MishMash

Nothing new in the world (it's all be done in Lisp)

A while back I waxed lyrical about the user interface ideas in Haystack, a personal information management tool being developed at MIT.

One of the things it does, and something which I think would make a huge difference to ease of use for novice computer users (that is, those who haven't already been inured to the inconsistencies of interface even within software applications) is that wherever an item appears in the interface, the same actions are available in the context menu. So, for example, when I right click on the name of a person as it appears in a list of email messages, I get the same options as when I'm in the address book view.

It's not a ground-breaking idea — consistency — and yet people seem intent on ignoring it. I suspect that inconsistent interfaces expose inconsistent code, and this suspicion is supported by the following comment from Michabelieveel Parker on his Symbolics XL1200 "Lisp Machine"

The Genera operating system is object-oriented to a degree that even the NeXTStation can't aspire. Everything on the screen is an active object; you can do a directory listing on the console, and each filename knows what it is and what you can do with it. Mouse over it and it hilights to let you know it's active. Left-click on it and you get a menu with options for edit, rename, delete, compile, etc. Any error message that gets printed out to the console will have active keywords that if you click on them will bring up the online manuals to the appropriate spot. You can bring up a dialog inline in the console, and after you finish with it it will remain in the scroll buffer like any other text. Imagine what an XML shell would be like, and you're starting to get the picture. Except that this type of behavior is consistent everywhere in the system, the editor, the help system, the browsers, the inspectors, everything.

I think that the McCLIM (an open source CLIM implementation) listener is an implementation of this same idea (perhaps it's part of the CLIM specification), so maybe I should put a bit of effort into getting McCLIM up and running.

There are other interesting aspects to the approach suggested. I am quite keen on the idea of this merging of the GUI and command line schools of interface design. I can type at a command line, and then manipulate the results directly.

Consortia don't reduce bureaucracy

From a CORDIS report on the (EU research) FP6 mid-term review:

While welcoming the new instruments as tools which really do encourage integration and collaboration, Professor Bullinger questioned whether such large consortia really fulfil the aims of increasing flexibility and reducing bureaucracy. He added that with so many partners involved in each project, the amount of EU funding received by each partner is often low.

Good to hear this said at that sort of level. Every cycle EU research funding seems to go for bigger and bigger projects. Everyone gets together to bid (and bidding costs an insane amount of work) but to what extent is the work done by these huge projects integrated, and to what extent merely collected? Some work just can't be done without big funding, and some of that requires large scale collaboration, but in the end money begets beaurocracy. I'm convinced that vastly more — and more interesting — research would be done if money was handed out in smaller packages to a wider range of people.

In the very next paragraph it says,

… he proposed that more is allocated to project management …

which seems rather at odds with the above quoted view.

Structured Procrastination

Helen has just drawn my attention to an short essay on Structured Procrastination. Me. Specifically.

What could she mean?

Amoral Adsense

Over at Bill de hÓra's weblog there's a post about a thesis on distributing RESTian web services. In itself worth linking to for future reference, but what caught my eye was the ads Google has placed at the top.

Custom Dissertations! it says. Custom Unpublished Dissertations in the UK - Quality Guaranteed.

UK University Assignments!

An impressive demonstration of Google's adsense ad placement algorithm, to be sure …