The basic principles of the Anti-Mac interface are:
- The central role of language
- A richer internal representation of objects
- A more expressive interface
- Expert users
- Shared control
This was written in 1996 but it sounds like a rough approximation of today’s OS X.
Users have a choice of gestural or verbal commands, as appropriate. Moving one file is trivial, but moving all files in several folders that are more than 30 days old or that contain .html in their title is a little more complex.
Visual display technology has improved to allow more useful representations of onscreen objects: I see this more in applications like PhotoShop than in the OS.
One of the big knocks on the Mac was that the learning curve was gradual and short: expertise was gained in days, not years. The flipside of this was the Mac users generally knew more applications since the basic commands were consistent with the OS they already knew. But now, we have the prospect of a consistent easy-to-use interface with the power of a command line and helpful items like cron and various command shells. As noted in the article, the downside of direct control is that you have to directly control everything: there is no delegation or automation. Undergirding the Mac’s UI with UNIX changes all that.
I think it’s interesting that this predates the release of OS X by two years but foreshadows it pretty well.