Since this article was written in 2005, multiple attempts have been made to establish non-rectangular UIs. The mentioned Daisy Disk delights in its hierarchical view. Ça. 2010 there was an initiative for an entire phone UI based on this kind of concept. This went nowhere but Android 4 tried to incorporate as slide in from the side circular menu. [1] Most recently HTC incorporated this kind of UI in their U11 phone launcher. [2]

Forgoing the entire concept of rows and columns of pixels to render a UI though is just asking for trouble as all assumptions about arrangement go out of the window. With sufficiently high resolutions screens (we've achieved that) an arbitrarily shaped UI can be displayed. Masterfully demonstrated here in Neil Sardesai s UI experiments [3]

As for having the menu separate from the content canvas, foldables are currently a great experiment platform for this, see Samsungs "flex mode" [4]

[1]https://www.androidauthority.com/is-google-aiming-for-a-ui-m... [2]https://www.htc.com/us/support/htc-u11/howto/opening-edge-la... [3] https://twitter.com/neilsardesai/status/1381241571895615491 [4] https://www.bgr.in/news/youtube-app-update-brings-improved-s...

It’s telling that the article about a “graphical user interface” is only text. I’m all for new ideas but a circle-based UI sounds terrible.

It's ACM SIGCHI. That's their thing. Lots of talk, very limited demos.

This feels like a blogpost about graphic design using too many grids and tables. It doesn't really dive deep into the conundrum of what UI could be when the system is "symbolic all the way down", with the basic digital representation of 0 and 1 groupings primarily existing as a leveraging mechanism for defining other symbols.

With everything physical and freeform, the problem of measuring and aligning becomes primary. Tool precision drives what our built environment can look like. For UI to evolve likewise, it has to pay considerable attention to what documents are measuring. At the most primitive level this is always linear memory cell structures, even if they have some data attached indicating representation as a connected graph or other structuring mechanism. But time and again we opt to adopt something with higher level representation, which then creates the need for a custom toolbox, and I think that in turn drives the use of tabular and grid presentation as a way of putting the toolbox within reach. If you don't have more than one tool, UI disappears.

I think this is why trying out new VR experiences is so compelling.

In a game about gardening you would just give the user a trowel and they’d already know how to play the game. VR devs are gleefully getting rid of quite a lot of metaphors and abstractions in UI that we take for granted.

This is how Daisy Disk works. It’s a great interface- in that context.

We have been using rectangular pieces of paper for centuries.

Probably because they are designed by humans

The story about the trowels is really good. And post internet trowels are/have changed quickly. Some tech is new, and per William Gibson now the future is evenly distributed. This article is 2005, if the author could see trowels today I think they'd be amazed.

But trowels have changed iteratively.

Monitors and cameras are square because of manufacturing, although they are now also curved squares. I'm pretty sure currently we want as many pixels as we can afford within viewing distance. I don't thing circles help with that.

A little of what the are doing here is the magic internet mirror paradox. They are solving problems just through the interface.

"Select the HR wedge to move into employee hiring, status, reviews, etc." this is not an interface issue, it's getting the data correct issue. No one needs to save 5 seconds accessing this data. It's collating and storing and sharing it through APIs is where the problem is.

This is not hard to prototype, I think you'd immediately see it's silly having unused pixels on the square interface, which is the same if it's a circle, you won't be jamming something else on your desk in that spot.

I do like the idea of having a small screen for control. It might help with task shifting. Because your brain knows it is only an interface it won't get distracted using it. Maybe. Interesting idea.