Kinda old hat, and really only scratches the surface of the problem that desktop computers are not phones or TV's. The Kinect interface IS a great idea -- for choosing between large tiles on a screen ten feet away. It's generally inferior to a keyboard and mouse for simple day-to-day use.
Which really was the stupidest damn thing about Minority Report: try waving your fucking arms for eight hours a day while you're sitting at a desk. It is NOT PRACTICAL. RSI's bad enough just resting your hands like claws all day; try holding them up in the air and see how long you can keep THAT going.
Gesture-based controls work fine on phones and tablets, because you are very deliberately trading a fast and sophisticated interface for one that is light and mobile. I can write the occasional E-Mail on them -- it's usually a short couple of sentences and it takes a damn sight longer than it would with a keyboard, but it's perfectly doable.
But an actual, day-to-day workload? I wouldn't do it without adding a keyboard, and even then it'd be inconvenient.
The other big problem that's only briefly mentioned in the piece is discoverability. While pinch-to-zoom and swipe-to-switch-desktops are straightforward enough, other gestures are a lot more opaque. It took me ages to figure out I had to hold to paste, and selection/copying still works for shit in most programs. (K9 in particular; I probably spent ten minutes today just trying to highlight and copy an address to paste it into my calendar. It kept either launching it in Google Maps or giving me those stupid swipe-to-select grabbers that never quite work right; eventually I gave up, let it launch in Google Maps, and then copied it from there.)
And that just starts to get into the problem of fragmentation.
Have you ever USED Windows? Even MS can't keep its fucking UI straight across its various programs. Third-party developers are less consistent, and the smaller and nichier the product the less likely it is to behave consistently with everything else on your damn computer.
Linux is worse. Android is worse still. I haven't used iOS extensively; I'm guessing it's a little more consistent than Android but still not nearly as consistent as Apple would like it to be.
Ever use PerfectViewer? It's a great little reader. But good fucking luck remembering which part of the screen you're supposed to touch for any given command. Is there a way to make it list all of them after the first time you open it? Probably, but it's one more damn thing that is totally opaque and indecipherable. And the reason I couldn't figure out hold-to-paste on my tablet? Because on my phone I use Swype, which uses good ol' Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V for copy and paste.
There's an excuse for behavior like this on phones and tablets -- because again, space is at a premium.
But, as I've often lamented, this UI philosophy has infected desktops, and it's terrible.
It's one thing to autohide the taskbar -- hell, it was damn near a necessity in the 800x600 days. But it's pretty fucking unnecessary when your resolution is 1920x1200.
Ubuntu, at least, has the good sense to recognize that it doesn't need to autohide its taskbar. But it's got the damn-fool idea that it needs to hide every-fucking-thing else. Menubars don't appear unless you mouse over them; hit Alt and instead of toggling the menubar you get an inexplicable search box. The box is so you can type in the menu item you're looking for -- which is actually a perfectly good idea for power users who are comfortable with the command line in the first place, which probably describes a typical Linux user, even an Ubuntu user -- but it's jarring as fuck when you expect the Alt key to behave in a certain way, and UTTERLY FUCKING USELESS if you don't already know what you're looking for. (And, you know, if I already know what I'm looking for, I'm probably going to use a keyboard shortcut anyway, not type in the fucking name of it. Why in the hell would I hit Alt and type Print instead of just hitting Ctrl-P? The ideal use is for commands that don't have keyboard shortcuts. Why don't they have keyboard shortcuts? Because they're probably not the most common or frequently-used menu items. Meaning, hey, maybe it would be a good idea to give the user a LIST of menu items instead of expecting him to remember the specific phrase he's looking for.)
There's shit like that all over. GNOME 3 manages to somehow combine an unnecessary lack of discoverability WITH a huge amount of wasted screen space,
through the magic of COMPLETELY SEPARATING the part of the interface where you interact with programs from the part of the interface where you switch between them, like it's fucking vi or something.
(In fairness that screenshot is several versions old at this point. Hopefully they have improved it by this point.)
There's this trend toward hiding scrollbars, hiding menubars, hiding every fucking thing you need to actually make your computer work. I still don't know how to get Windows 8 to shut down in fewer than five keypresses.
And again, all this behavior is acceptable on a phone because you really DO need every damn pixel on that little screen -- but on a full-size monitor it's completely goddamn insane.
Like touch controls.
