Samuli Heljo | Natural UI

The Blog

Future user interfaces

published February 2, 2010

Now that Apple revealed the iPad, Goole is showing a concept for Chrome OS with some pictures, Microsoft is working with Windows Surface as well as project natal, and Nokia is unveiling N900, you got to wonder if the new era of user interfaces is upon us. Natural ui is coming which will bring interesting times for web development. Generally, a developer does not make a great user interface designer and natural ui will likely to make things more complex for the poor developer.

In the mean time I would very much like to see progress in modular user interfaces and software development modularity in general. I am not talking about mere software reuse but more like Component-based software engineering. As our problems are growing in size, the need for modular applications is coming more and more evident. There is absolutely no point of doing same thing over and over again.

Could there be a way to combine natural ui with something like component-based engineering? A platform that would provide needed ui components and intuitive user interaction that could just be hooked into a custom made service layer with a rich domain model?

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