Hallo! I’ve created this blog for the sole purpose of improving our computer user experience. It consists of this single (evolving) post.

I’ve spent at least a solid year of my short life interfacing with computers, and it’s beginning to show. My wrists hurt, my eyes hurt, my head hurts, and my heart aches. I’m a near-sighted young man with a [smallish] dominant right hand, and I was not made to use computers!

My eyes like arcs and circles and spirals and tendrils. My brain likes mindmaps and pieces of pie, preferably somewhere close to both the cursor and to the center of the screen. When holding a mouse, my hands like to move from side to side rather than down. When writing on a smartphone, my right thumb really likes to swoosh over the keys, but it doesn’t like extending too far. My heart, well my heart beats hard for the freedom of real choice. I’m slowly dying within the confines of the decades-old metaphors that rule my Windows, my OSX, my Linux, my ChromeOS, my iOS, my WebOS, my Androids, my Symbian.

The world has poured billions of dollars and countless hours into the production of more powerful hardware, more optimised code, fancier eye-candy. I now need your help with diverting some of those dollars and some of those hours to the task of helping me get my perfect user experience.

If you know of programs and projects that take interesting approaches to UI design (or that fit the descriptions on my wishlist), please post links in a comment. Likewise if you have ideas and peeves and requests of your own. They’ll be added to this post. I hope they’ll lead us to our chunky tomato sauce nirvana :)

If you have the time, please also write your local OS-developer (eg. Microsoft, Canonical, Apple, Google, xda-developers). They’re doing incredible work, but they could certainly make my life a lot easier.

Cheers!

-- P

Wishlist:

• Keyboard-app similar to Swype and SlideIt. Occupies only one side of the screen in landscape mode. Presents list of suggestions at far left of screen, far right, top, bottom, or in the middle (between keyboard and text input field). A gesture-based virtual keyboard that takes handedness into account and that doesn’t require stretching during one-handed use in landscape mode.
• Completely customisable keyboard app (with respect to content and layout). Eg. if I want to have a dedicated button for “.la” in the place of the “< > |” key when entering a URL.
• Original text input apps such as 8pen (but not 8pen).

• Menus that open in arcs.
• Context-menus that are horizontally organised. Curvy and organic paths optional. Should open towards whatever area is likely to be in focus.
• Context-menus that present options in a simple grid instead of a squished top-down list with tiny text. Press the Menu button at the homescreen of your LauncherPro-equipped Android device for an example. Sub-menus to slide out.