Breaking out of Little Boxes

Apologies for anything which may be boring in the following page but I am going to talk about computers - sound of half the audience clicking the Back button - sound of cheetos being opened by the other half. Single yelp from the Aardvark who accidentally clicked here.

I have just written a very simple web-based application that we have to put live at some point. I worked on it on an NT box and displayed it in IE on the same box. When the web-server admin type people looked at the page I was immediately struck by the tasteful and rather attractive round edges to the buttons as they saw as opposed to how I saw them (stay with me - the end is worth it). This made me think for a while, through a circuitous route that ended up with a lament on how computers are still based around little boxes - the machines themselves and the stuff they display. I know of course how you set up irregular areas and strange shaped forms but even then the whole concept is based around lines. Now Tony Buzan has been trying to get us to make notes in ways which much better fit with the way our brains operate. I know you can get mind-map software for PCs but even then it seems limited in how it can fit with the nice little rows of data that PCs have to work with. Information Technology has sometimes removed all the clutter that business used to have. We have fitted everything into little boxes of disks but I am sure you know that putting everything on computer just gives you a lot of ordered clutter. At the bit level everything is nice and orderly but then again at the atomic level everything is uncluttered (in its own quantum type way). We need to break out of these little boxes and start designing organic type PC programs.

I know the Internet is big and that there have been some attempts to do this. It is quite depressing to see that Tony Buzan's own web-site only has a few examples of his mind maps. Most of the stuff is just lists, which is what I thought he was against. I have seen web-sites which are just seemingly random links between drawings but which seem to convey much more meaning than any text list could.

Meanwhile, for a site with some claim to be doing exactly what I say (yes I know it is all unoriginal and you have heard it all before) go here. You don't have to be able to read French and even if you do it probably won't make the experience any more enjoyable. See you next time. I'm Adam Hart-Davies - Good Night. No I'm not. Sorry about that.