Re: [9fans] Colors and other fun

[Bakul Shah <bakul+plan9@bitblocks.com>]

> i see the point of 3d when doing tools for visualizing representation
> of things that should be moved live like a car model, or a building
> plant or quake. May be he is speaking about this? something like
> opengl or directx :-?

Consider for example google earth or a CAD program -- if you
ever played with revit you'd realize just how clunky Autocad
is.  Consider 3d video games.  Consider something like a
flight simulator -- all the one I played with were very
clunky to interact with.  Can we do something to make it easy
to visualize complex information in a virtual 3d space and
navigate around it or modify it?  Can there be an interface
for a sculptor to model something he wishes to build?  Why
must such things be separate "applications"?  Why can't we
just treat each "window" as a piece of paper and shuffle it
around, bend a corner, crumple it up, stretch it out, do some
origami with?

Take my question in whichever direction you want.
Some times misunderstanding leads to invention!

> > What's more usable about 3d than 2d for a GUI desktop?

Turn your question around.  If you had a 3d UI what useful
(or playful) things can you do that you can't do today?  If
you come up with something you'd want to do, what else can be
added/changed/removed to make the UI simpler and more useful?

> > I use Acme on Mac OS X as my main editor for most things these days
> > actually.  The only things I really miss are when I'm editing scheme or lis
> p
> > and need to match up all those damned parenthesis.  In those cases I use
> > Emacs... it's just better at it (and no stopping to click to highlight
> > open/close parens doesn't do it for me as much as automatic code indentatio
> n
> > based on syntax gets me)

Do you write any haskell/python in acme?

If the editor showed each s-expr at a different height &
color and if you could look at your program from a 45 angle,
you'd see what's what :-)