Everyone who was familar with the Office 2003 menus and toobars hates the Office 2007 pardigm. There is even a company that sells an addon that provides the 2003 layout, and they are making a fortune. Too bad MS did not provide a simple toggle to let you choose your UI. Bring back Clippy!

Its always great to dream and think of new things but seriously the market has yet to make a simple laptop in your pocket and do you really think a talking PC in your pocket is realistic?

To me there are too many geeks thinking up computer designs and they are people not in tune with what mainstream people want. It is like the cyborg type wear a computer on your face or a TV watch, the same goes for the UMPC’s with no touch type keyboard;they are cool gadgets for geeks but the mainstream does not buy them.

Technology needs to enhance what the mainstream people prefer and feel is easier to use. I think techno computer geeks opinions do not match well for that part of the equation.

A perfect example of repetition the damned computer should be smart enough to do.

I do a bunch of vlc screensnaps. I want them all resized to 440-pixels wide. I should do one, them tell the PC to do the rest itself.

I do a bunch of web screensnaps. All must be cropped the same way, then resized. Instead of me having to manually crop and pay attention to the dimensions, the PC should be able to do everything itself after the first one is manually done.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking and Windows Vista speech recognition has most of the functionality you talked about to recognize and train certain commands but as has been said by yourself Kevin it isn’t intuitive enough yet.

But let me tell you as a disabled person who uses many of the accessibility options in Windows and who also uses his computer 16 hours a day these voice recognition programs do work once you give it a time and effort it deserves.

However what really gets to me these days is that a dual/quad core CPU has many of its cores underutilised. Surely Microsoft in the 21st century has the time and financial wherewithal to utilise all these cores in the next version of Windows as they have done efficiently in Microsoft flight simulator-x.

What’s the first thing Vista users need to disable in order to get decent performance out of their machines ? SUPERFETCH. What’s the purpose of superfetch – to analyze and predict your usage patterns. Microsoft continues to try to do this and fails every time – because by definition people are willful and unpredictable.

Sorry, I don’t do the same things at the same time of day on my computers, and I don’t like to be slowed down because the OS is recalculating my priorities for me every time I do something a bit different.

An instinctive interface has to somehow read my mind and *know* when I want to go free-range. Otherwise, I will turn off these “conveniences” that throttle performance and limit my use of the machine.

Somehow, this post makes me think of the Terminator series and all the “mischief” that Cyberdyne lead…

Assuming Kevin White’s questions weren’t entirely rhetorical, I would say I didn’t have a problem with Windows Start Menu showing me only some of the installed programs, or with Office menus only showing me some items.

For me, the problem was that neither application told me what it was doing, nor offered me a quick and *explicit* route to the full choice if that’s what I wanted. Hence I was confused and exasperated when I first encountered it, as, in my experience, everyone is.

Now that I know these programs are offering me a limited choice, and know how to get the full choice, I don’t mind – and actually get a lot of benefit. But it has cost a lot of bad temper and frustration on my part to get to this point. That’s the trouble, as I see it.

If your computer guesses what you want to do, or learns what you do regularly, what happens when you need to do something different?

What happens when Windows’ Start Menu’s top level shortcuts suddenly include a program you only used a couple of times, bumping off a more-regularly-used program? (Why is there a 400×24 WM6 Emulator in my start menu shortcuts? I haven’t launched that program for the better part of a MONTH!)

What happens when Office helpfully hides all your menu items, causing you to click around extra to find the one that you need *right now*?

I don’t think we really want computers to guess what we want to do. We want computers to solve problems for us. We want to say, “computer, I have a problem, it is this: blah.” and we want the computer to say, “Okay, I have done X Y and Z.” (I’m getting an image of Scotty talking into a Macintosh mouse…)

*Other People* can’t guess what we want to do. How often do you get gifts that are only ‘the thought that counts’?

If computers could talk back like people, then maybe we would feel comfortable talking to them. If you could have a conversation with one, instead of having to repeat yourself like you do with those phone systems… “Hi, I’m the customer service phone droid! Tell me your home phone number.” “555-1212″ “I’m sorry, did you say 642-1975?”

I’ve often had similar thoughts. Most of the time I’m working on the same small set of files, but over the course of a year I will gradually move from concentrating on one set of files to another. Why doesn’t the computer notice this? Why do I have to set up a system of short cuts when I find myself constantly negotiating a hierarchy of folders to get to the files I want.

As for voice input, I can’t see it. I notice the trend in office design (insanely in my view) is towards open plan, to the extent that if you want to do anything that requires thought you have to go somewhere off-site. I suppose ‘thought’ is an inefficient use of time and not to be encouraged. It would be 10 times worse if everyone was talking to their machines. I would, in any case, feel an idiot talking to a machine. But maybe that’s a generational thing.

I think we’re going the other way. Vista is driving us back to XP and I think the command line is next. Interesting clip art. Is that the Fabeo interface or the Michael Bolton interface?

Thank you James.

While I don’t think I want my computer “knowing” me that well (who’s to say it won’t “decide” a better way for me to do something?), I sure would like to be able to wake up in the morning and, as I’m stumbling to the bathroom, tell my computer to open my e-mail app or go to my feed app or start up Pandora.

Others might not like it, but I would much rather talk to my computer than touch it.

I’ve experimented with voice control applications, while they aren’t perfect, they are much further along than some people would like you to believe.

Didn’t you basically just detail Microsoft Bob 2.0?

Thus far the marketplace has shown that people don’t like when their computer tries to guess at how it can help them. That said, if it had major advances in AI, I suppose that could change people’s minds.

This is something that is coming, though I’ve heard that programming it is much harder than it would seem. Its not just a matter of the OS/shell “knowing” what to do, but also learning what it is that you do best and then delievering the best interactions.

I would not be surprised if the next version of Windows offers this in a small way. I think to do this within the next 2-3 years for complete device interaction might freak out people more than it makes them go wow. That being said, mobile devices (tablets, smartphones, and feature phones) should be doing this already. They not only have the user data to do such things for items like call lists, web bookmarks, etc., but they are already personal enough that the bridge to such functionality is easier to receive.

I’d settle for a computer I could use in a dock, with a pen or with my fingers for multi-touch. Sometimes each of those is the best interface. Computers that anticipate my needs are fine for deciding what to put in RAM or knowing to do housekeeping when I’m plugged in and not when I’m walking around, but if an intuitive interface is like the “I’m guessing what you want” button on cell phones or the MS Office menus, it needs to be very good before you turn it loose.

voice input is a long ways off. The problem is that it just does not work very well. While geeks love to create things they think mainstream would love like the non keyboard UMPC’s; guess what 350k sold in all of 07′ and 08′ looks just as weak? What is needed is just to make a simple touch type keyboard in a jacket size UMPC. There are creative ways yet to be designed that could take lessons from the Samsung sph p9200.

Pen input basically sucks for mainstream and voice is even more decades away if ever in our lifetimes. Technology is supposed to make our lives easier and the reality is that most people find the touch type keyboard easier than all these touch screens and voice attempts to change things.

>>>One of the things that I notice about the way I work is that I quite often do the same things the same way for the most part.

Get out of my head, Kendrick!! What did I tell you about planting bugs in my mind?! eavesdropping fiend!!

I’ve been thinking about the same thing, almost included a few lines about it in a recent post, but cut the lines as verring too far off the topic.

And now YOU come out and say it.

I’m going to sue for mind plagiarism, I will!! I’ll have X-rays taken to show the judge and jury the bugs you’ve planted! (Probably designed by MS and fabbed by HTC, knowing you!!)