Re: [tlug] Holy smokes, Unity and Gnome 3 suck worse than I ever could have imagined.

[brandelune@example.com]

On Oct 19, 2011, at 11:19 AM, Martin G wrote:

> Jean-Christophe,
> 
>> You are missing the point. As you say, they match the technology they were designed for.
> 
> You can come at it from all the angles you want, but unless you're
> using some wildly different device than the rest of us, you're
> pointing at a 2D screen. You may touch it with your finger, you may
> use a mouse, you may see the pointer graphic, you may not, your screen
> might be the size of your palm it might be the size of your desk... it
> might be LCD, CRT, or digital paper... whatever... it's all a 2D
> plane, on which you point at things. That has not changed in 30 years.

Sure. But at that pace you can argue that it is unlikely to change any time soon because papyrus too was a 2d plane.

The Gutemberg press changed that a bit, then screens changed that a bit further and since screens contents could not be accessed manually they had all sorts of devices to fake the hand and now we are back to the hand.

And more than that, we are back to devices that are designed _around_ the hand. The size of the iPhone has been widely discussed but it happens to be the right size for and average thumb to access the whole screen when handled in one hand etc.

So unlike the 30 years that you mention where the pointing/input device was designed to access contents displayed in a formatted way, the current paradigm is that the contents and the contents delivering device is designed around the pointing/input device. Because a hand is infinitely more powerful and natural to use than any pointing device.

I personally think that the fact that we still work in 2d planes is barely relevant. After all most of the activities that involve a hand can be reduced to some kind of 2d activity.

> So when Unity tries to make my dual monitor set up run and work like a
> hand held device, that's stupid.

I can agree with that :)


Jean-Christophe Helary
----------------------------------------
fun: http://mac4translators.blogspot.com
work: http://www.doublet.jp (ja/en > fr)
tweets: http://twitter.com/brandelune