Text In Columns

In the Windows-centric milieu, certain developments in computer interfaces are slower to show up. This is not flamebait; it's simply how it seems to work. Expose is an obvious, very useful, example of a real, new UI tool that makes using a computer better. (If you don't know what Expose is, go to apple.com and check out a demo -- it's been around for two or three years now, and occasionally (and poorly) copied for Windows.)

A couple of other interesting developments are afoot in human interfaces that are also, so far, mostly confined to Mac users and web-design nerds. But inroads are being made.

The first of development coming around the corner is the idea of reading text on a screen in multiple columns, instead of in a long, skinny vertical column that requires a lot of scrolling to read. There are a couple of factors that make this reasonable: one is that most screens are wider than they are tall, particularly laptop screens. Columns are easier to navigate without using the mouse -- the right arrow moves you over by one column. It's a nicely quantized operation. And the third thing is context. For example:

The International Herald Tribune website has used a columnar format for some time now; it works fairly well and has garnered some acclaim. A news article is laid out in three columns, side by side. The whole rightmost column of text works as a big button: click on it, and the article scoots over by one column. The next column of text scoots in from the right hand side. By this means, you have plenty of context (the two columns you just read) to anchor the new content (the new column you're about to read). Affordances like this are a major positive aspect of reading a book or newspaper, and completely unavailable in a vertical-scrolling setup.

(I wrote that paragraph from memory. In real life, it turns out that the article doesn't scoot over by one column -- it changes to a fresh set of three columns. So in this case, the context advantage doesn't exist. Oops. Just apply those comments to the following instead.)

I mentioned the keyboard -- the website doesn't actually exploit that. But there is a little piece of text-reading freeware that creates a column layout for any piece of plain or rich text, and it lets you fly through the text very easily using only the arrow keys. Called Tofu, and built on some fairly simple Apple APIs, it's only available for the Mac at the moment. Nor is it the most useful thing in the world, for the simple reason that to use it, you have to drag and drop some text onto the program manually (or write a script). This is a process that is only worthwhile if you have a long piece of easily-selectable text to go through. Something downloaded from Project Gutenberg, or a long web page, are good targets.

But something like Tofu has been suggested as a Firefox plug-in -- which would let you apply column logic to all kinds of random web text. And there is even a new "columnar text" spec afoot in the CSS community, so that web pages may begin to build column-reading functionality into themselves with the addition of a single tag.

The second interesting UI trend is something I'll write about more in the future, because it's going to be so significant and so ubiquitous. Hint: with the Google Desktop search tool installed on your Windows box, press Windows-G. It's a keyboard shortcut that gives pre-indexed, instant access to your entire harddrive, entirely from the keyboard.

Sort of.