On my flight to the Interaction Design Association’s first conference in Savannah, GA I found it fitting to flip thru the revised Interactions Magazine. Richard Anderson and Jon Kolko, the new editors of the magazine, did a bang up job bringing in an assortment of new contributors which I found quite refreshing.
Notably I really enjoyed Aza Raskin’s perspective on the formation of Humanized’s Enso product. As Jon Raskin’s son (original Mac team), he’s the first person I know who is a second generation interaction designer–very cool. As for Enso, I installed it today and found it to be pretty useful. For those that haven’t tried it, Enso layers a smart command-line interface onto your Mac or PC allowing you to access programs, files, windows, or websites in an instant. Perhaps my favorite feature is that they put Caps Lock to good use (instead of randomly causing you to YELL in emails).
Will a smart command-line interface take off? Well in my mind it already has with the proliferation of Google (e.g. many people navigate to their favorite websites by searching for them vs. clicking a bookmark). The big issue Enso will need to overcome is the recall problem, however with a powerful suggestion feature they’re well on their way to solving that too. Now that Mozilla has acquired Humanized, it seems that Mozilla is slowing pulling together all the pieces for a more effective operating system that just happens to run on top of MacOS or Windows. It should be interesting to see what comes next…