In part 1, I made a negative case against the desktop interface as it currently exists, but I promised to make a positive case for my solutions. Because it would take at least a few weeks to put together a complete presentation, I thought it more timely if I instead present the ideas in installments (and hey, more reddit karma whoring this way). Most of the pushback to part 1 (both constructive and vitriolic) concerned my ideas about lists, so I decided to start there.
Rather than writing this up, I thought a screencast would be more appropriate for presenting these visual ideas. The run time is 37 minutes. (Yes, I know that’s long, and it starts slow, but if I’m not thorough, I just leave myself open to superficial dismissals.)
(I apologize for some parts where my narration gets a bit difficult to follow: I heavily edit the audio and end up removing awkward gaps and pasting together sentences from different takes; this works surprisingly well most of the time, but sometimes the result sounds a bit like Max Headroom.)
[...] brian will . net « Reinventing the desktop (part 2): I heard you like lists… [...]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl9kD693ie4
Seen this?
One point they make is that rearranging stuff like office 2003 menus is bad.
You have very interesting ideas, but the one massive list working depends rather heavily on tags (or remembering program names) and I’m not convinced of it’s feasibility. What happens when the programs don’t have premade tags that are intuitive for me? Do I then go through every option in the menu and add the tags I want there for every item in the menu? And then do this on my work computer, my laptop (linux x 2) and my desktop (windows and linux x 2)? I’ll admit to being somewhat of an extreme example, but I think the point still stands. And if I’m ever using someone else’s computer I’m all lost again. What I’m afraid of is that I’ll replace one kind of information I need to remember (settings of a program can be found in the Edit menu on linux and Tools menu on windows) with another kind of information (Program/Action X can be found behind search word Y).