The desktop user interface is a mainstay of computing. Bread and butter, if you will. A pointer, icons, windows, menus and buttons, controlled using a keyboard and a mouse. Ingenious simplicity.

For almost half a century now, we haven't really managed to come up with something better, and that's not for lack of trying. This fact seems to annoy a lot

... See more

20 years ago, Jef Raskin (the founder of the Macintosh project) asserted that the desktop interface strategy was “inefficient and inhumane.”

Last weekend, I gave a talk at @agihouse_org for the "Generative UI" hackathon focusing on "just-in-time UI (JIT UI)." I put together these slides super quickly, so the history will be incomplete, but it's worth starting at the top: Early computing users had to learn how to use text-based... See more