It’s true that natural language is way better and more advanced than command line instructions. In fact, commmand line style is RECALL whereas natuaral language is RECOGNITION only the other way around: the computer recognises your messages in a natural way.

Well, substitute “command lines” for “text input” and I’ll still be able to sustain my argument. Take into account that efforts to humanize command lines by making them able to parse natural language are also much older than GUIs. What I mean is, the collision front between text input and GUIs started in the eighties, and what we’re witnessing now is a symmetric phenomenon, only at a smaller scale.

For instance, it was in 1994 that Umberco Eco made that funny statement that MacOS is catholic, whereas MS-DOS is protestant. Those were the latest turbulences of the old collision front. Since then, for more than ten years, the victory of the graphical counter-reform had flattened the interface landscape (at least, as mass-market users were concerned –power users, sysadmins and developers had remained semi-loyal to the now occult command line faith). It wasn’t until recently that new Luteros such as Quicksilver and Ubiquity have nailed their language-centered manifestos on the very doors of the graphical cathedrals, to boldly remind us that, for many applications, language can be far more powerful than graphical object manipulation as a human-machine communication system :-)

For example, I know that “rm -r folder” is something I learnt and is not something I would come up with myself easily, “remove this folder and all its contents” is far easier to remember, but less practical. With Ubiquity all I need to do is think of the concept of what I want to do and start typing. If I’m on a website that I want to add to planetaki, I would think “planetaki” or “add to planetaki”, and this is exactly what one would type in, ubiquity realises that we are on a page that we want to add to our planet.

So one deals with commands, the second deals with concepts and works out the command, a very subtle but important difference. I wonder how long it will be before a I can shout to the computer “add to planetaki” or “email this to Javier”… rather more exciting than a command line!

sam

http://www.planetaki.com/ubiquity

Just a tiny test based on a Google Reader one. Even detects if there is a feed available… I’ve also decided type “pl” is easier than clicking a bookmarklet :-)

sam

Sam: You know that persons (I’m tired of saying users) are too far more unpredictable than we could ever think. While the easiest way (we could say the only!) to visit a site with already known URL is typing the address in the the address bar, you know that many of them rather type the address in the search box in Google. So … already started creating the command? :-)

sam