Wednesday, March 12, 2003

Focus and Context. So what I was thinking about last night was focus and context.  This is in the UI sense.  Most software today does a really crappy job of keeping the information you need at your fingertips, in your thinking space, while you're working with it.  Part of the reason is that there's just a lot of it, and where would you put it all? Let's think about programming for a second.  You've got the code you're actually working on.  But wait, there's more to it than that -- you are working on a project, mostly -- the project has a lot of parts.  While you're working on one part, you pretty much need to be continuously referring to other parts (as in, what's the signature for this method, what did I put here, there)...most text editors and programming environments make you flip from one page to another, one editor to another -- it's frustrating.  To see one thing, you have to lose your view of the thing you're really interested in working on.  Focus and context -- the focus is your work, and the context is the information you need to do that work. Most editors and IDEs will allow you to split views, create multiple views, and just generally set things up somehow so you can see more than one thing at once.  I think it's extremely inefficient -- shouldn't the IDE/editor be handling all that for you?  Shouldn't it be providing a good sense of focus and context automatically?  The amount of screen real estate devoted to focus and context should be variable in a continuous sense -- there should be a keystroke for "give me more context", and another for "less context please".  That might make certain adjustments for you, bring in new sources of information, make windows wider/smaller, and so forth. If we break away from the concept of "Rectangle as God" there are more interesting, more organic organizations of information that might be more amenable to a continuously variable focus/context setting...Elliptical shapes and so forth. I need to diagram some of this out on paper. 10:42:18 AM

FM RadioStation. 65 of you read my little bitchin' about FM RadioStation and not one of you could tell me how to fix it?  Let's hope my post at UserLand gets a response.  I need my aggregator back. 10:35:55 AM