Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Golden Krishna’s Best Interface is No Interface is a criticism of the “slap an interface on it” mindset, the idea that if you put a touchscreen on anything, it must be an improvement over the old way of doing things.   He cites those self-checkout kiosks at many supermarkets as an example. Many stores in the US found that the incidence of shoplifting seemed to increase with the advent of self-checkout machines. Did people really start stealing once those machines came? Possible, of course. But it’s also possible that people are often confused – am I buying the supersized packet? Or the large one? If the buyer isn’t clear, guess which option he would be selecting…   The author’s point is not that the old systems and interfaces should not be changed. Rather, his ire is at the tendency to put a touchscreen’y “solution” to everything. Sometimes, an improvement can be without a screen. Take, he says, the problem of coming out of the supermarket with all those bags in both hands, a

Hacker Kevin Mitnick, in his book, Ghost in the Wires , describes the time when he asked an operator in the company he was hacking into to type the following command: spawn /nowait/nolog/nonotify/input=ttg4:/output=ttg4 Did the operator key in the command? “Because she wasn’t keying in usernames or passwords, she didn’t think anything about what I was asking her.” Little did she know what the command was doing for the hacker… Over time, we’ve moved from such cryptic commands that were grammar Nazis (only exact syntax was accepted) to GUI/mouse to touch and now voice based interactions with computers. In voice, which is better? There are only two contenders, Alexa and Google Assistant (I base that on the extremely unscientific criteria of who has ads for such products). I thought kids didn’t care about this mortal combat between Google and Amazon, until I had this conversation with my 7 yo daughter after she saw the Google Home ad: She : “Alexa is better.” Me : “H

We love our touch based devices, from the iPad to the smartphone to the Kindle. But are there better interfaces than touch that could be created? Bret Victor certainly thinks so . He points out that almost every real world object offers some feedback to our hands (“texture, pliability, temperature; their distribution of weight; their edges, curves, and ridges; and how they respond in your hand as you use them.”). Now contrast that with what you feel when you interact via touchscreens (“Did it feel glassy? Did it have no connection whatsoever with the task you were performing?”). That is why Victor terms current touch tech as “ Pictures Under Glass ”: “It's obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better.” So what is the future then? As per Victor: “Despite how it appears to the culture at large, technology doesn't just happen. Revolutionary technology comes out of long research, and research is performed and funded by inspired people