Another thing to consider when looking at things like Quicksilver, Enso, etc. is how they (or variants on them) might support voice as a command channel. I think many of us "old hands" expected that voice- based interfaces would be far more common by 2008 than they are. Maybe one of the reasons we don't see mainstream voice-based interfaces yet is that they don't splice neatly on the GUI / WIMP paradigm, which is (unlike CLIs and QS) oriented toward recognizing, not recalling, commands and items.
Granted, we still have the problems of ambient noise, not-quite- accurate speech recognition and social permissibility (do you want to be in the cube next to someone saying "Excel. New. Template. Time log." all day?), but an interface like Quicksilver's, where the size of the recognizable vocabulary is constrained by context, may lend itself well to augmentation by voice. Imagine that in addition to a QS hot key, you had a "hot word" that you could say to invoke the QS UI, and then you could speak the items that you would otherwise be invoking by typing. Of course the UI would allow you to mix keystrokes and voice, so if you said X and its first match for X wasn't the one you wanted, you could use the arrows to select another one (or, perhaps, say "no" until the one you wanted was selected). I don't know whether you'd be better off splicing voice onto an existing launcher or starting fresh, borrowing QS / Enso / etc. ideas into a new UI that had QS's responsiveness and expressive power, but was more optimized for voice. Of course, OS X already has some voice command ability, but I don't get the impression that many people use it... would a different, QS-like approach be more eagerly accepted, or is the problem with voice more basic? Anybody want to start a project? ;-) ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
