For desktops, basically, yes. And that's OK.

Take any other praxis that's reached the 'appliance' stage that you use in your daily life from washing machines, ovens, coffee makers, cars, smartphones, flip-phones, televisions, toilets, vacuums, microwaves, refrigerators, ranges, etc.

It takes ~30 years to optimize the UX to make it "appliance-worthy" and then everything afterwards consists of edge-case features, personalization, or regulatory compliance.

Desktop Computers are no exception.

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mrob 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I can think of two big improvements to desktop GUIs:

1. Incremental narrowing for all selection tasks like the Helm [0] extension for Emacs.

Whenever there is a list of choices, all choices should be displayed, and this list should be filterable in real time by typing. This should go further than what Helm provides, e.g. you should be able to filter a partially filtered list in a different way. No matter how complex your filtering, all results should appear within 10 ms or so. This should include things like full text search of all local documents on the machine. This will probably require extensive indexing, so it needs to be tightly integrated with all software so the indexes stay in sync with the data.

2. Pervasive support for mouse gestures.

This effectively increases the number of mouse buttons. Some tasks are fastest with keyboard, and some are fastest with mouse, but switching between the two costs time. Increasing the effective number of buttons increases the number of tasks that are fastest with mouse and reduces need for switching.

[0] https://emacs-helm.github.io/helm/

	▲	calmbonsai 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I use Emacs as my daily-driver so point well taken wrt incremental drill-down though I'd argue that's not just a "desktop thing". You see that in the Contacts manager of every smartphone. I see "mouse gestures" as merely an incremental evolution for desktops. Low latency capacitive touch-screens with gesture controls were, however, revolutionary for mobile devices and dashboards in vehicles.

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Hammershaft 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

All of the other examples you gave are products constrained by physical reality with a small set of countable use-cases. I don't think computer operating systems are simply mature appliance-like products that have been optimized down their current design. I think there is a lot of potential that hasn't been realized because the very few players in the operating system space have been been hill-climbing towards a local maxima set by path dependence 40 years ago.

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calmbonsai 10 hours ago | parent [-]

To be precise, we're talking about "Desktop Computers" and not the more generic "information appliances".

For example, we're not remotely close to having a standardized "watch form-factor" appliance interface.

Physical reality is always a constraint. In this case, keyboard+display+speaker+mouse+arms-length-proximity+stationary. If you add/remove/alter _any_ of those 6 constraints, then there's plenty of room for innovation, but those constraints _define_ a desktop computer.

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pegasus 8 hours ago | parent [-]

That's just the thing, desktops computers have always been in an important way the antithesis of a specialized appliance, a materialization of Turing's dream of the Universal Machine. It's only in recent years that this universality has come under threat, in the name of safety.

	▲	calmbonsai 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I wouldn't save the driver is "safety". It's happened that a few highly-specialized symbolic manipulation tasks now have enough market value such that they can demand highly specialized UX to optimize task performance. One classic example is the "Bloomberg Box": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_Terminal which has been around since the late '80s. You can also see this from the reverse (analog -> digital) in the evolution of hospital patient life-sign monitors and the classic "6 pack" of gauges used in both aviation and automobiles.

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danans 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Take any other praxis that's reached the 'appliance' stage that you use in your daily life from washing machines, ovens, coffee makers, cars ...

I wish the same could be said of car UX these days but clearly that has regressed away from optimal.