Then and Now: How Little Things Have Changed (2016)
This article sounds poorly researched to me - examples:<p><pre><code>  * He doesn’t have any interest in learning to program, so he doesn’t attempt to create new things with computers.
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AppleScript has been around for a while now - and since OS X you have a full UNIX system with terminal too. Johnny may just be a consumer, but Doris Developer has a mac too.<p><pre><code>  * The desktop paradigm has been around in the 1984 Mac — it’s time to re-think interfaces at just about every level.
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It&#x27;s not like this hadn&#x27;t been tried (GNOME 3, Ubuntu, Windows Vista&#x2F;8&#x2F;10, iPad &quot;home&quot;&#x2F;&quot;apps&quot; screen, google&#x27;s mobile-optmised interface guidelines). I would hazard a guess that for productive work, the keyboard&#x2F;mouse&#x2F;desktop interface is actually pretty good.<p><pre><code>  * But there’s nothing inherent about the precision of a mouse that makes it better for content creation.
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For programming, I&#x27;ve yet to see any input device that beats a keyboard. For tasks from photo&#x2F;image editing where sometimes I want 1-pixel precision to games (mostly strategy) to 3D modelling, my experience is that a good mouse is miles better than any touch interface I&#x27;ve seen so far, precisely because of its precision.<p><pre><code>  * [Word] allows people to create single document (that can’t connect to other documents).
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I&#x27;m pretty sure &quot;master documents&quot; have been around for ages, templates even longer and you can certainly manage a bibliography database shared between different documents in recent versions.<p><pre><code>  * The documents must be static, you can’t have any data-driven content 
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I will grant that it&#x27;s not the easiest thing to use, but various forms of OLE and ODBC have been around since about the Windows 3.1 era. Embedding videos and sounds in powerpoint presentations is really common too.<p><pre><code>  * It’s clear: people see the need for new interfaces, and lots of research is being done. Why isn’t any of it hitting the mainstream? I have no idea. Let’s find out, let’s make it happen.
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I don&#x27;t see the need for new interfaces just for the sake of it and a lot of the experiments I&#x27;ve seen over the past years haven&#x27;t exactly been improvements. It&#x27;s got to the point where there&#x27;s a free program called &quot;classic start menu&quot; that gets you the older menu back on newer versions of Windows, or Linux Mint the USP of which is at least for me &quot;like ubuntu but WITHOUT the new interface&quot;.<p>The change from toolbars to ribbons in office also &quot;hit the mainstream&quot; (I think on balance this was a positive change, but I miss the old Control-Shift-V for &quot;paste without formatting&quot;.)