see the iphone, a usual way of scrolling it to click somewhere around the scrollbar, that obviously sucks especially on a small touch screen, so they use clickless gestures.
while this experiment may not have directly influenced the iphone devs, it may have, and its in the same direction.
our interfaces are terrible at the moment, anything that pushes innovation into smarter ways of working with computers is good in my book.
I do agree that as a demo they pushed it to its limits, and that a lot of the cases its impractical, but there are positive lessons to be learnt that can be applied in real situations (like the iphone)
This is some fantastic new definition of "clickless" which I have been previously unaware of. You never remove your finger from the surface of your iPhone? I think you may be doing it wrong.
You're sort of right, but not in the direction you think you are. Finger swipes and gestures carry more information than clicking. The entire point of the clickless interface is for the user to convey less information that clicking; as I've referred to it in another context, the author believes that the solution to the problems of "point and grunt" interfaces is to reduce it to a "point" interface.
Modern mouse interfaces actually have more types of grunts (like the relatively recent scrollwheel innovation), and the iPhone multitouch is a way to get several types of grunts onto a touchscreen that previous had just tap and drag. Totally the opposite direction from this demo. If the iPhone developers carried anything away from this Flash demo, it was to head further away from this approach.
Interestingly, I was about to post a conclusion to this post based on how nobody has ever adopted this interface for anything, but I just realized that as of yesterday (in the US), I am wrong. Totally serious. The new DS game Knights in the Nightmare uses this interface for combat. It is adapted to the touchscreen by making a persistent cursor that simply stays still if you remove the stylus (which in general is a bad idea in the game), and if you then touch some other part of the screen, the cursor will head straight for it with a maximum speed (so no teleporting around the screen). Weapons are deployed with dragging, commands are triggered with hovering and some light gesturing, and so on. It's interesting, but it's also a decent demonstration of why you don't want to use this for serious work. It's one thing when you trigger the wrong unit in a game, it's quite another when you delete the wrong file.
I dont believe the clickless interface is trying to make the user convey less information, but instead its trying to interpret information the user is already conveying in a smarter way, so they dont have to produce redundant information (the clicks).
Im sure I know of one or two good uses of this in practice, but its late and they arent coming to me right now.
"I dont believe the clickless interface is trying to make the user convey less information,"
This is a matter of information theory. It is an objective fact that only moving a mouse provides less information than a mouse that can also click. That is also why using this inferface is slower than using a conventional interface; you have to convey the same number of bits, but you have a smaller bandwidth to do it in. It is also, now that I think about it, a relatively decent explanation of why I consider this demoware; cutting down the bandwidth from human to computer certainly does have the effect of simplifying the interface, but only by slowing the user down and constraining the amount of information that can be extracted from the user. Throw this interface at a real problem with even more bits needing to be extracted from the user and the problems and slowdown will only compound. I don't think that most of us are looking to be slowed down.
In that entire paragraph, only that last sentence is opinion. The rest is a very simple application of information theory.
If you feel like you have to argue with that fact, I suggest brushing up on your information theory first. I'm not kidding about the objective fact bit. If you'd like to argue that interfaces should be based on reducing the amount of information extracted from the user, feel free, that is a conceivable argument, but it certainly flies in the face of experience and current interface developments.
(By the way, why am I being so harsh? It's education, albeit more for the audience than anybody else. Liking this interface as art is great, heck even I think it's sort of cool that way, but thinking it's actually a useful revolution is a sign that you are applying very weak thought processes to the idea, and it's helpful to see things like the simple application of information theory to the topic.)
"In that entire paragraph, only that last sentence is opinion. The rest is a very simple application of information theory."
urm, only the first sentence is an "objective fact", the rest is your opinion and fuzzy attempts at reasoning, if you are going to patronise, please be right.
while its true that the interface is sending less information, its entirely your opinion that there is not enough information already being sent by the user to determine what exactly they want to do.
thousands of people have installed mouse gesture plugins, the xbox natal project looks to be an entirely gesture driven, the idea that this type of interface is pie in the sky "art", as opposed to a useful experiment is well, wrong.
I usually wouldnt mind discussing this more but you have pretty much put me off any further conversation.
and please note I said "worthwhile experiment", not "revolutionary"
see the iphone, a usual way of scrolling it to click somewhere around the scrollbar, that obviously sucks especially on a small touch screen, so they use clickless gestures.
while this experiment may not have directly influenced the iphone devs, it may have, and its in the same direction.
our interfaces are terrible at the moment, anything that pushes innovation into smarter ways of working with computers is good in my book.
I do agree that as a demo they pushed it to its limits, and that a lot of the cases its impractical, but there are positive lessons to be learnt that can be applied in real situations (like the iphone)