express the 'context'
| between the user and the AI assistant. The context can be quite
| complex! We've got quite a challenge to help humans keep up with
| reasoning and realtime models speed/accuracy.
|
| Having a voice input and output (in the form of an optional text
| to speech) ups the throughput on understanding and updating the
| context. The canvas is useful for the user to apply spatial
| understanding, given that users can screen share with the
| assistant, you can even transfer understanding that way too.
|
| I'm not reaching for the future, I'm solving a real pain point of
| a user now.
|
| You can see a demo of it in action here ->
| https://x.com/ojschwa/status/1901581761827713134
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| The next biggest shift in interface is moving from a tactile
| input -- keyboard, mouse, touch screen, ect. -- and visual screen
| output to none tactile input -- voice, brain implants, ect. --
| and none visual output mostly automation or multistep tasks. Some
| attempts so far haven't been successful, i.e. Alexa and Siri,
| others look promising like OpenAI Operator, and it exists in sci-
| fi like Iron Man's JARVIS, nonetheless, it is definitely the
| future.
|
| I worked on a browser automation virtual assistant for close to a
| year -- injecting JavaScript into third party webpages like a
| zombie-ant fungus to control the pages. The idea of tactile input
| and visual output is so hard coded into the concept of an
| internet browser, to rethink the input and output of the
| interface between the human and the machine, everything becomes
| hack.
|
| After a decade working in UI, it was strange to be on a project
| where the output wasn't something visual or occasionally audio,
| but rather the output of the UI was automation.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I'm highly skeptical about voice for most interactions. It's
| inherently inappropriate in most public settings.
| rochak wrote:
| +1. I see it being helpful for the differently abled but for
| everyone to just speak out loud their every action would
| drive everyone nuts in a public setting. Not to mention I can
| type "code" much faster than if I were to speak it.
| regularfry wrote:
| There are a few ideas about subvocal recognition kicking
| about which might change that. If your voice assistant is in
| an earpiece that can (somehow) read what your vocal muscles
| are doing without you actually needing to make a sound, it
| makes it practical to the extent that it could become the
| default. There's a lot of ocean between here and there,
| though. Particularly in the actual sensor tech. That's got to
| get to the point where you can wear it in public on a highly
| visible part of the body without feeling like a loon, and
| that's not trivial.
| SilasX wrote:
| True, but we could move to lip-reading for that:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43400636
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| We were putting this into classrooms where teachers were
| speaking all day anyhow. The system completely automated
| teaching tools, smart boards, and browsers. I don't think it
| gained a lot of traction, nonetheless, the company raised
| $100,000,000 to focus on the automation part of the product
| as a vertical.
|
| My point is that as a UI developer, I was moving from all
| output to screens to output which is automated tasks. There
| are different types of output and they almost all relate to
| the senses which is the were the interface between the human
| and the machine exists. For example, to screen, eyes, to
| sound, ears, and haptic feedback on mobile devices, touch.
| Because in my space, the browser, I was using JavaScript and
| browser APIs the same but the end result was different.
|
| Automation as an output is fundamentally different from all
| the UI I built the decade prior.
| danjl wrote:
| AI chat will replace the huge number of menus and complex
| interactions in many content development applications. In VSCode,
| for example I rarely touch 98% of the UI anymore. I just use
| Copilot. I no longer need large, complex chunks of the IDE, like
| the old refactoring code, or the formatting tools. Similarly, in
| 2D and 3D content creation, isn't it clear that we'll move to
| some iterative process using AI chat instead of millions of mouse
| clicks? There are clearly still issues with this, but there were
| issues with the early GUI tools too. I think huge swaths of
| complex GUI interfaces will disappear over the next few years. I
| know many folks who have spent decades in the VFX industry
| learning how to use Maya, video editors, paint tools, and
| proprietary tools, and lots of developers who built custom
| pipelines who might think it will take a bit longer. But it is
| coming for sure. Maybe you can optionally use voice, but that's
| not the important bit. This feels like it is going to be a
| significant shift in how we use computers, and it is already
| happening.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Why use a 3 key refactor shortcut when you can describe what
| you want in only a few back and forth conversational chats?
| danjl wrote:
| Because what you describe in the chat has a much more
| significant impact. Sure, you could mimic each little mouse
| click and short cut, or you could say "make the arms longer",
| or "write a test for the new endpoint".
| spartanatreyu wrote:
| And why do you think delegating the responsibility of tasks
| to the AI is going to end well?
|
| "Make the arms longer" could lead to way too many polygons,
| or messed up UVs, or will create arms that don't have edge
| loops, or have them but along the wrong axis, or etc...
|
| "Write a test for the new endpoint" is going to lead to
| "ok, now make the test pass" which is just going to make
| the test return true, or return a false positive by
| checking that a function exists instead of calling the
| function, or calling the wrong value, or changing the code
| to fit a test that doesn't do the thing it's supposed to
| but at least the test passes now, or etc...
|
| The only thing "AI" is doing is either spitting out
| something that already exists from google, or making a mess
| that will need to be cleaned up later.
| danjl wrote:
| I've been writing code since before GUIs existed. Last
| year, many, probably most experienced programmers were
| skeptical about using LLMs to help write code. This year,
| there are vanishingly few who don't use an LLM every day.
| Words are easiest for LLMs so programming changed first.
| Images, audio and 3D are next. It really isn't a question
| whether the change is coming, it is just a matter of
| time. And, change is coming faster and faster. It isn't
| perfect, but it is getting better at an alarming rate. It
| is just a new interface, not a replacement. The new
| interface allows you to iterate in different ways to
| produce a result. It isn't about providing the right
| magic incantation and having a perfect result. Like with
| current tools, you iterate, taking bigger steps each time
| and as you learn how to better use the system.
| lionkor wrote:
| Speak for yourself; the other tools aren't going away, just
| because you're less effective at using them
| submeta wrote:
| There are compromises that should have never been made. Just to
| please the eye. The Blackberry keybord worked fantastically well.
| It was killed because Steve beleieved that touch screen is always
| better. Then there are the knobs in cars replaced by
| touchscreens. I hope there are no attempts at replacing physical
| keyboards by touchscreens in laptops. I cannot type on
| touchscreens. I love keyboards. Especially my mechanical
| keyboard. Love it.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I think Steve (et al, I will not attribute everything to one
| person) did have a point; it's 2025 and an on-screen keyboard
| makes different inputs easier, for a lot more languages than
| physical keyboards can, without needing separate production
| lines.
|
| There's multiple input methods; typing, swiping/path writing,
| braille, dictation. It's not for everyone, sure, but for others
| it's ideal and preferable over a physical keyboard.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _an on-screen keyboard makes different inputs easier_
|
| Sure, it can certainly make different inputs _easier_. But
| you 'll be hard-pressed to convince me that those different
| inputs are _better_ specifically because a touchscreen doesn
| 't have the kind of physical feedback that comes from feeling
| the boundaries of different selections (eg,
| letters/characters) for that input.
|
| With a keyboard, I can center my fingers without looking at
| them. I know _exactly_ what input selections are nearby and
| in what directions; and I know _exactly_ when my finger has
| crossed the boundary of one and is in a null-zone or is on
| another input. For many keyboards, I can even feel the
| embossing of the individual input selection (character).
| crubier wrote:
| > It was killed because Steve beleieved that touch screen is
| always better.
|
| No, it was killed because people much preferred Steve's product
| than Blackberry's. In large part thanks to trading off a 5% of
| keyboard effectiveness in favor of 50% additional screen space.
| mystified5016 wrote:
| > I hope there are no attempts at replacing physical keyboards
| by touchscreens in laptops.
|
| There have been _many_. Laptops that are just two touchscreens
| hinged together. Every review absolutely demolishes them for
| the obvious.
| mansoorsheriff wrote:
| Mechanical/Analog will always win in the end
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| "In a commercial for the Alto, we meet a man - some kind of upper
| middle management, presumably - going about his daily business.
| He works in a spacious private office and, using the Alto, he can
| read and send email and produce laser printouts. Eventually, the
| Alto conjures up a high resolution image of flowers. The man
| wonders why, and the computer replies - with text on screen -
| that it's the man's wedding anniversary. "I forgot," says the
| man, to which the Alto replies, "It's okay, we're only human.""
|
| Sounds like fruit intelligence features
| zabzonk wrote:
| At least for games, design everything to be useable for mouse
| input only, if you want my money. Mind you, do not play FP
| shooters and the like.
| rifty wrote:
| Surely i'm not the only one but I've always felt when it comes to
| the discussions about replacing the computer desktop experience
| there's some serious historical blinders on.
|
| Work surfaces like the desk as an idea has existed and had been
| refined for millennias as human interactive spaces before being
| borrowed and codified to work on computers.
|
| it's not bad to look into but i don't think its surprising to
| find that human physiology hasn't changed, and so the interface
| environment ideas are still useful for similar situations
| zombot wrote:
| I know one thing for certain: The future ain't what it used to
| be.
| fedeb95 wrote:
| I don't agree with the fact that touchscreens are necessarily
| cheaper everywhere: take cars as an example. If a touchscreen
| makes me more prone to car crashes, because I have to look at it
| more often than with knobs, in the end it costs more. May take a
| while to fully reach better interfaces. Sitting at my desk,
| otherwise, means I can look at a touchscreen.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| On Star Trek TNG they have what appears to be a bank of Fujitsu
| Eagle disk drives on the bridge to the right of the elevator.
| Looks like 10 for a total of 4.7 GB worth about $100,000! Those
| are so noisy, you'd think the'd put them in another room so they
| didn't have to work next to them.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujitsu_Eagle
|
| https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/chosen-one-of-the-day-those-c...
| rapnie wrote:
| Different UI paradigms? Then Dynamicland [0] communal computing
| by Bret Victor [1] comes to mind.
|
| Anyone knows other examples where truly different UI paradigms
| are involved?
|
| [0] https://dynamicland.org/
|
| [1] https://worrydream.com/
| codelikeawolf wrote:
| > I instead urge UI designers to consider the powerful concepts
| of consistency and familiarity just a bit more often than they
| presently seem to do.
|
| I've been developing UIs in some form or another for almost 20
| years and this really hit home for me. I often use the analogy
| that UI/UX designers are like interior designers and architects
| rolled into one while developers are the general contractors and
| tradespeople (you need to pretend "software architecture" isn't a
| thing for the analogy to work). In my experience, I could ask a
| general contractor to come up with a design/layout for a kitchen
| and I would probably be satisfied with the result. That
| contractor has built hundreds or thousands of kitchens. A good GC
| will know how to lay out the space efficiently given the
| dimensions of the room. You won't end up with weird issues like
| needing to open the oven door in order to access a cabinet drawer
| (something I'm dealing with in my current apartment). It probably
| won't be flashy or unique or have a "wow" factor. In fact, it
| would probably be so unremarkable as to be forgettable, but it
| would feel immediately familiar to anyone who comes to visit and
| function perfectly as a kitchen.
|
| I try to push for this type of approach in my current job. I
| don't want to try implementing novel design ideas. Novel design
| ideas don't have reference implementations or accessibility
| guidelines. I think familiarity is the best UX. Are the familiar
| approaches always the best ones? Maybe not, but I don't want to
| be the trailblazer. Whenever I encounter a novel design, I ask
| the person who came up with it to find me 3 other apps that
| implemented something similar. If they can't, I suggest a more
| idiomatic solution. Sometimes people push back, but once I start
| asking _very_ specific questions about how this thing is supposed
| to behave, they usually end up deciding to drop it and go the
| idiomatic route.
|
| I can't say for sure, but I'm guessing a lot of the articles and
| blog posts out there complaining about the state of user
| interfaces aren't written by the folks that have to implement
| them. There are so many variables involved in accommodating for
| user interactions with _basic_ controls, let alone complex ones
| (if you 've ever built a custom <select> component that meets all
| a11y requirements, you know what I mean).
|
| So to end my rant: just use the dang controls we have available,
| don't try to reinvent the wheel, and focus on making your product
| really good at what people are paying for it to do. I wouldn't
| spend extra money on an application _just_ because they came up
| with a novel alternative to a slider control, and I 'm guessing
| most other people wouldn't either.
| WillAdams wrote:
| More than anything, the interface which I want to normalize is
| holding a laptop as a book and using the touchscreen (and
| optional stylus) on one side, and the keyboard (say for drawing
| shortcuts/modifiers) on the other side.
|
| Still surprised that this wasn't a standard for say the Voyager
| e-book reader.
|
| Hopeful that the Lenovo Yogabook 9i will help to popularize this
| (and if it had Wacom EMR, I'd have one and be working on such
| concepts) --- annoyingly, my Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 is
| just a bit too large for this, and the screen is so impossibly
| thin, trying it makes me worry about breaking it.
| mncharity wrote:
| > For almost half a century now, we haven't really managed to
| come up with something better, and that's not for lack of trying.
|
| In contrast, my impression is that deprioritization of trying is
| a defining characteristic. Patents - "yeah it's neat... you can't
| sell/buy/have/buildon anything like it". Narrowing optimization -
| "thinkpad is 2-key rollover, because business apps don't use 3,
| and it saves some cents". Software design-space badlands - "to
| tweak that, reimplement the full stack and apps". Unicorn dreams
| - "mass-market or nothing... most often nothing". So instead of a
| rich ferment of DIY and multi-scale commercial exploring for
| diverse viable niches, we have an innovation monoculture desert
| of "wait years for bigco to maybe find incredibly-challenging
| mass-market fit and _afterward_ backfill niches ". So a "we can't
| sell it because patents so here's a kit"-crippled but still
| creative AR/VR DIY community hits "Facebook bought Oculus for how
| much!?!" unicorn dreams and dies. So... etc.
| stevetron wrote:
| I just wish I had a hotkey that would turn everything on my
| screen to Liberation Sans Font, 14-pixel, Boldface and keep it
| there until I possible hit another hotkey to reverse it.
| stevetron wrote:
| I just wish I had a hotkey that would turn everything on my
| screen to Liberation Sans Font, 14-pixel, Boldface and keep it
| there until I possibly hit another hotkey to reverse it. If the
| occasional item needs to be emphasized, then it can be
| underlined.
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