Spatial Is Not Easier [LWN.net]

Spatial Is Not Easier

Posted May 19, 2004 16:49 UTC (Wed) by markhb (guest, #1003)
In reply to: Spatial Is Not Easier by Prototerm
Parent article: The Spatial Way

You make a couple of good points. First, when I started using OS/2 3.0, before I had seen Win95, the whole "spatial" windowing confused me. My thinking was, I clicked on this folder here, so why did it open over there? Having the new view take the place of the old view made a lot more sense... the folders are nested, just like matryoshka dolls. People can deal with that.

Second, the only other major platform that used a spacial GUI was MacOS n (n < 10), and that had one key distinction from Linux: the user never saw a command line, so they never saw that the folders were actually hierarchical. The illusion of spatial persistence was never broken. Trying to apply a strict spatial metaphor in a CLI-heavy OS like Warp or Linux didn't work in 1994, and I doubt it will be well received by its target audience now.

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