Neural Gourmet Archives | Feed Your Brain
Neural Gourmet Archives | Feed Your BrainJust a quickie before I head out to do early morning battle at Big Box Mart... Slashdot has a story on the Star Trek: The Next Generation LCARS theme being developed for the Nokia 770 tablet PC. While this rates very high on my coolness scale, I can't say I would find such a thing enjoyable. Don't get me wrong, Michael Okuda will probably go down in history for this bit of graphic design and I must admit that it's visually stunning. In fact, I'll go so far as to cop to having had a LCARS theme on my Windows box back in the Win 98 days but for everyday use it's just too visually cluttered. Judging by how many icons I see on the typical Windows user's desktop perhaps I'm abnormal in this perception.
The biggest drawback though is that every damn interface component emits a sound. Sure, in the heat of battle on a noisy starship I can see where this would be an advantage; giving audible feedback of an action. I would think though that in the 24th Century humans would have figured out how to give tactile feedback on touchscreen displays. However, here in the early 21st Century the constant stream of bleeps and bloops is just damn bloody annoying.
Still, even if I should not have been, the Slashdot blurb surprised me. Did you know there's an LCARS standards board? Which leads me to wonder... When will we see the Klingon computer interface standards board?
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Can you imagine trying to use that to get any real work done? Even just reading a book? Grr!
I've got to say, despite my riffing on the 770 LCARS theme and LCARS standards board, both are really solid pieces of work. I'm still not sure I'd want something like these for my everyday handheld environment, but I like the idea of alternative interfaces and it's something I'd like to see more of.
I hadn't really looked at the Nokia 770 as a product before but it looks like a nice piece of kit. I'm still disappointed by battery life in handheld PCs (3 hours browsing time for the 770) and even if I had the money I probably couldn't justify the price (about $350-$400 on pricegrabber.com). If battery life in a device like the 770 could be extended to say 6 or 8 hours I'd be inclined to think differently though.
Other than aesthetics, what makes LCARS such a stunning piece of design? It doesn't seem particularly intuitive, or indeed particularly clever or original. I think Okuda did a good job at set design, not interface design.
The TNG interface bothers me for a veriety of reasons, and one of them is - surprisingly - the fact that I think it is simply too slick for its job. A purely electronic interface could be prone to failure in an emergency, I'd like a few mechanical backups, please. Plus, where are the greasy fingermarks?
