Brian will writes a fascinating, very entertaining criticism of modern desktop UI.

Only librarians want to live in a grey, motionless, silent world of text, but for a long time, that’s what the computing experience was. Then came icons and windows, and they could move! Quickly this novelty wore off, so today our menus slide, our workspaces spin in three dimensions, and our windows cross the event horizon every time we minimize them. And our iPhones fart.
Moreover, we increasingly expect interfaces to entertain our hands. Touch screens! Multi-touch! Surface top! Gestures! I’ll admit that these developments are exciting, but they’re exciting mainly because we don’t really know what will come of them—our hopes at this point remain still very vague. As clearly as we can define it, our hope is that computer interaction can be made satisfying in the same way that a good hit on a tennis ball is satisfying or in the same way that closing a well made car door is satisfying.
Sadly, these ideas may turn out to be like virtual reality: worlds of possibilities, none of the possibilities very useful. So we may be in just another cycle of the permutations of fashion. Still, aesthetics and feel really do matter to an extent, for a good layout of information and good use of typography tends to be aesthetically pleasing, and good tactile feel, such as proper mouse sensitivity, definitely facilitates usability.
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