Re: [kidsUI] Magic Cap as a stalking horse

[Sanjay Chandrasekharan <schandr2@chat.carleton.ca>]

Hi all (three?),

I liked the Magic cap screenshots! But my image of our planned UI is
somehow more colourful. :-)

I also liked the idea of  extending Doom into a process manager. The "kill"
metaphor works,  but the graphics is a bit cheesy.

Here are some thoughts.

When you say room metaphor, are you thinking of organising the screen into
different rooms, and the user having a top-down perspective on the rooms
(like Sims)? Or is the screen itself a room like the Magic cap UI?

I am for the Magic cap version, but with one difference. The rooms are
inside a palace, or a house, or a Igloo or something like that, depending
on the theme. The palace or igloo is what the user gets as his opening
screen. The room is not the default screen. Think of the palace as the
"opening shot" of a Disney movie. It sets the context for further
navigation. Within the palace you will have different rooms, a basement
where all the deleted files go, and the user navigates through the rooms
like they navigate a game. In other words, we should change the "passive"
nature of current navigation (where objects appear, and wait for our beck
and click) to an "active" one, where the user feels as if he is in a real
environment.

It shouldn't be as active as a game, where the environment is always
changing, but it should be reasonably active. One way to create the
impression of activeness is to use slow-motion to change the screen. The
doors should look as if they are opening, instead of jumping up as a
window. Returning to a place would be difficult in this navigation mode,
and I suggest we use something like the dock in Apple's new Aqua UI to
store opened stuff. The Magic cap uses the dock, but I'm not sure whether
it is for opened stuff.

The way I see it, the desktop mataphor assumes that the users want
simultaneous access to a whole bunch of stuff, and the desktop is a
convenient place to represent a lot of assorted things. However, in our
case, we can afford to start off with an opening shot that does nothing but
sets the context. And this context can vary, and the user will expect
different things for different themes. For instance, in the case of the
igloo, the rooms inside will be glassy, for a palace under the sea you will
have all sorts of stuff floating around etc.

Ken is right about "insulting the user's intelligence" part. That is the
primary reason why the MS Agent is hated. However, the way I see it, our
"agents" don't insult the user's intelligence. They only provide
entertainment, no advice. I also think we should look at the graphic themes
(like the penguin carrying the file) as modules while designing, so that
these themes can be changed every once in a while. I dream of a world where
I can download my interface themes from the Web! :-)

Sanjay

Doug Loss wrote:

> I just remembered Magic Cap, an OS for PDAs that was originally written
> by General Magic back in the early to mid-'90s.  It used the
> room/buildings concept.  You can see some screen shots of it at:
>
> http://home.twcny.rr.com/magiclink/
>
> I wonder if something like this interface, but updated, might be
> something we should consider.
>
> --
> Doug Loss                 Even if you're on the right track,
> Data Network Coordinator  you'll get run over if you just
> Bloomsburg University     sit there.
> dloss@bloomu.edu                Will Rogers

--


-------------------------------------
Sanjay Chandrasekharan,
Ph.D Student (Cognitive Science),
Carleton University,
Ottawa, Ontario,
Canada K1S 5B6
Phone: 520-2600 ext 1568

http://wabakimi.carleton.ca/~schandr2