Now announcing Accela Hypermedia Desktop

Our new project, Accela Hypermedia Desktop, is a Linux distribution that makes use of a coherent central interface, complete integration with GNUStep libraries, a recursive UI, speech recognition/synthesis, and transparent interaction with the cloud.

Stay tuned for updates.

From Babel to NAMCUB -- a history of UIs ending in our vision of the future

User interfaces are a form of graphical communication, so to understand the problems in UI design and their possible solutions, we should start with the first systems of writing.

The first system of writing was Sumerian. Sumerian was an ideographic system (pictures standing for ideas, much like icons), and was written on clay tablets. Once baked, the tablets were more or less immutable, which is why the only practical limit to the info we can dig up on the Sumerians is how long we keep digging.


A sumerian tablet

Later on, ideograms progressively gave way to phonemic orthography (symbols representing sounds). This allowed for more variety, but required more abstraction.

The history of computer user interfaces progressed from this relatively static world (the printing press simply widened literacy and made text more generally readable -- it did not change the actual concept of text). Although there were attempts to do more interesting and innovative things with text before the computer age (ex. the creative printing styles of Dada), many if not most of the creative orthographies of today come from the computer age.

Inheriting from the book and the page, the original UIs for computers were textual (discluding the invariably terse and obfuscated world of bit-twiddling, much of which was simply a debugging aid). Around this time (the 1960s), Ted Nelson, et al. started Project Xanadu, which gave birth to the ideas of hypertext and transparent versioning, among others. Project Xanadu was founded with the intention to improve on the book and on writing systems -- to use the computer to make something better than paper, rather than emulating paper.

Unfortunately, Xanadu's time came too late. By the time that anyone had really heard of them, computers had already progressed from the command line phase into a primarily graphical phase, wherein the GUIs were a simulation of multiple pieces of paper on a desk. A "window" in the classic WIMP mentality is a piece of paper, perhaps rolled up on either end (hence the term "scroll bar"), or perhaps having pictures on it. It resembles more a minimally interactive piece of paper in many cases than what Nelson had hoped for.

The world wide web, which was born from Project Xanadu's concept of hypertext (and which Nelson insists is a bastardization of the concept), did little more than automate footnotes, and as it evolved, it typically remained far more static and paper-like than it could have (or should have) been. In retaliation, Project Xanadu implemented a few version of Nelson's old idea of the zzStructure, which simply removed one limiting aspect of paper media: finite dimensionality.

The zzStructure is essentially a simple data structure, allowing storing some data, and having an arbitrary number of global links to other structures (think of it as a node with n pointers elsewhere and a bit of space for its own data). The user interface was also quite simple, initially. This is my own variant of the ZigZag UI (I term it the Z2):


The Z2 UI, which uses the zzStructure as a backend, and is similar to Project Xanadu's original ZigZag UI

The idea of "Web 2.0", which has caused endless controversy due to hype and terminology butchering, was initially termed as an attempt to make the web less static. One would think that perhaps this would initiate progress towards a more Xanadu-like web (as the web, web 2.0, and the semantic web were all arguably inspired by the Xanadu designs). However, Nelson has argued (and I myself agree) that the web and its standards are too stale and crufty to make an especially decent Xanadu system. While Nelson and his Xanadu team have actually attempted to ride the wave and integrate the Xanadu ideas atop the web, this is where his ideas and mine diverge.

Web 2.0 is not the future: it is a simulacrum of the future through the rear view mirror (to borrow a term from McLuhan). Which is to say that Web 2.0 is a view of what the web should have been all along, and a view of what will replace it, as seen through the dirty rose goggles of the web of the past. We cannot simply cram all this new functionality into the old, cruddy, poorly designed, poorly implemented, non-standards-compliant web infrastructure, and anyone who has ever done web design should know why. The Acid2 test (which tests web browsers for standards compliance) has, until recently, not been passed by any major browsers. Every browser views the same page a little differently, and so a web designer must write more or less completely different code for each browser. Is this what we want the future to be?

Not only that, but look at our desktop user interfaces! Most people use windows, mac OS, or some variation thereof. The windows UI has not changed significantly since 3.1, from a functionality point of view -- the 3.x series was simply a poor replica of the original mac interface, which in of itself was a poor replica of Xerox's initial UI design, itself only a slight improvement over Doug Englebart's original wooden mouse and non-overlapping windows. The UI for Windows Vista is essentially a skin on top of the normal windows UI to make it look vaguely like Mac OS X, and Mac OS X uses a UI whose very code was taken mostly from NeXTSTeP, and written more than 10 years ago! Most of the "new features" added to OSX and Vista are essentially shoddy implementations of simple features that various desktop environments and window managers on UNIX have had for years (multiple/virtual desktops hails from the hey-day of CDE, at the latest). Even so, UNIX GUIs are now progressively becoming more like windows and mac, and innovating progressively less.

So, okay. NeXT had a neat UI for its time. Enlightenment 1.6 (e16) had something decently original. Practically everything else consists of copying ideas that have been around since the 1970s. About the most original UI I've seen as an integrative desktop barring the Xanadu team's demos is Ion3, which in of itself is mainly original because of its minimalism and keyboard orientation.

What do I see in our future?

Well, here are some of the designs I've worked on over the years:


An early mockup of a XU88-like UI


A mockup of an experimental UI using a zzStructure-like backend with XU88-like elements (the 'Zig' or the 'Galaxy menu')


A later refinement of the early mockup, adding some ideas from the 'Zig'

All of these UIs are elements in what I see in the future -- a larger system with organically growing, infinitely customizable UIs. Our so-called 'Project NAMCUB' uses these elements (as well as something resembling the Z2) in combination with other elements more reminiscent of The Croquet Project and Project Xanadu's new demo UI. The backend, a distributed predicate logic system with distributed storage and processing, is already complete, and the UI is built flexibly on top.

What do you want the future to be? Should it be static? Stagnant? A cess-pool of rotting software and protocols and interfaces that should have been chucked out ten or fifteen years ago? Or should it be new, innovative, fluid, and flexible enough for its very essence to be modified on the fly in new and diverse ways with nary a line or two of code?

I pick the second. And to quote Alan Kay, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it".

<(o)> Accela Labs new domain / progress

Our new domain is http://accela-labs.com, and we will be updating the site more frequently in the near future.

Additionally, we have three permanent offices in Second Life, which will be linked at a later date. Both Project NAMCUB and Project Ziggurat are making good progress.

Project Ziggurat (which has not been mentioned before) is something of a new take on the OmniSTAGE system, utilizing both S^2AWS and the Second Life GRID system. More details will be released once the project has gelled.

Project NAMCUB has new developers, and an improved plan for the frontend development. Our server is back online, fixed, and a working prototype backend is running 24/7 for development and testing. Further details about the nature of the project will be released once the project nears 1.0 status.

The SL offices have a complete mockup of the OmniSTAGE technology, which should be compatible with Project Ziggurat's additions. The two systems will be integrated at a later date.

We will keep you posted on our progress.

~ John Ohno
President, Accela Labs

Project NAMCUB

Certain key factions of Accela Labs are currently working on something called Project NAMCUB. This project is to be kept under wraps until its release date, kept secret so that no negative hype can develop, however once released it will be open source, and will hopefully have a large impact on society.

The hope, obvious from the Tower of Babel illustration on the splash page and the choice of names, is to trigger a thinking change of a level not seen since the fall of Babel -- a modification in the methods of learning and reasoning akin to that which happened when mankind was introduced to writing. How this will happen can not currently be released, though it is to be a "silent revolution" and involve Prolog.

Xu/Synergist needed, now more than ever

Digital universe set for the Big Bang in 2010

Serious strain on IT infrastructures in place today

Sandra Rossi (Computerworld) 07 March, 2007 10:45:30

• Print this story
• Digg this story

• More by Sandra Rossi

ARN Distributor Supplement | Distributors relevant to this article

ACA Pacific , ASI Solutions , Channelworx , Datastor , Data Technology Solutions , Infortech Distribution , LAN Systems , PC Range , SLI-Consulting , T Data , Techplus Distribution

• Top Stories
• Most Popular

• Vendor offers licensing equity to resellers

• ICT gets memory boost in a Flash

• Data leaks equal 8 percent drop in revenue

• Optus readies SMB for VoIP

• Vendor looks for Trust-worthy resellers

• Vendor offers licensing equity to resellers

• Data leaks equal 8 percent drop in revenue

• Hosting company hit by hack attack

• Gates keeps top billionaire spot

• More efficient quad-core Xeons coming Monday

In 2010, the amount of digital information created and copied worldwide will rise six fold to a staggering 988 exabytes. This is a compound annual growth rate of 57 percent.

The unprecedented nature of this growth is symbolized by the fact that the word 'exabyte' doesn't exist in any word processing program's spell checker.

While nearly 70 percent of the digital universe will be created by individuals in 2010, businesses of all sizes as well as governments, will be responsible for the security, privacy, reliability and compliance of at least 85 percent of this information.

Put simply, it will be a huge task for the enterprise, according to a groundbreaking "Digital Universe" study released today by analyst firm IDC.

The study, which claims the digital universe in 2006 is 161 billion gigabytes or 161 exabytes in size, was sponsored by storage giant EMC.

Today's digital universe equals three million times the information in all the books ever written, or the equivalent of 12 stacks of books, each extending more than 93 million miles from the earth to the sun.

EMC VP and chief development officer, Mark Lewis, said this ever-growing mass of information is putting considerable strain on the IT infrastructures in place today.

"This explosive growth will change the way organizations and IT professionals do their jobs. Given that 85 percent of the information will be the responsibility of business and government, we must take steps as an industry to ensure we develop flexible, reliable and secure information infrastructures to handle the deluge," Lewis said.

IDC VP and chief research officer, John Gantz, said this incredible growth and the sheer amount of different types of information being generated from so many different sources represents more than just a worldwide information explosion of unprecedented scale.

"It represents an entire shift in how information has moved from analog form, where it was finite, to digital form, where it is infinite," Gantz said.

"From a technology perspective, organizations will need to employ ever-more sophisticated techniques to transport, store, secure and replicate the additional information that is being generated every day."

The largest component of the digital universe is images, from camera phones to security cameras, captured by more than 1 billion devices. The number of images captured on digital cameras in 2006 exceeded 150 billion worldwide. It will reach 500 billion by 2010.

The number of e-mail mailboxes has grown from 253 million in 1998 to 1.6 billion in 2006. Moreover, there will be 250 million IM accounts by 2010.

In 1996 when the Web was just two years old there was only 48 million Internet users. Last year this figure topped 1.1 billion. Another 500 million users are expected to come online by 2010, according to IDC.

Other key findings in the study relate to unstructured data, which accounts for 95 percent of the digital universe, and compliance. In the enterprise, 80 percent of all information is unstructured.

Today, 20 percent of the digital universe is subject to compliance rules and standards and about 30 percent is subject to security applications.

IDC estimates that today less than 10 percent of organizational information is "classified" or ranked according to value. IDC expects this to grow at a rate of more than 50 percent a year.

For more trends and history from the study go to http://www.emc.com/about/destination/.

Source link

========

Now, mind you, these are wierd numbers, and probably only statistically correct. However, the issue remains: someday, we'll run out of storage, or it will otherwise be scarce. The scarcity may simply be because the single (or few) original sources have gone down and no mirrors are possible. However, this does not combat the problem itself -- the information will not be available.

The Synergist, like all proper Xanalogical structures, allows transclusions and transpointing. Unlike traditional Xanadu implementations (XU88, for instance), it extends the proposed cache system for the docuverse into a fully functional bittorrent-like peer-to-peer system for any document. It works like this:

Every server (called a "node") keeps a cache of all the data it has retrieved in a given amount of time or space. This data is taken from the "grid", a kind of decentralized tracker of nodes indexed to their actual IPs. Each node in the grid tells the other nodes what it has downloaded, and where in the cache it put the data. Therefore, when a node needs to download some data and the original source is down, any other node can redirect it to a cache of this data, possibly distributed across a few other nodes.

The key to this plan, of course, is that every client also acts as a server. Similarly, if the original source has too much load (or possibly even just on the basis of good old "for the hell of it" distribution, so as to lessen the impact of some possible load spike in the near future) it can simply redirect to other places. This is done via the standard transclusion mechanisms.

One might say "but what if the data gets changed?". Herein lies the beauty: the data is inherently versioned. When a change is made, it has a different address.

Anyway, if you want more information, contact me. My info is on the sidebar.

~John

The Synergist -- Now with XU

The Synergist is now planned to implement a modified version of the Xanadu "FeBe" specification (above), as used in Udanax Green. In fact, most of that code is already implemented (a relatively new version of the xu code is usually here, whenever I care to upload). This adds a great degree of simplicity and extensibility to the project.

The current plan is to follow the general OGS/SecondLife paradigm to some degree in the 3d world, as far as division of server responsibility and such, except to also add in elements of Croquet and BitTorrent. The entire back end system will be based on a combination of the XU code and DOCP connectivity. This provides more flexibility and a more powerful, robust system. It also provides simplicity to the paradigm.

I will be writing reasonably extensive documentation on this plan pretty soon, so keep up with this blog in wait for that. For now, we are finally making very real progress, and hopefully our design shall be sound and we'll get the userbase that we require for this new paradigm to really spread.

~John

Is this real?

BanBot seems an interesting concept. The page is badly written, and so it lends credit to the fact that this is indeed real. It may be a threat to certain places, though my office land is under a contract where I can't ban anyone. Hopefully once OGS is working I can move to a full-Synergist grid.