Tengui Fever: Desktop Paradigm Shift

The talk of the day was the new multi-touch UI concept, 10/GUI created by Robert Clayton Miller. Everybody has given their 2 cents to this subject. Although most people seem to have missed the point that Miller was trying to make with this concept. From the background page:

The purpose of the 10/GUI concept video is to inform, inspire, and start discussions.

In this case Miller has overachieved. Although the bulk of this discussion may be just the flash flood through the blogosphere today, he has certainly piqued interest in Cupertino, Mountain View and Redmond. At the very least he has made a name for himself.

It is obvious that not much of this concept is ground-breaking as Miller admits. The main piece of innovation is Con10uum. Controversial in nature, this may actually be a breakthrough and something that would be refreshing to any modern Operating System.

The common cases against Con10uum are numerous:

• Can apps be maximized to the entire screen?
• Zooming out to switch between applications is not an improvement on the already ubiquitous task bar
• Some apps work better together when stacked vertically. Other times it is nice to have 4 screens tiled.
• What happens when you add a monitor? What if that monitor is a completely different size?

The oddest part of the Con10uum design is that it attempts to solve a problem that is inherently fixed by multi-touch. Multi-touch gestures for managing applications in a workspace are intuitive. Moving and resizing a window can be done simultaneously by placing index fingers from each hand in the upper corners and thumbs in the lower corners of a window and moving them accordingly. Tiling windows is as easy as pressing down one finger in each window that should be tiled and then dragging the windows to the desired location.

Despite all this here are a couple of reasons why the Con10uum design should succeed.

Saves time and reduces stress. When opening an application most users will either maximize the window or move the window in relation to another window. In Con10uum both of these are done immediately. The window is maximized vertically and placed relative to the window currently being worked on. The user spends less time arranging windows and starts interacting with an application sooner.

More screen. The overwhelming problem with contemporary UIs is that an application's content space is severely vertically challenged. The popularity of the wide screen monitors has further exacerbated this problem. The vertical space is eaten up by the title bar, menu bar, toolbar, status bar, and task bar. Con10uum says enough to all of these bars. There are many workarounds in applications today:

• auto-hide the task bar in Windows XP
• Full screen mode in web browsers and many other applications
• Adobe's design products remove the title bar altogether
• Microsoft Office has dropped the standard menu bar and tool bar for a new ribbon interface

The paradigm shift is here. The next few years should bring a lot of exciting new developments. Time will tell whether or not the 10/GUI concepts pan out.