I just watched a very eye-opening video from the makers of Enso. Aza is giving a talk to the folks at Google.
One of the knee-jerk reactions with the rise in popularity of AJAX was to run around trying to make all Web 2.0 apps look and behave like desktop apps. While some of this was necessary just to bring web-apps “up to speed” with their desktop cousins (since we lost a lot of capabilities like: undo/redo, cut/copy/paste [for objects instead of just plain text]), rather than stopping to think if there was even a BETTER way.
One of my favorite lines in the early portion of this video is:
You can’t be better without being different.
One very subtle item I noticed as Aza was demo’ing some of the features of Enso, which among other things, is a command-line interface for your computer: Most command-line interfaces, even the good ones like QuickSilver for the Mac, expect that you conform to a certain grammer – like “verb” before “noun”. Enso seems to look for character combinations as you type, even if they appear in the middle of a multi-word command, and starts auto-suggesting even from the middle of a sentence fragment, rather than just from the beginning, where the verb would be. It also seems to use synonyms!
Another interesting point he makes is about the Toolkit Straightjacket. The idea is that while toolkits are great for “mass producing” the status-quo of design, the are the antithesis of the evolution of design, because they provide so much incentive to simply pump out the same-old same-old that the toolkit enables you to do. I’ve always preferred to roll-my-own software rather than relying on too many off-the-shelf libraries, because of very similar thinking.
This is inspiring stuff. I wonder how to make use of this in main-stream web-apps in the mean time, ’til they get scooped up and stuck into the OS…
