LCARS on the Nokia 770
Just a quickie before I head out to do early morning battle at Big Box Mart... Slashdot has a story [1] 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 [2] 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 [3]? Which leads me to wonder... When will we see the Klingon computer interface standards board?
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