Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Messy Desktop and the Ajax enabled portal

This video talks about organizing documents, but of course the same kinds of techniques can (and should) could be applied to interacting with portlets.

Getting beyond tabs and columns. Way beyond.

1 comment:

Jason Shao said...

They have a good graphic designer working on their UI abstractions.

I know when all the Apple Mac OS "piles" talk was going on I was less than impressed. The strength of the current metaphors seems to be that they will scale relatively will into a more meta-data rich environment where we can query, sort, etc. based on all kinds of arbitrary metadata which is hard to express in terms of spatial metaphors.

What I did think was interesting was the possibility of ordered collections, like Microsoft Office Binder, but integrated into the filesystem. e.g. make a photo slideshow by storing photos as a "pile" which you could open in photoshop. Or maybe something like photoshop layers in a cross app context.