TheUltimatePowerInterface

ThoughtStorms Wiki

Of course the ultimate power interface is Emacs or WikiAsUltimateUserConfigurableApplication.

But as a contrast to AnEasyInterface, here's a place to freestyle about ultimate power interfaces.

For example ...

Magic Interface

put motion detection, GPS, camera and range-finder in a mobile phone and it becomes a MagicWand :
- Wave it to create gestural input.
- Point it at things identify what and where they are.

So, given that the world is going to be full of smart radio enabled things, it should be possible to point at a smart object, make radio contact, get a feed of information (eg. see http://www.serendipit-e.com/miasma/archives/cat_cyberculture.html for webserver on a chip]) (BlogJects).

I'm pretty much convinced that the RSS feed is the web equivalent of the *nix pipe. So we need to pull RSS feeds out of objects, process them (which in general will be about directing them through various application servers)

Hence, I'll take my mobile phone ...

point it at things to suck their informational souls,
wave it to create the gestural patterns that will invoke various web-services (or let's just call them "spells" and be done with it),
sketch the piping network that connects these services in the air.
observe the result on the screen of my phone or projected onto a convenient nearby screen.
obviously complex sequences and routing networks can be cached as single invocable programs (or daemons) ...

Counter

Anti fancy gesturing and conjuring in the interface : http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1931943,00.asp

Some of my "ultimate power interfaces" are:

A stack of index cards and a large table
A /huge/ white board and a bunch of marker pens of various colours
A wall, a pen and a large stack of post-it notes

– AdrianHoward (See also LifeHacks)

Started thinking about this idea of "uber-shortcuts", action histories and datapipes, and will be collecting my ideas on [this http://www.exmosis.net/node.Functionally-focused_Interfaces this page]. With a bit of time, I might even use this to get into C++ and Qt coding...

Other than that, I'm quite intrigued by the crossover of traditional interfaces like Adrian's (hello again, btw ;) with automation. I've seen a few devices that let you draw on paper and it'll take it and stick it into a file, but I'm still waiting for the advances that truly electronic paper could bring. Full-on, doodled-to-schematic image manipulation that ties in with system functionality is still a while away - imagine being able to design your databases like you can now with Visio, but via pen and paper, or having document/code structures put together based on a scribbled flowchart.

– GrahamLally