The Human Interface

[Michael L Torrie]

On Thu, 2005-03-10 at 09:35 -0700, Eric Jensen wrote:
> I agree with you with those types of applications, in fact I think that 
> would be really swank.  But what about the more complex applications 
> like video games,  advanced multimedia, etc?  I'd definately run some 
> like THE at work if it functioned the way you described, but I can't 
> really see how it would work for me at home with all the DVD, 
> multimedia, and high end games I run.  Unless I had one beefy machine 
> anyway or my own cluster farm.  I would so love to zoom out my video 
> game to a picture-in-picture size and work on another project.  THE is 
> definately something to drool over, no argument on that.

Multimedia is easy, actually.  Multimedia is just another form of a
document (compound document) with internal smarts to handle interaction.
The document is the application.  A simple example of this is a flash
document.  It can be entirely self-contained (or point to other things).
So I don't think multimedia would have any problem fitting into the
paradigm I've described.  DVDs aren't a problem.  Even movie editing
isn't really a problem.  Realize that some things we think of as
applications can really just be described as tools and frameworks that
can hold the documents.  A video-editing system could be the same thing.
I mean in real life we need a desk to hold documents on.  Plus tools to
work with them.  While this can be described by an application, I
believe it can be also described from the data's pov as tools that are
automatically available anytime you need to work with a movie.

As for games, well, they don't really fit into our current paradigms of
computer use or UIs anyway, so nothing need change.

I agree that zooming out of a game and checking on our other work would
be fun.

> 
> Eric Jensen
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