iabervon's Journal: User Interface design ideas

I am designing for the case where every user has a "home" machine, which has the user's files as well as the applications the user wants to use. An individual user might have multiple home machines, but has a separate identity for each. Users are sitting at either the home machine or a remote machine.

All of the configuration should be on the home machine, because the user is likely to sit down at a new remote machine frequently (i.e., go to a friend's house, and log in from there). The home machine should, however, be able to chose different configurations based on the remote machine in use, since a user will likely want a different UI depending on the speed of the connection, the capabilities of the remote machine, etc. Remote machines should be identified both individually and by negotiated features.

The interface layer will present to the application a set of capabilities which may be used. Without some capaibilities, the application may refuse to run (without graphics, an image viewer will not work), may run with limited functionality (an image editor might still let you scale or crop an image unseen), or may simply skip using the capabilities (an HTML viewer will use a label instead of graphics, or just ignore sounds).

The interface layer is intended to be "narrow", such that relaying instructions over a network connection is quick. This means both that simple commands must remain simple (e.g., "display this text"), and that a "smart" implementation must be able to indicate its cleverness (e.g., if multiple independant buffers are supported on the remote end, the application must be able to use this to switch between buffers without repainting each one).