January 19, 2010

2010/GUI

Hello again.

Circa my last entry at no substance. all eloquence, 10/GUI was an ambitious, slightly daft set of ideas for the future of human-computer interaction that had recently found their expression in an unknown eight-minute video. In the first weeks of 2010, 10/GUI remains largely the same, though “unknown” may be replaced with “somewhat widely circulated.”

If you have, in the past couple of months, arrived at ns.ae. from the Twitter page that I hurriedly linked from the 10/GUI site the hour it hit Slashdot, you might have wondered why ns.ae. stood dormant with no mention of the project. To say that the whirlwind of activity in the wake of 10/GUI’s popularity prevented me from writing wouldn’t quite be accurate: I wasn’t short on time as much as on perspective.

In practical terms, I haven’t seen any huge changes in these three months, though my momentary fame brought me to talk with a number of fascinating people and even opened several exciting career opportunities, including a full-day interview at a tech giant many dream of working at (though alas, that one didn’t pan out). 10/GUI is still little more than an idea with a video, but that will have its chance to change given time.

The next step is a proper treatment of the keyboard problem, by far the most asked-about feature of the video. I’m wrapping up the conceptual phase for it, and I’m hoping to be able to give this its own video soon. It also looks like I’ll be speaking at a couple of conferences this spring, so I’ll be noting those here once everything’s official.

Also: I’d like to thank everyone who has reported on, commented about, analyzed, and critiqued 10/GUI. Those of you who have been inspired, those with criticisms, those who can’t wait to beta test something, those with oddly long e-mails I don’t quite know how to respond to. I appreciate all of you.