Comment by hyperhello
4 hours ago
I got to use a real Magic Cap, one of the examples of alternative metaphors, in the article, a black and white view of a room with a desk full of old office oddities. It was the worst user interface that may have ever been designed, like an Alice In Wonderland nightmare. Click an envelope on a desk or a clock, and it starts some other metaphor like an image of a spreadsheet in a dialog, or something, which might appeal to some kind of “grand adventure” logic, but in today’s context…I’ll avoid ending with a negative comment.
I own a Sony Magic Link and you are 100% correct. The UI is the worst sort of point-n-click adventure game memes. Not only do you have to guess what visual elements actually do something you need to figure out what functionality they represent. The spacial metaphor is insipid because it takes a lot of taps to get from one "room" to another.
None of this is helped by how slow the Magic Link is. Supposedly the DataRover 840 was much faster but I've never owned one to tell for sure.
The UI of the Newton MessagePad (I own several) is far from perfect but makes much more sense than MagicCap. It also requires fewer taps to reach different functions.
Every once in a while I'll pull out my Magic Link but the insanity of the UI just inspires me to put it back in a box.
Skeuomorphism was an interesting idea but should have been basically just that -- a design inspiration, not a full fledged embrace of extending old school ways of things.
The folder metaphor for the Mac desktop was reasonable, but it effectively stopped there (as it should), rather than try to embed filing cabinets and document archives into pretty pictures to click and point as if it were a game to be played once rather than a daily driver.
People don't seem to remember, but the finder used to be spatial. You'd open a folder, and a new window would pop up atop your old one.
We can still do this, but thankfully the ui paradigm seems to have advanced to the point that it assumes users don't need to see a stack of every directory they opened. And if they do, Miller columns are superior anyway