Desktop Environments: The Past and The Future
The goal of ergonomics is to make the interaction of humans with machines as smooth as possible, enhancing performance, reducing error, and increasing user satisfaction through comfort and aesthetics.
Even the biggest fanatics of the black console box won’t hold it against me if I say that in the respect of interacting with the computer, the future belongs to the GUI. And along comes the question: how will the desktop environments of the future look like? To envision them, we’re going to take a look at the interfaces available today, at typical and non-typical solutions given us by their creators, which finally will lead us to the question: is this still about the improvement of the comfort of work or something else?
While looking at modern operating systems, like: Ubuntu, Windows or Mac OS X, it’s difficult to believe that the GUI is a pretty old idea. Presumably it was invented in the PARC laboratories of Xerox, in the seventies of the previous century, that is in the times, when personal computers were created. Actually we owe to Xerox a lot more. Except the mentioned GUI, there are also: the computer mouse, local area network (LAN), the use of small images (icons) to control the computer, the WYSIWYG mechanism, a purely object-oriented programming language Smalltalk and a massive overall contribution in creating the personal computer.
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