I’m tired of user interfaces. Most of them are clunky, poorly implemented re-incarnations of better interfaces past. Some tools do a really good job, but they aren’t readily re-usable. Some apps have great data models but no way to effectively use them. Way too often I find that I want to use one UI with another app’s data, but alas.

I should say that given the choice, I typically prefer the command line. That’s probably atypical of most users, but most users probably don’t realize what they’re missing. The power of a bash one liner is tough to beat — offering the composition of numerous single-purpose apps in ways that regular GUI users might never imagine. I often think it would be helpful to be able to have standard ways to interact with GUIs programmatically, and I know there are probably techniques and tools for doing so, but it seems like a path fraught with peril.

Standardizing Between Applications

The web browser did a tremendous thing in terms of partially separating the UI from the application data model. Every app developer is allowed to take advantage of or is otherwise forced to consider:

• Standard navigation: forward, back
• Anchors/bookmarks: Copy-paste URLs
• Page searching: single-page only, but ubiquitous
• Standard page structure, styling, and activity

This has made for an improvement in UI consistency that might have been difficult to envision otherwise.

Windows 8 and 10 made a move toward more consistently applied UI features via their “charms” interface. I thought this might be a good idea, but I never got around to trying it.

More Multi-Purpose UIs

I believe this move should continue and to a drastic degree. When I think about the types of data structures that I regularly deal with, I usually can’t come up with many more than ten (though I may not be all that imaginitive):

• Plain text
• Tables
• Trees
• Graphs
• 2D maps
• 3D maps
• Audio
• Video
• Arbitrary data
• Collections of the above

There are certainly a large number of variations on each of these, but I think this group captures the general categories — “arbitrary data” being the catch-all, of course. Step one: find a set of adapters that can represent most of the data formats that I care about as one of the above.

What kinds of things do I tend to do with my data?

• Inspect/view
• Search
• Navigate
• Edit
• Diff
• Transform

“Transform” being the bucket for “all the ways in which I could change my data”. These are innumerable, but also not necessarily interesting enough to warrant consideration here. Step two: find a UI tool for each of the above data categories that performs each of my standard actions. Granted, worst case this is roughly 50 tools, but I tend to think that some of the functions could overlap and in some cases, like audio diffing, they may not be all that interesting.

This is an approach I’ve been slowly pursuing for a couple years. I plan to make some of my work available in the near future.