anti mac

Influential paper written by Jakob Nielsen and Don Gentner which explores the possibilities for User Interface development by taking each of the Macintosh human interface design principles, and seeing what would happen if it were broken. (http://www.acm.org/cacm/AUG96/antimac.htm)

The conclusions reached are interesting; that there is scope for the rules which define everything we know about WIMP GUI's to be broken, and that a more useable system could be created. Central ideas of such a system are:

• The central role of language - communication with computers in increasingly natural free-form languages (similar to RPGs)
• A richer internal representation of objects - a system which holds meta information on objects and changes about size, importance and relevance to other documents, similar to the information understood by a good secretary
• A more expressive interface - with full colour, high resolution displays much better representations of documents are possible (changing icons according to filesize, contents, importance, recentness, revelance etc)
• Expert users - UI's should adapt to the skill of the user allowing experts even greater productivity whilst not slowing down new users
• Shared control - leaving control over some tasks to computer agents, other humans and other network objects leaving an environment not totally under the users control

The Anti-Mac interface is not realistic on current hardware, in particular language parsing still has some way to go, and computer agents are not currently trustworthy. However the ideas contained within the document are being used as inspiration and development by many.