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Enso seemed to just show a lot of idiosyncratic ideas about how UI design "should" be. The idea that the user should type some extra command, or hold down some extra key -- that's all crap. I'm a loyal Quicksilver user who bought into their arguments and tried using Enso at work on WinXP for a few weeks, and Quicksilver beats Enso hands down. Quicksilver just works and is friendly, whereas Enso tries to convert you to their quirky UI cult.

I like the idea behind Enso's "commands", but why the hell make it mandatory? Make the default action what the user expects by default, and allow the user to override it in exceptional cases -- a la Quicksilver!




I was being deliberately rude and snarky about Humanized, who, let it be said, can choose contrasting color saturations with the greatest of ease, and can "collect user interface evidence" circles around my command-line ass.

But I agree, I think their attempt to position Enso versus Quicksilver is weak. If Quicksilver was ported to Windows, nobody would use Enso; the marginal cost of that particular value prop for Windows users is already zero, and Quicksilver's "search-and-act" idiom is just more sophisticated, and makes a greater contribution to UI design, than does Enso's. Sorry, command completion? Not revolutionary.




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