gesture interface

A short compilation of the gesture and multitouch interface scenes from the film Minority Report.

A short demo of Code Bubbles, an IDE interface built around editable code fragments in bubbles instead of files. It was a research prototype for Java development.

Tantacrul critiques the UX and UI of Steinberg's Dorico music notation software, comparing it with Sibelius and user testing it with real musicians alongside his own attempt to compose in it.

A 1982 Xerox PARC film, presented at CHI '90, in which Star designers David Canfield Smith and Charles Irby give an overview of the Xerox Star interface. It shows the document-centric, icon-and-window office system.

Tantacrul dissects the UX and UI of Avid's Sibelius music notation software, going through a long list of bad design choices. The review is both a comic rant and a practical lesson in interface design.

A 1997 Computer History Museum lecture in which Larry Tesler and Chris Espinosa recount how the Apple human interface was born, from the Lisa through the Macintosh. It covers design decisions such as discoverability and the standard editing keys.

Tantacrul gives a detailed UX and UI design review of the MuseScore 3 notation software and compares it with Sibelius. It examines visual appeal, navigation and notation quality.

Lex Fridman interviews Bryan Johnson, founder of Kernel and previously Braintree, about brain-computer interfaces and Kernel's non-invasive brain monitoring hardware. It covers what the devices can do today and the company's plans.

Google ATAP's 2015 introduction to Project Soli, a radar-based sensor on a chip that tracks sub-millimeter hand motions for gesture interaction in small devices.

A demonstration of the 1982 Xerox Star user interface, including its desktop, icons, documents, networking and printing. The uploader argues that Apple's later Lisa and Mac interfaces evolved from these ideas rather than copying them.

Erik Meijer argues that category theory is the mathematicians' version of interface-based design. He shows that Java 8 lambdas and method references form a Cartesian closed category.

A short clip from the film Idiocracy showing a hospital reception computer where staff pick a condition from a board of simple pictorial buttons.

Second half of a demonstration of the 1982 Xerox Star user interface. It shows how the Star differed from the later Lisa and Mac interfaces, with strengths in networking and printing and little direct manipulation.

A JSConf 2014 talk visually breaking down algorithms behind everyday UI patterns, such as dropdown menus that vanish when the mouse drifts and picking the nearest target to the cursor. It shows how these are implemented in JavaScript.

A promotional video for Leap, the navigation technology invented by Jef Raskin, demonstrated on the Canon Cat computer around 1987. It shows keyboard-driven search and cursor positioning in place of a mouse.

Ben Eater explains how the PS/2 keyboard interface works, covering its clocked serial protocol and scancodes. He builds up the hardware-level understanding needed to read keypresses.

Pranav Mistry demos SixthSense, a wearable device that projects information onto the physical world and lets people interact with data through gestures. He also shows a paper "laptop" and says he will open-source the software.

A Google Tech Talk arguing that the best interface requires the fewest clicks and choices, with Google search, Facebook, the iPod and Firefox as examples. It shows how minimizing interaction makes interfaces easier to learn.

A short PBS NewsHour clip of Elon Musk making a gesture at the post-inauguration celebration in January 2025, which many described as a fascist salute. The report includes the remarks he made just before it.

A Burnistoun sketch in which a voice-recognition elevator cannot understand two Scottish men saying the number eleven. It satirizes voice interfaces that fail on accents.

A TV show about Ivan Sutherland's 1963 MIT thesis software Sketchpad, which ran on the TX-2 computer. It shows a light pen drawing, constraints, snapping, scaling and object-style graphics, foundations of GUIs and CAD.

Russ Cox gives a 23-minute tour of the Acme text editor from Plan 9, showing its mouse-driven interface, executing commands from text, and its filesystem-based interface to other programs.

Bret Victor's closing keynote at UIST and SPLASH 2014 argues that our tools for thinking ignore most of human sensory and motor capability. He sketches representations that engage more modalities beyond screens and keyboards.

Casey Muratori's 2005 video introducing immediate-mode GUIs as an alternative to retained widget toolkits. He explains the motivation and shows minimal-state button logic.

A three-minute Emacs Rocks screencast demonstrating Magit, the Git interface inside Emacs, including staging and other everyday operations.

David MacKay's 2007 Google Tech Talk presents Dasher, a text-entry system driven by continuous gestures and a language model, reaching about 35 words per minute with one finger and 25 hands-free. It explains the information-theory reasoning behind the design.

An animated, profane rant critiquing Windows 8, especially its touch-first interface on desktop PCs. The author draws on a background in tech journalism to lay out the UX problems.

A seven-minute demo from the author of Notcurses, a C library for text user interfaces. It shows the 2.3.0 release, which adds Sixel and Kitty bitmap graphics integrated into its multiplane character-graphics model.

Accursed Farms' hour-plus critique of the modern desktop GUI. It argues that current interfaces are a regression from older designs such as Windows 7 and proposes principles for better ones.

Avi Bryant demos Dabble DB, a web-based spreadsheet-like database for building apps without code. It shows how users can model and relate data through a smooth interface.

Steve Jobs demos NeXTSTEP Release 3, showing the object-oriented development environment and UI that later became the basis of Mac OS X. Midway through he builds a database-backed GUI app with Interface Builder and Enterprise Objects Framework with almost no code.

Alan Kay demonstrates GRaIL, a graphical input language system from around 1968 in which hand-drawn strokes become boxes, connections and dataflow-style programs.

A demo of the 8pen, a gesture-based keyboard replacement for touchscreens that lets users enter text by moving around a circle. It is meant for phones, remotes and game controllers and mimics handwriting.

A 1984 Computer Chronicles segment in which Susan Kare explains the ergonomics and interface design of the original Macintosh. She introduces the interface step by step for newcomers.

Andrew Price presents at the Blender conference on the problems, politics and possible fixes for Blender's user interface, followed by a full Q&A. He argues that an interface upgrade is overdue.

An episode of the BSD Now podcast in which Bryan Cantrill joins the hosts to rant about Linux interfaces, alongside the week's BSD headlines. The conversation also touches on containers and related systems topics.

A short Italian-language clip about the Canon Cat, a text-oriented personal computer from Canon designed by Jef Raskin, who started the Macintosh project. It shows the machine in use.

Jason Perkins's talk at Vintage Computer Festival East 2020 compares the user interface of the Xerox Star with that of the Apple Lisa. It covers editing documents, the Star's mouse and a Q&A.

A REACT episode where teenagers try Windows 95 for the first time and react to the retro interface and technology.

A short demo of Sun Microsystems' Looking Glass, a 3D desktop GUI concept for a future operating system.