(Up to: Interfaces Ideas Proles And Technology )

[ Originally posted over at ThoughtStorms, repeated here as braindump material. ]

Is there a niche for designing interfaces focused even more around functionality than currently exists?

By this, I mean that instead of taking the functionality of computers and trying to shoehorn it into a simple interface that is easy to pick up, we actually look into a system that makes any arbitrary task easy once you know how. This would entail a steep learning curve, but great reward.

Still a bit unclear. OK...

• Current text-based CLIs are born out of a non-graphical era more through necessity than design.
• This approach is hard to learn for people not used to it, hence graphical UIs (although people still struggle with Windows)
• But those who do use it are proficient and can achieve complex tasks very quickly._
• Current Interface design is towards making things simple.
• Why not look into making things faster to perform, once you know how to do it?

The grammatical/linguistic approach is the obvious example, but there are a hundred other ways to use a keyboard, assuming that we're sticking with the legacy input device. Control codes and keyboard shortcuts are examples of both how the field could be evolved, and how interfaces can offer a secondary path of user advancement, but the former is what I'm on here. Could you use meta-commands to control information and data flow, maybe in the same way as we use pipes in *nix to flow information from command to command? For instance, you choose the data you want to process, whether it be a file, text stream, image, etc, and then hit a series of control codes to perform a series of actions on it. Something like that. You could undo your actions, branch them and have different flows, etc etc. I think there's a lot of unexplored potential for making computers faster for those who have the time and motivation to learn how to do so.

Some other ideas...

• Being able to search through ALL text from ALL windows quickly. Could somehow extend this to other information too, for instance match filenames/alt text/window text for images, or display a list of all available images (not sure this would be so quick though). Results could be displayed in a standard list widget, which can then be selected from to jump to the item of your choosing.
• Need to be able to select items, such as text or images, et al, and then perform commands on them. See above for item selection, still thinking about simple text selection.
• Stuff like chaining of shortcuts with ^| and outputting with ^[Enter].
• "UI" would then be a Photoshop-style History of Actions, that you can step back through/remove/insert actions from/into the chain.
• Could have context-sensitive commands, based on the data being manipulated and/or the current context of the action chain.
• The interface should be abstract enough to be both user-configurable and flexible/extensible, i.e. shortcut designation should be separated from what the user wants to do with it. This will be influenced by a). the types of information being acted upon, and b). how Qt works.. ;)

(See also: The Desktop Metaphor Ideas For EMail Client Integration EMail As An Interface On Bul BAnd Visual Forums HCTOpen Day2004 )