In the days when computer users were really hard and computed without any namby-pamby GUI rodents, their finger tips developed calluses. The hardened skin made scratchy taping noises against the key caps which were the cause of the corns growing in the first place.

This was especially on the fingers that hit the tab key because without a pointing device to move round the screen, menu-based operating systems had to be accessed via tabbing across and arrow keys up and down. Modern TV remote controllers are pretty similar today in that they control the various functions of the set via its built-in menus. Then along came the people at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center who ruined it all for us.

They invented computer icons, devised to make computing interfaces easier for novices to get to grips with. In those days it was probably true because they had only a limited range for users to see. A little icon representing a calculator or a waste bin are pretty easy to understand, especially if it says the name underneath as well. But what about icons to show the address book or application manager? There is no common feature that one immediately associates with them and so there are a zillion icons all trying to make it easy to know what clicking on it will do.

When it comes to more esoteric actions the icons themselves move into a fantasy world. Take screen savers for example. BeOs used a little image of a monitor half covered over and with Zzzz’s floating from it which like BeOs, seems pretty well thought out. Gnome has gone for a rectangle with a little padlock on it, whereas Apple, the first major user of icons, hasn’t tried to represent such an off-beat concept with an icon.

From a users point of view, how is it easier to learn what all the various tiny pictures really mean? Man invented the alphabet and joined letters together to describe anything in the universe, known or unknown, in an easy to learn and use method called writing. Apart from some languages in the Far East the rest of the world abandoned communicating with icons centuries ago because they were too unwieldy and limited to use. What, for example, does the icon I see of a little plastic duck or a child’s toy dog mean to most people? How did they come to represent ftp applications Cyberduck and Fetch? Or why is Adobe Photoshop (currently) a feather, inDesign a Butterfly and Illustrator a flower?

When I go to the applications I look for the name not the icon, in the same way I look for files called “Accounts 2005-2006″ rather than a little icon that looks a little like a half opened folder with an arrow circling it. How on earth are we meant to navigate through our computer’s filing systems with the windows opened to icon-view? A screen full of little pictures is not easier to use when compared with a list of names. Have an icon next to the name by all means, to give an easy-to-hit target for the mouse pointer to click on.

Apparently I’m not the only computer user who feels this way. Don Gentner and Jakob Nielsen then of Sun Microsystems explored the Anti-Mac Interface back in 1996 and proposed a hypothetical user interface that is not tied to the conventions of GUI and suggesting a return command line interface that can understand simple instructions. In 1996 the desktop computer had the brains of a microbe compared with today’s but even now we are still stuck with WIMPs. While at Sun, Bruce Tognazzini, the Apple employee number 66 and Sun interface expert made a film in 1994 called Starfire. It was his attempt to show how a high-end workstation might look in the year 2004. According to Wiki, his system understands objects well enough to integrate them seamlessly (it can construct a 3D texture map of a person from a 2D video image); the screen is very large, with fairly expressive interface elements; the computer has some independent initiative (when the heroine searches for an article reprint, the agent automatically decides to search further and display subsequent articles with links to the original article); and the computer monitors the user (it does not attempt speech recognition while she is talking with a colleague).

Yeah, wrap it up, I’ll take it.