Who Knew?“As amazingly revolutionary and beneficial as your new idea may be, you can’t escape this albatross of legacy data. Unless your new metaphor presents a new way of working that is such an obvious and dramatic improvement over the status quo (like pinch-to-zoom) then there’s no compelling desire to laboriously learn, adapt, and migrate to the new environment. It seems a bit fatalistic, but I can’t think of a way that the entire desktop metaphor can be overhauled without either everyone in the world switching over at once (which won’t happen), or becoming a “data island” like the Newton or Classic Mac OS. I’d love to be proven wrong, but the only realistic way up seems to be to build atop the existing infrastructure, with all of its cruft, and keep abstracting it away over time, fingers crossed all the while that Moore’s Law has a few good decades left in it.”
- Steven Frank of Panic just posted an interesting take on the state of computing and HCI, and ideas of where to go from here.
