Xanadu Basics 1b-- INDIRECT DOCUMENT DELIVERY

Multimedia and HyperText: The Internet and Beyond, by Jakob Nielsen, SunSoft (1995). link link I hadn't come across this book before, but I popped for the Kindle edition, and found an excerpt about HyperTIES. It also goes into fascinating detail about many other early hypermedia systems. Jakob Nielsen writes deep well-researched books and articles about usability and user interface design, and he gives excellent talks and keynotes! (He's aka "guru of Web page usability", "king of usability", and "usability Pope", but definitely not "usability Godfather"! ;) ) link) link His raises important points about Hyperties' design being focused on ease-of-use by museum visitors and ease-of-authoring by museum curators and historians, the simple consistent keyboard interface, configurable link colors, and the definition window at the bottom of the screen that previews descriptions of link targets in context before you even visit them (often making it not necessary to even follow a link and lose your context). And he describes the different touchscreen interfaces like the "Lift-Off" strategy that Rich Potter designed and empirically evaluated with Hyperties. Some of these ideas are useful but missing features that I wish modern web browsers would natively support (like pie menus, of course). What Jakob Nelson's book didn't mention was that the Sun NeWS research version also featured built-in and use-defined pie menus for navigation, window management, font and color selection, embedded PostScript applets with interactive widgets, scalable color PostScript pictures and animations, pop-up cut-out embedded graphical links, as well as tabbed windows in the emacs based authoring tool. >Hyperties (1983) >Hyperties was started as a research project by Ben Shneiderman [Shneiderman 1987b] at the University of Maryland around 1983. It was originally called TIES as an abbreviation for The Interactive Encyclopedia System, but since that name was trademark by somebody else, the name was changes to Hyperties to indicate the use of hypertext concepts in the system. >Since 1987 Hyperties has been available as a commercial product on standard PCs from Cognetics Corporation. Research continues at the University of Maryland, where a workstation version has been implemented on Sun workstations. >One of the interesting aspects of the commercial version of Hyperties is that it works with the plain text screen shown in Figure 3.3. It is thus suited for DOS users. Hyperties also works with the main graphics formats on PCs and PS/2s and can display color images if the screen can handle them. >The interaction techniques in Hyperties are extremely simple and allow the interface to be operated without a mouse. Some of the text on the screen is highlighted and the user can activate those anchors either by clicking on them with a mouse, touching if a touch screen is available, or simply by using the arrow keys to move the cursor until it is over the text and then hitting ENTER. Hyperties uses the arrow keys in a special manner called "jump keys," which cause the cursor to jump in a single step directly to the next active anchor in the direction of the arrow. This way of using arrow keys has been optimized for hypertext where there are normally only a few areas on the screen that the user can point to and the use of keys has been measured to be slightly faster than the mouse (see Chapter 6). Figure 3.3: htt