Sergey Andreyev

Sergey Andreyev

Science and engineering have requests for a wide variety of programs, but I think that all of them can be divided between two groups. Programs of the first group deal with the well known situations and, by using well known equations, give results for any combination of input parameters. Such programs are specialized very powerful calculators. Another group of programs is needed to analyse the situations with different levels of uncertainty. Programs are developed at the best level of their authors, but scientists need to look at the situations beyond the area of current knowledge, and they need programs to do analysis in the areas of uncertainty. Is it possible do design programs which allow to analyse the situations beyond the knowledge of developers?

Sergey Andreyev

At the beginning, programming was inspired by the search of the best solutions. At that time some fundamental stones like famous languages and object oriented and structured programming were laid. It was found later that applications could generate huge profits; after it marketing departments started to decide what was right and wrong. Programs are ruled by developers but declared user-friendly; millions of users are going mad trying to get the needed results from these applications. Research goes on and new results can be opposite to business view. History shows that not science has to adjust to business, but eventually business will have to adapt to the results of the research work.

Sergey Andreyev

This article is about one feature which was partly introduced 30 years ago with the development of multi windows operating systems. It is about the movability of screen objects not according to some predetermined algorithm but by the direct user action. Many years ago it was introduced on a very limited basis and nothing was improved since then. Smartphones and tablets give direct access to screen elements but on a very limited set of commands (scroll and zoom). There is an easy to use algorithm which turns any screen object into movable / resizable. This algorithm uses only mouse to turn screens of normal PCs into touchscreens, but this simple change means a revolution in our work with computers.

Sergey Andreyev

The mechanism of communication between users and devices is called interface. From time to time changes in interface significantly improve our work with computers even without any serious changes in programs themselves. Main ideas in PCs interface were introduced many years ago and since then there are no significant changes, while new devices show promising ways by using direct manipulation of screen objects. Users' direct action with all the screen objects of our ordinary PCs turns standard screens into touch screens of very high resolution and not only changes the interface of familiar programs but creates the new type of programs: user-driven applications.

Sergey Andreyev

Users can't talk with computers in their natural language (machine codes), so there are interfaces that allow such communication. 40 years ago the outcome of computer programs was in the form of long listings covered by numbers and even the format of those numbers was determined by developers. Throughout the latest 25 years: program views and results are shown in a wide variety of shapes and variants, but all these possibilities are predefined and fixed in code by developers; nothing outside of their approved solutions is allowed. My vision from now on into the future: developers are responsible only for correct work of a program (calculations, link with the database, etc.) and suggest a good default interface, but not determine all possible scenarios; only users decide WHAT, WHEN, and HOW to show. This will be a revolution in our dealing with computers, but there are obvious questions. How this step can be made? Do all users need such change? Is it going to be a burden for users or a welcome revolution?