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.

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giantrobot a day ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	detourdog 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The thing with General Magic is they were Mac team members without a lot of imagination. They thought the next GUI environment had to encompass the real world as the connected world. The problem statement is solid. Unfortunately they looked at the MAC’s desktop metaphor and decided the next logical step was to add legs to the metaphor and bridge the gap to the real world. I have a Sony Magic Linknthat doesn’t boot.

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pstuart a day ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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paradox460 a day ago | parent [-]

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

	▲	em-bee 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		i wish miller columns were more popular. i did a search for linux. there are a few minor in development or abandoned file managers that have them. dolphin dropped them in 2012 because they were not used enough and to much work to maintain for the devs at the time. nautilus discussed and rejected them. interestingly i found a recent inofficial patch for nautilus, and dolphin is officially working on bringing them back. that's maybe even going to get me involved to test once i figure out how to build dolphin from source.