July 19, 2005

That New, Old Interface Every once in a while, designers turn back the clock and give something another try. Exhibit A: the Fold n' Drop interface for sorting through computer files. Exhibit B: the book radio, which is exactly what it sounds like. Are these paper metaphors suitable for what they've been used for? Could or should they be extended into other areas?
posted by jmhodges 18 years ago
  • Reminded me of this ass interface (click-less mouse interface). I broke it the first time I tried to do something. Of course.
  • Ah, but I think the Fold n' Drop is not nearly as terrible as the clickless interface. Being able to "push away" folders to close them is a nice, distincy verb-noun pair (like, "close the window" or "click the icon") unlike the click-less interface which doesn't really seem to have anything like that. Everything is "wave the mouse over" with no separation between opening, closing and moving the mouse across the screen.
  • Yeah, I didn't mean to say that it is similar, just that it caused me to recollect it. I didn't see any online test/sample for this one, other then the downloadable java version, so I didn't see anything but the AVI sample.
  • Fold-n-drop seems like an awfully elaborate solution to the problem of too many folders competing for the same desktop space. When this happens, I just close some of the folders. Then again, I've been using GUIs for many years, and I'm pretty comfortable with the way they work now. Something that still irks me is how frequently there are small glitches in the implementation of GUI idioms that lead to new and confusing classes of mistake. If we can't even get the current GUI idioms right, what are the odds that MS (or Apple, or KDE, or Gnome, what have you) would implement fold-n-drop in a way that was more useful than irritating?