The Devil's Advocate - Mac UI Ain't All That: The Future & History of the User Interface (with Snazzy New UI Videos) by John Kheit - August 15th, 2006Seems like a good start on the problems with
Mac UI [User Interface] as I have already pointed out before.
However without completely rethinking from the requirements and dumping everything we currently have now, I doubt if we can get a real usable interface. But, in my opinion, good tools create great interface and until the tools are in place, the UI changes wouldn't be much more than cosmetic bit twiddling.
When I say dumping, I mean dump: no more files and folders and disk drives. I shouldn't have to worry about where my data are stored and how. If I crash my computer for some reason, I should turn it back on and everything should be as it was. Even if my harddrive [HDD] is wiped out: maybe a flash drive can boot off the network and I can still use it slowly off of some network drive until a new HDD is replaced -- which would then automatically be reformatted and reinstalled, much like adding a replacement drive on a RAID5 system. And don't give me grief about my data being no longer valid: If I write my doc in Word 5 and then take it to a system with Word 2000, why should I care? I still own my data/document, don't I? Since when did Microsoft claim ownership of my words? I didn't give M$FT any permission to own my words at all [and don't give me none of this click through agreements].
And as for privacy, the data should be encrypted automagically and no one but me should have easy access to them. No one should be able to plant any fake data [or "plant evidence"] nor read my secrets without my permission. [and all transactions would be logged so that any problem can be easily audited by me.] Similar rights would be handy for parents of a minor and that "privilege" would be automatically revoked when that child turns of age [set by the parent(s), of course].
Update 9:30PM: A friend pointed out Mac's FileVault but it's not quite I had in mind: it's got to be the default behavior: the first person to use it automatically gets custom private key generated [which would be put on some secure token like a smart card and multiple copies can be made for backup] and HDD gets encrypted with that the new public key. [actually it can be
encrypted with AES for performance and the key can be regenerated every few days or weeks and reencrypted with the new key (again, much like RAID5 "refilling"). Backups should be encrypted with something stronger than AES since it is more permanent data.] For parental control, the private key would belong to the child but the parental private key(s) would override the children's until of age (or something like it). [Actually too late now to think all that straight]
Copyright 2006, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.
