A consistently valuable interface design prompt for me: how would I do [X activity] with paper/pen/physical tools? The answer is often so much more fluid and improvisational than typical UI idioms and "data structures" tend to produce!
Conversation
If I "highlight" something on a computer, it needs to represent that with a literal start offset and length. But annotating a physical document is often intentionally vague and gestural—attach a sticky to the general vicinity of an area, shade a line down the margin, etc.
3
2
30
I can improvise purpose-specific solutions with a physical highlighter: draw a box around something; make special marks in a personal code; write big-font marginalia. Most interfaces permit only pre-set verbs and a small surrounding space of creative repurposing.
Replying to
This is an old problem, of course. There's a great discussion in "Formality considered harmful"[1] (via , I think!). See also Smalltalk, Dynamicland, Chalktalk…
[1] andymatuschak.org/files/papers/S
1
2
35
Replying to
Intuition keeps telling me that basic writing implements should be easy to replicate online. But getting a highlighter to work like that everywhere on a computer… yikes. Reminds me of Moravec’s Paradox.
1
(What if an application doesn’t use the standard library for scrolling animations? Would you have to use computer vision? How would it handle 3D effects?)
1
Show replies