February 16, 2005
in the fuuutuuure...
Oooh want one -or two, or three...
Mini-side rant:
For years I've had my own ideas for a fantasy computer - one that consists of mainly a flat touch sensitive panel - no stupid mouse, no stupid keyboards -imaging that voice recognition would improve so much that it'd hardly be necessary any more - and on those few odd occasions when you needed one you could just pull up an on screen one - like on a Palm pilot and tap away.
It looks like -with the tablet computer and this - we're starting to get there.
My other fantasy linked to this is that the masses of different software we use to do various things would disappear. No one but me seems to think it's really stupid having to have one separate program for writing - a word processor, another one for handling bitmapped images (photoshop or whatever) another one for drawing vector-based art (freehand, illustrator etc.) another to make paper-based thuings - like Quark Xpress, yet another for web pages... What's more these programs seem to know it themselves as in every upgrade they add in limited functions from other dedicated programs. If instead software writers concentrated on a more modular approach -where you could add in various functions to one main program as and when needed.
Er... you know like how a web browser works... notice how that's grown and grown from it's humble beginnings which was to only show text, to show pictures, to later show animations, then vector based animations (flash), then to handle databases and forms, and to run varous java and VB and shockwave programs...
So i know I'm not talking out of my hat and that it's completely possible, it just takes a different approach to how we see computers working...
Posted by groc on February 16, 2005 11:28 AM
Comments
I like the idea from Idoru (at least I think it was Idoru) where the guy carries around just the screen, which communicates with the computer remotely.
wibbled by: JB at February 16, 2005 01:40 PM
Sounds like the modes on an Apple Newton! You entered text or graphics with the pen, if you wrote "lunch with bob tomorrow" it would schedule the meeting for you and stuff like that.
wibbled by: John V. Keogh at February 27, 2005 02:40 AM