Its hard to say whether Enso will go the way of my experimentation with browser gestures. Others I work with use the gestures fluently now making me envious of their reduced barriers to productivity. I do think I lose much time transitioning from pointer devices to the keyboard and back so I am inclined to think the people at Humanized have something.

For the uninitiated, what is it? I’d recommend watching the video they have placed on the frontpage of their site. The short rub is that Enso overloads your caps-lock – holding it down reveals the Enso dialog which hovers above your OS, transparently waiting for input. Its a command prompt for navigating your applications or for applying simple commands to your context; for instance some selected text.

It is clearly a polished product – I recognise a few elements from earlier memes they had successfully set loose into the sphere. Some elements such as their use of modal messages which appear in the user’s field of view are smart but maybe not as clever as they present them to be. But maybe they are – I am still training myself to look for the Enso interface in front of me rather than in the task bar.

I can’t help but wonder whether the task of testing this software out is somewhat of a catch-22. To test it properly requires one to learn a few keywords which drive the system and also to train themselves to use Enso rather than existing (slower?) ways of achieving goals. If you succeed at this then the system is probably working for you already and the ‘test’ is over before it has begun.

I guess it comes down to whether you believe this is a significant adjustment to the drag that ‘modern’ interfaces such as windows afford you. I personally think that windowing is working against you for most of the time. Fiddly dragging and resizing is time costly and doesn’t deliver much. If you need to fit two documents side by side then there should be a button or a command for it. Moving these things manually seems like pushing unnecessary work to the user.

Humanized present Enso as being grounded in the study of human computer interaction and they present a manifesto of how life using computers could be much easier. I don’t disagree, but is this product a step forward? Enso takes us back as much as it takes us forward. It reminds us of lessons many developers already know – of the effectiveness of the commandline. It consolidates what Google success has been teaching us – that typed text can lead to an infinite number of destinations and they have made even Googling a few clicks closer by having access always available from the keyboard alone.

Those with Google Desktop who have put up with its (in my experience) fairly regular crashes would be familiar with a similar capacity, in this case overloading the control key, a double-press brings up dialog Enso-esque but of course has in actuality beaten Enso to market to what appears Enso’s most interesting application thus far.

I do persist though as navigating many tabs and windows is my own personal goal and Enso may offer a path of lesser resistance to them. I will let you know how it goes.

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