Ted Nelson @ FACT

Web I've just returned from seeing Ted Nelson, the man who coined the term 'hypertext' speak at the FACT centre in Liverpool in the first of a series of annual lectures comemmorating Roy Stringer who was fundamental in helping to set up the FACT organisation. I went because of my dissertation topic, 'hyperlink cinema', hoping that he might say something which would trigger a new line of thought. It didn't quite happen that way. I was going to write a massive entry synopsising the main thrust of his argument, but since he designed the concept of hypertext, I think it would be more in keeping to link to Ted's wikipedia entry which actually eccentuates the main thrust of his arguments.

I could certainly identify with the opening of the talk, in which he suggested that really software should be thought of as branch of movie making. That people who design software should take the cues from classic cinema, from Eisenstein and Welles. He talked about how the opening of Disney's Pinnocio is better than Snow White because he learnt that if was better to have Jimmy Cricket singing and introducing the film rather than endless pages of information -- getting information across as unobtrusively as possible. I do think a lot of software is designed this way, although I understand that much the time designers are papering over the cracks or looking for new ways to follow the same approach. As he said, Windows, Linux and Macs all basically use variations on the same interface.

He continued that the reason that most games are better designed than office software is because they have directors where as office software is put together by programmers who are closer in this context to cameramen. He offered Pacman as a model for office software because there was no need for a manual -- you understood the game straight away. Critical of Photoshop as being uncomfortable to use and unintuitive and requiring a manual for most features.

Nelson has a ready wit and the biggest laugh of the evening happened when he described Steve Jobs as being like a very good movie director, but Bill Gates is a traffic cop, directing a mass of software created under weak principals. He describes himself as the only dissenter in the computer field because everyone else accepts that hierarchical directories are good - as is the simulation of paper, reminding us that all GUI interfaces were designed in the 1970s by people working for Xerox.

There were many demonstrations of the software he's designing. For anyone who knows about such things he played through the Xanadu Cosmic Book system, which is hypertext that includes a line linking back to the original document, also still visible to show the original context. There was also Billowtalk in which text increases in size when most important to the user. Some of his approaches are about expressing information in a three dimensional space -- there were a couple of systems on display which seemed quite fiddly to use with a mouse. When I asked about that Ted pulled a gamepad from his bag and plugged it in, providing a much smoother user experience.

I sometimes feel a bit isolated when it comes to the web because whenever I try to talk about my online activity, this blog in particular, people tend to think it's a bit strange. Last time I felt entirely secure was when I met Suw Charman a few years ago. It was amazing to see so many people gathered who were in my context, using the same websites I do. I've never been in a Q&A in which people are asking questions about Creative Commons licenses, Web 2.0, upcoming and flickr and in one case mentioned that they have a blog. Ian Jackson from Art In Liverpool was there too which made three of us, although I'm sure there were others. So what I really enjoyed about the evening was being in a room with lots of people having a similar online experience to me.