The Future is Movie OS

You may be onto something here.<p>I remember reading somewhere that Bond gadgets become true after something like 30 years, however I suspect that this pace of development will be speed up dramatically as time goes on. Some examples off the top of my head: GPS - there's an old Bond movie with a analog 'homing device', weapons on cars, cars that can drive on the road and fly also, 'stealth technology' like in Die Another Day (in development).<p>Getting back to movie inspired OSs, the guy who designed the amazing gesture interface behind those in 'Minority Report' started a company and has prototype UI in development:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwVBzx0LMNQ" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwVBzx0LMNQ</a><p><a href="http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/futuristic-minority-report-computer-interface-makes-a-real-life-debut-20100217/" rel="nofollow">http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/futuristic-minority-repor...</a>

I think to a certain extent we already had Movie OS in the early 00s / late 90s when all kinds of apps were skinned. People would make all kinds of baroque skins that looked like they came out of movies, that acted much like this, but you know what? They were cluttered and hard to use.<p>Who remembers Winamp 3, with its fancy skins[1]. I know I breathed a sigh of relief when iTunes with its simple, yet highly functional, interface came out.<p>1. As an example: <a href="http://www.thg.ru/technews/images/winamp_skin-270206.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.thg.ru/technews/images/winamp_skin-270206.jpg</a>

Unfortunatelly, Movie OS is horrible security-wise.

Interestingly enough, the "It's a UNIX operating system" moment from Jurassic Park used real software. It's called fsn: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn</a>

There was an article at UIST (a user interface conference) making similar points about 15 years ago. Here's one free version of the paper: <a href="http://research.sun.com/techrep/1995/abstract-33.html" rel="nofollow">http://research.sun.com/techrep/1995/abstract-33.html</a> That paper had some actual concrete recommendations for different kinds of animations that were implemented in Self.

And people will still ignore the flashing lights because they want to click the dancing bunny.

I have to say, I hope the future looks a lot less like Movie OS and a lot more like the Anti-Mac: <a href="http://www.useit.com/papers/anti-mac.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.useit.com/papers/anti-mac.html</a>

I guess the thing may be that movies have the luxury of make-believe; that is, they have absolute freedom with these interfaces because as someone else pointed out, they don't actually have to function. Sure, their dialogs and warning messages are great to convey a single important message, but what about someone who needs to do something on the computer that reports the "lockdown" status of an area? And do you really want it displayed with a huge green bar every time you get into something that was previously protected? Aren't there some situations where discretion is preferable?<p>In the milder example of the email flying off the screen, who wants to sit around and wait for a few seconds watching these animations in everyday use? Sure, they're a neat one-off or demo, but when you have a stack of emails to pop off, nobody wants to sit around and wait for that cute little animation to finish. You can probably toggle it, but after the first few times, who would leave it on? It seems like something that would just make grandma's computer usage even slower.<p>I do think that we could probably look at movies more and try to cherry-pick some cool ideas for dialogs or animations, but in general movie widgets, like everything else in the movies, are larger-than-life. They wouldn't work if you tried to deploy them as a real usable UI.

I think it's nice for a UI to show you things in a way you can respond to on an almost instinctive level, but will it help with UI designers who just don't think?

Completely 100% agreed. Apple already knows this which is why is makes such heavy use of animations and lavish graphics in its UIs.

For my daily work of pounding out code, I'd certainly want none of this going on. I always disable silly OS animations. However, for my 2 kids who instantly 'get' my iPhone and iPad but feel less secure with my MacBook, I think Movie OS is the kind of thing that would convey useful meaning ... until they understood it all and the varnish wears off and they're asking how to disable the Movie so they can work with the OS.

To me, many of the issues are the computer telling the user about stuff they shouldn't have to worry about. For example, wouldn't cloud computing solve most of these problems by not giving the responsibility for the problem to the user?<p><i>Change your battery</i> You shouldn't lose your work if the battery fails<p><i>Formatting this volume...</i> People would not do sys. admin themselves like this<p><i>Permanent delete</i> With storage so large nowadays, there is no particular reason to delete something for space reasons.<p><i>Disk full</i> Shouldn't happen, in the cloud it could never happen, you just get charged more. Gmail for example was designed never to get full.<p><i>Checking for software</i> In the cloud it would always be upto. date<p><i>Downloading messages progress bar</i> Well with web apps it's either loaded or it's not.<p>Of course these are not the only problems, but are the type that are most difficult for users because they are more about sys. admin than getting the task done.