11:38, Monday 12 Feb., 2001 Link

Jef Rackin's Down With GUIs! from Wired 1.06. Extremely interesting, especially in the light of:

• Raskin on 'Raskin on OS X', a response to an editorial that many people read as Raskin attacking Mac OS X (which he was, but they saw incorrect reasons).
• Are Unix GUIs all wrong?: What would a mouseless gui look like? See also the Slashdot thread.
• XMLterm, a Unix terminal window which runs through Mozilla and can render graphically (eg it understands the xml that xls - the xml replacement for ls - returns).

In Mac OS X the gui and the terminal provide completely different views of the system: hidden files and gui shortcuts enhance what is already a different interface. But what if when you cd'd to a directory with the terminal the gui reflected this in the background? What if the gui and the command-line were linked in an analagous way to the source/rendered-page views of Dreamweaver?

And beyond this, the way we store files is wrong. Why shouldn't documents just be stored in a central location, with no explicit 'Save' command. The primary interface would be search results that look like folders, eg Documents Modifieds Yesterday; Documents Containing The Word 'insurance'. The system would come with some of these predefined, and you could set your own primary keywords -- but how is the current system any better than this at all? (While I'm at it, we should have versioning, but that's a different story.)