
The Anti-Mac User Interface (Don Gentner and Jakob Nielsen from 1996) - soundsop
http://www.useit.com/papers/anti-mac.html
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tdavis
The funny part is, the anti-mac core principles pretty much described the Web
up until recently, but now we're starting to go backwards by making web apps
look and feel more like desktop apps.

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unalone
Yeah. I mean, I like a lot of the innovation on the web, but that's just it -
innovation. I see a lot of these apps wasting resources to look and feel like
a desktop, and I wonder - why? The Internet can do more than that. It's open
to direct URL access. You can make a site that does one thing and does it well
and have it much more convenient and accessible.

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tdavis
Exactly. A good example of what I consider the "Right" way can be found by
looking at a bunch of the Google App Engine sites that are out there -- many
of the most useful ones just expose some specific functionality via a REST
interface. Give it X, you get back Y.

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unalone
What App Engine sites would you recommend? I'll be honest: I don't know if
I've ever seen one in action.

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parenthesis
I particularly liked this:

"Although the use of metaphor may ease learning for the computer novice, it
can also cripple the interface with irrelevant limitations and blind the
designer to new paradigms more appropriate for a computer-based application.
The designers of the Phelps farm tractor in 1901 based their interface on a
metaphor with the interface for the familiar horse: farmers used reins to
control the tractor. The tractor was steered by pulling on the appropriate
rein, both reins were loosened to go forward and pulled back to stop, and
pulling back harder on the reins caused the tractor to back up [5]. It's clear
in hindsight that this was a dead end, and automobiles have developed their
own user interfaces without metaphors based on earlier technologies.
Nonetheless, people today are designing information-retrieval interfaces based
on metaphors with books, even though young folks spend more time flipping
television channels and playing video games than they do turning the pages of
books."

