HN Gopher Feed (2017-10-22) - page 1 of 10 ___________________________________________________________________
The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI
87 points by kens
http://www.righto.com/2017/10/the-xerox-alto-smalltalk-and-rewri...___________________________________________________________________
fairpx - 3 hours ago
It's fascinating how the GUI's haven't changed much since. I run a
UI design agency (we work mostly with startups) but would love to
collaborate with someone who's working on a (niche?) OS and see if
we can redesign the UI. Open Source is fine. If you're working on
something, hit me up. Details in my bio :)
seanmcdirmid - 3 hours ago
You can redesign the UI using Canvas, no need to do it at the OS
level. It is hard to get past the standard WIMP GUI though,
naturalistic UIs (NUIs) were tried a decade ago, but they were
found to not actually be more usable.
fairpx - 3 hours ago
I?ve been following OS UI experiments for some years and the
problem with all of them was that they took an approach that
sounded cool but wasn?t really practical. From 3D desktops to
strange card based interfaces that wanted to replicate the
messy physical desk. I think the key is to redesign the GUI by
removing stuff instead of adding fancy new ways of shuffling
files.
setr - 2 hours ago
I imagine the big issue is that the underlying model isn't
actually being changed to support the new UI (even by a
wrapper-layer); so you're just doing shallow edits to the
"skin" of the OS. The problem being the underlying model and
the WIMP model have been co-evolving, and likely aren't very
open to other fashions of interaction.Presumably, the way to
beat it out is to figure out how to change both to
instantiate an entirely different interaction model, and thus
naturally a new UI.Otherwise you can really only commit to
incremental improvememts, but nothing particularly
interesting.ie smalltalk's requires an entirely different
underlying model to support its in-place editable UI model;
it cannot naturally be built (but maybe hacked together) if
you try to avoid that shift
mncharity - 31 minutes ago
The big incoming UI challenge is XR. But as with ST/Alto,
it's an integrated bootstrap problem of hardware, system
design, foundational software, user software, and UI.Absent
research labs, we wait on market availability for hardware.
For the modern analogues of mice and bitmapped screens.
Eye tracking may be cheap next year, but now it's $2k.
High-resolution HMDs may be $10k next year, but now they're
simply unavailable. Hand tracking is flaky. Haptics are
"it buzzes".For software, we're so used to the 2D windows
interface, it's easy to forget how much foundational work
was needed. Eg, around topography, and Smalltalk, and live
coding. Hand gesture recognition, spoken dialog management,
3D constraint-based layout, are just a few modern
analogues. And so on.So it looks like we're going to be
doing broad-based innovation and infrastructure
construction, gated on hardware availability. And plagued
by patents.It's not clear to me what can usefully be done
to explore UI in the meantime. You can do wireframing in
TiltBrush, but not really. It doesn't give you the feel of
say hand-attached controls, and of automated collaboration
in general. The "oh, it feels good to present this graph
as a sphere, and hold it you lap and peel off layers".
So...Perhaps do UI design by paper improv? A crew
scribbling on and holding up paper, hovering around a
"user", who is managing a todo list? :) That could be fun.
agumonkey - 2 hours ago
To me the most intriguing part is that, even though I pushed for
more, I realize CUA/Windows is 90% of what I need in terms of
clickodrome.
nikki93 - 16 minutes ago
I think React Native / Expo can be an opportunity to do this on a
touchable interface.Here?s a thing:
https://youtu.be/ZFdFyQBlXXUYou can eval JS there.
gumby - 58 minutes ago
> It's fascinating how the GUI's haven't changed much since.I
think you mean WIMP GUIs haven't changed much (and indeed, the
WIMP interfaces of the classic Mac, Windows, current Mac, Apollo,
Sun all felt very much like the Smalltalk GUI to me).But I think
the tile+touch interface pioneered on the iPhone is indeed a new
GUI paradigm which shrugged off the baby-boomer "desktop"
metaphor.These shifts require a change in hardware, as any
interface that gets traction with technology T forms a local
maximum, which makes it inherently conservative. That suggests
that the phone interface is unlikely to change.What are the
elements of the next generation? Looking at the horizon, some
subset of voice and AR+gesture, and likely shared experience
(note: I don't believe VR offers any affordances for mass UI).
So far I have seen nothing viable (including some efforts I've
participated in) with these technologies though.
flavio81 - 3 hours ago
You know your article was worth writing when my idol, Sir Alan
Curtis Kay, Smalltalk inventor, takes the time to comment on it!
bsaul - 1 hours ago
i wonder what's today's equivalent to this pionnering
technologies...biotech gene editing ? quantum computers ?
artificial intelligence ? Cars ?Is there someone somewhere
discovering the ubiquitous usage of the next decades ? Does
computer science still has the potential to bring the same kind of
world-changing tools ?Here's something i'd like to ask AlanKay : at
that time, you probably had the feeling that you were working on
groundbreaking technologies, but what were the magazines saying ?
I'm pretty sure some people were thinking that computers were going
to play a role, but was this obvious to everyone ? Did people
hesitate between funding CS and, say, flying cars ?
nikki93 - 20 minutes ago
Today?s equivalent could be to make the same thing again...
andreasgonewild - 3 hours ago
Pharo (http://pharo.org) is also worth mentioning on the subject of
modern Smalltalk environments.
kens - 2 hours ago
Ok, I've added Pharo to the article.
[deleted]
shalabhc - 2 hours ago
An easy way to try ST-72 is in your browser here: https://lively-
web.org/users/Dan/ALTO-Smalltalk-72.html and ST-78 here: https
://lively-web.org/users/bert/Smalltalk-78.htmlThe above links run
emulators in Javascript and have been used for live demos as well
(see https://youtu.be/AnrlSqtpOkw?t=2m29s for a fun one)Related,
for a Javascript based live system check out https://www.lively-
kernel.org/ (also created by Dan Ingalls).
robertkrahn01 - 1 hours ago
Thanks for posting the links.The Lively project evolved over
time:- https://www.lively-kernel.org is from the Sun Labs / HPI
days (check out the ancient http://sunlabs-kernel.lively-web.org,
fully SVG based rendering :D)- Lively Web: https://lively-web.org
A live, programmable wiki (2012-2015)- Since 2016 we are working
on lively.next: https://lively-next.org. lively.next will focus
more on the "personal environment" aspect.
detaro - 15 minutes ago
There also seems to be
https://github.com/LivelyKernel/lively4-core
gumby - 1 hours ago
Smalltalk was the first dynamic UI environment but within a few
years you could do this on lisp machines as well (both the Xerox D
machines in either Smalltalk or Interlisp modes and MIT CADR
lispms). Which is to say the Smalltalk environment was influential
both at the time and later.
pjmlp - 18 minutes ago
If you read the Xerox PARC papers, there was a lot of shared work
between the Interlisp-D, Smalltalk and Mesa/Cedar teams.Actually
some of the REPL and debugging features in Mesa/Cedar were done
because they wanted to appeal to the Interlisp-D and Smalltalk
users, while offering a strong type development environment.
maxpert - 1 hours ago
It's amazing to see how little the concepts have changed in desktop
world since Xerox Alto. The only different concept I saw few years
back was by 10gui http://10gui.com/ with VR, MR, and AR coming in
we need such innovation again.
PrimHelios - 19 minutes ago
I had some reservations at first, but that actually seems
incredibly useful. I'd love to be able try it.
igouy - 9 minutes ago
> If you're used to Java or C++, this object-oriented code may look
strange, especially since Smalltalk uses some strange characters.
version that made it out of the lab into the wide-world was
Smalltalk-80For Smalltalk-80 see "I Can Read C++ and Java But I
Can?t Read Smalltalk"
pdfhttp://carfield.com.hk/document/languages/readingSmalltalk.p...