Re: [Usability] spatial desktop

["Daniel Borgmann" <daniel borgmann gmail com>]

Hello,

On 8/22/06, Calum Benson <Calum Benson sun com> wrote:
> To be honest, I'm also not clear what 'spatial' means for other
> applications anyway.  E.g. Daniel Borgmann writes about your scratchpad
> example:
>
>         In true spatial philosophy, it is not possible to create a new
>         document from inside a scratchpad window, instead you will have
>         to create a new document using your file manager and then open
>         it.
>
> which I'd say, in itself at least, isn't much to do with spatial UIs
> (and as an aside, it would probably drive me mad!)  Without having used
> it, it sounds to me more like it's just a document-driven rather than an
> application-driven UI, which always sounds like a great idea until you
> try to design a whole desktop around it :)

What spatial means to me can basically be summed up as "object
oriented". It means that each window of the application represents a
unique object with persistent (spatial-) state. This can be an
application object, a document object, a project object or something
else. The current release of Scratchpad is purely document oriented
indeed, for the next release (and this was my initial plan as well),
I'm working on the project oriented interface which will be used when
Scratchpad is launched independently. I have written some details
about it[1] on my blog and would very much like to hear usability
related critique about this plan.

The reason why I don't allow new documents from within a document
window is more related to the spatial interface than part of it. The
point is that it's not possible to have a direct window<->object
mapping, when the object doesn't even exist yet. I could offer a new
document interface that would require the name and location of the
document beforehand, but that appeared like a rather crude method to
me compared to using the file manager directly. Scratchpad has an
"Open Folder" option to access the document's folder, so it flows
nicely. I doubt that it would drive you mad. :-)

In general, I don't think spatial interfaces are the right choice for
every application yet (my chess viewer doesn't use a spatial interface
for example), but I strongly believe that it (or rather object
orientation in general) is a worthwhile idea to pursue, mainly because
it makes interfaces more consistent and their behaviour more reliable.
It's just important to remember that object orientation doesn't have
to mean document orientation and that a document UI isn't always the
best choice. Then maybe most of the obligatory flaming about this
topic could be avoided.

Daniel

[1] http://dborg.wordpress.com/2006/03/25/what-the-f-is-scratchpad/