It seems like a lot of people skimmed without reading the top or bottom of this site:
It's not a company. It's not a product. You're not being asked to buy it or buy into it, just to discuss the concept if you'd like.
This website is a portfolio piece for a 21-year-old university student hoping to find an internship. In my opinion, it's an impressive demonstration of his design and technical skills. It certainly says a lot more than the average 21-year-old's resume listing what courses they've taken so far.
The problem with the tablet analogy is nobody seems to know how to design complex, professional-level (like Photoshop, or Blender) applications in that paradigm. Tablet apps are overwhelmingly consumption-oriented, and those that aren't all seem to be oriented around popular (and populist) appeal.
Why is everyone out for the blood of the desktop/windows paradigm? Why can't the simplified-tablet market and the desktop-power-user markets coexist? Windows and taskbars and start menus are wonderful and my favorite way of interacting with computers, why must it be taken away?
Right, this seems to me to be a tiling window manager with a touch interface. This is kind of an odd combination too, because most tiling WMs are keyboard oriented, whereas most non-tiling WMs are pointer oriented. Maybe that's just historical and doesn't really make much of a difference though.
But with i3, I have keybindings to "open the last browser window i used" or "open the last gvim window i opened." I can tile them in different workspaces as I please extremely efficiently and quickly, and move them around as needed. I can move much faster using the keyboard than when I'm in my Windows machine. Having this tiling ability on a tablet seems odd to me.
I am kind of getting tired of the "attacks" on the traditional desktop interface. People just don't want to admit that just because tablets exist they are not a superior interface. Just a different one.
The interface they propose is beautiful but it would really have to walk a thin, thin line between usability and screen space.
I do like the idea of a tag-based filesystem though. Obviously then you get into the problem of managing your tags (a tree-based filesystem solves this problem naturally).
This is exactly the idea of Desktop Neo. If tablets and phones are used for consumption, the desktop can be focused on productivity.
I don't want to replace the complexity of the desktop with interfaces that are easier. I want them to be better, to be more efficient for professionals.
Concepts like panels, tags and touch input are probably way harder to understand than windows, folders and mouse input. But it doesn’t matter, because professionals spend so much time on desktop computers that it's worth the effort to master the interface.
I can see the reason from the power user's point of view. I've noticed that quite a lot of power users don't use desktops (or window affordances) at all! Their only use is to provide a place for a cool background picture. I see a couple of reasons:
- having to use a mouse (or, God help us, a touchpad) is annoying when you have to switch between it and the keyboard
- using the mouse is slow
- windows on traditional desktops take way too much space (compare with how much better they look on tiling WMs)
- ALT+TAB (and equivalents) suck - you can only switch back and forth between two applications; anything else requires paying attention
- window locations and sizes are ephemeral, which again is annoying when you want to set up a good working environment
- wheel menus are awesome and the fact that pretty much nobody is doing them baffles me
Tablets suck for creative work, I agree, but the way I see this project is not as a nod towards touch interfaces. On the contrary, it's about using sane(r) window management, combined with tags, eye-tracking, voice control and wheel menus to minimize the amount of effort you need to make to issue commands or search for things. It sounds like a perfect addition to keyboard-driven work style.
In my world (music, concert, theater production) we depend on a lot of equipment which is basically a computer and a custom physical control surface, retailing for 10x the price of the computer. The keyboard and mouse interface is simply not good enough to replicate faders and knobs. The tablet interface, on the other hand, is. This has important implications for light boards, sound boards, and DAW controllers. For many of them the domain-specific IO by itself isn't actually that expensive and the software can run on commodity computers. We were only locked into custom hardware because we needed its control surfaces to work efficiently.
Existing desktop workflows may not be improved, but existing custom-control-surface workflows can be made vastly cheaper and more flexible, consolidated onto relatively commodotized hardware, and in some niches this is happening.
I think some of that results from the limitations of mobile OSes: everything is tied to an app store, jailed, etc. A mobile device is not a "real computer" not because of any hardware limitation but because the OS is designed for it to be a dumb terminal to access the cloud and consume content and rapid-interaction services.
It maps well to the sorts of things you want to do with a tiny device in your pocket, but it's not suitable for producing anything other than selfies.
This is the hole in the "mobile is the future" argument. Mobile (as it exists today) is only the future if nobody has anything substantial to say or create and we are all just passive consumers.
This is really great desktop UI work and I do hope someone takes a look and gets inspired. It would really be nice if Linux desktop efforts stopped trying to deliver Windows 95 or early versions of MacOSX in 2016 and actually innovated.
Talking about Blender: I think that the way windows work in Blender could make a great OS window manager. Devide the panels the way you like and select a program or part of a program you like to show inside the panel.
There are window manager who can do this but imho not as simple as Blender.
What do you think generates the most money for Apple and Google... You being reduced to a consumer that buys movies, music and apps in their stores — or you fiddling around in Logic or Photoshop?
This is a shameless plug, but I've been developing something involving 'scrolling with a resting thumb' to bring up a quazimodal menu, intended for applications where one is creating content in a spacial context… (i.e. here's a gif demo with Photoshop: https://twitter.com/vivekgani/status/659437589896630272 ) The intent though is for folks that want some middle ground between having to remember a bunch of keyboard shortcuts and mousing out to click something. This is an actual working app that works with Sketch & PS and more apps soon - if you'd like to try it email [email protected] and I'd be happy to share it.
The OP had a similar thing with the radial marking menu, though I've shied away from that approach since it doesn't scale with lots of icons/options unless you do hierarchies - also I simply just wanted to try something different. One random thing I stumbled upon yesterday is an old Autodesk Research video looking testing these versus other methods: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHZB0d20640
I think this is the best objection I've seen to what could otherwise be a pretty cool idea to try and refine.
The answer to designing complex, professional-level applications in that paradigm is "make it fullscreen, and use a keyboard and mouse". Tablets just don't give you the precision and screen space to work with extremely complex tools.
I think Windows 10 actually manages this well. I'm using a Surface Book, and despite its various issues, this tablet/notebook hybrid actually works quite well. Plug the screen into the base and I have a full blown, high res screen with a keyboard and dedicated GPU for my coding/Photoshop/Blender. But if I just want to consume, I can pull the screen off and sit on the couch.
There are a few things I like in this (particularly the Finder bit), but so much of this is just a bunch of extraordinary statements with absolutely no universally-accepted justification, spoken as if they have some sort of universally accepted justification.
For example, "Panels use screen space more efficiently and are a more elegant way to multitask than normal windows."
Says who? You? It just drives me crazy when I see statements like these. It's not an effective way to get your point across. You want to make your case for something like that? Actually make your case. Present some evidence and your conclusions. Not everything has to be a Jony Ive marketing video.
edit: Last thing I'll say - I just re-watched the video, and caught the last line - "it rethinks desktop computing to help you get work done". My advice to the author - go work for various companies for 5-10 years, and then come back and see if that statement holds up. My ability to get work done would be crippled with this; in fact, my work would come to a grinding halt. "Work" just doesn't work in the kinds of idealistic ways these types of marketing-like videos always seem to show.
And don't get me wrong, I like the author's ambition. If I was in the internship-givin' business, hell, I'd probably consider him. I think this is a good way to get your name out there, even if it attracts criticism (like mine).
The biggest thing I find lacking in desktop UI is the ability to save and switch between states. We need the idea of project 'sessions' where I can open up the software I need to use, pull up the files I need, set my favorite folders, etc and then hit 'save' and be able to restore back to that setup at the click of a button.
Right now, switching between projects means setting all that up every single time.
I agree whole-heartedly. I was excited when I heard Windows 10 was adding multiple desktops, however I find they are quite lacking in use. For example if I want to move a single window of Notepad++ to a different desktop it moves all of the Notepad++ instances.
On top of that, I really don't want all of my software always open in a separate desktop. There is no need for me to keep Photoshop open, using resources, while I have transitioned from work to play time. I'd much rather have a "working" session saved and a "gaming" session saved where-in different programs are auto opened when I start a session.
State preservation, generally, is a huge failing of computing. From losing my desktop arrangements in Linux between reboots (or even logins), to Web tools that lose comments and posts, etc.
Being able to specify a workspace state and return to it is hugely significant. But that requires deep stateful awareness of pretty much every app, including terminals, and the command / console-mode tools running within them.
But at the higher level, I'm liking what I'm seeing here.
While feeling the shortcomings of a window system, I never felt like I could productively work with a tiling manager, since I frequently overlap windows as a mechanism for easy access ... and there are lots of popup windows I don't want to cover the main application.
Oh yes, and I purposefully keep my Mac apps out of Full screen mode (and use a keyboard shortcut to maximize when needed, keeping out of full screen).
I've sometimes thought the most egalitarian way to design a GUI would be to make it exquisitely accessible to the blind. This would force designers to organize their GUI with sensible, navigable hierarchies of data and controls.
To me, an exquisitely blind-accessible GUI's should function like a fancy keyboard navigable/editable graph data structure that echoes the hierarchies and relationships represented on the sighted displays. The biggest boon to such a GUI would be that the blind-accessible controls would function as an "expert" mode of navigating the GUI - one would never have to touch the mouse or trackpad to get stuff done.
Sighted users would benefit from learning these keyboard controls and we'd inject some hyper-productivity back into our apps to counter the fisher-price'ification that has been creeping into GUI's over the past 10 years.
This is a very good point. Much of this UI is based on visual clues and accessibility seems to be an afterthought.
A three finger tap or swipe is not easy for everyone. I'd like to see more (digital) navigation based on actual (physical) navigation -- waypoint labels and directional paths.
I agree! Desktop Neo isn't about using touchscreen or tablets to replace the desktop. The opposite, actually. It tries to move the desktop even further away from phones by rethinking it for professional users.
And yep, the first part about using panels was very much inspired by 10/GUI. I am linking to that concept on the website, and also talked to Clayton Miller before publishing Desktop Neo.
> "We now use smartphones and tablets most of the time, since they are much easier to use."
Interesting. I have the opposite impression. I think _customization_ is the key for real productivity. The more customizable the system the more productive I can be with it.
Phones and Tablets are easier to use as long as we deal not with more than two apps at a time. The Neo GUI is an interesting idea but what productivity for? As for me, I prefer a window pager where I can address any window instantly with just one mouse click. Swapping between several pages all the time would confuse me.
> "Windows are now inefficient and incompatible with modern productivity interfaces. ... "Window Management is Outdated"."
No, surely not. I would always prefer a PC with a customizable GUI (KDE and OpenBox for instance). I barely use my phone and pad because they are only useful for basic things.
This is still hacker news, right? So hypothetically we're talking silicon valley startups. How many of these kinds of places are heavily reliant upon outside companies like those mentioned by @GuiA to build prototypes of their designs?
I have seen plenty of consultants hired, but nearly every startup I've seen or been at/around (~20) prototyped their designs in house. As an example bu.mp hired an industrial design firm to help them make physical prototypes of a POS competitor to NFC technology (which ultimately failed), but had their own engineers and designers actually create and test the working prototypes.
Shortcomings notwithstanding, I think this is an example of excellent work and a creative way to find an internship. Given the opportunity, I'd most certainly offer this guy an internship if I could.
That's weird --- I looked at some of the sample animations, and I could swear I heard a tiny voice shouting 'Oberon! Plan-9! Rio!' in my ear...
I'd like to try something like this in action; but the problem, as always, is going to be bootstrapping. Look how badly Ubuntu manages something as simple as putting the application's menu bar in a non-standard place.
...I worked once with a desktop environment for the PC, GEOS. It had a feature where your application's UI was described in logical terms and this was then mapped to a physical UI when the app loaded. It allowed pluggable look-and-feels to drastically modify the look and behaviour of the application as they saw fit.
If we had something like that, this would be easy. Shame we don't, really.
So basically xmonad + with a tagged file indexer. Although fzf + https://github.com/rupa/z works for me most of the time.
With respect to eye tracking, I had a similar idea the other day. Imagine holding a key, then moving your gaze to see an on-screen target following where you're looking at. You could use this as a really quick way to scroll or highlight/copy text without leaving your home row.
Tags are really tough. Unstructured categorization comes with its own basket of issues -- some distinct from structured taxonomies, but not necessarily less tricky.
A few thoughts there:
1. What happens when my mental schemas change in a year? The word I use to look something up changes, and I suddenly can no longer find it.
2. What happens when I get a little lazy in obediently tagging everything I create? Imagining the 2 or 3 words I'll want to use in the future to look something up (see the first thought) is really tough. Mentally taxing = a barrier to adoption.
3. Folders can get unnecessarily deep, stale, etc... but having the structure available to browse can be an extremely useful trigger in reestablishing the hallways of my desktop-stored "mind palace."
4. Having many ways to discover information I'm looking for > having a few ways. Search, browse, categorize, all have a purpose depending on the way a file or piece of information imprinted on my memory.
Currently, Firefox's bookmarks is the main task where I use tags these days. Bookmarks so quickly become quite a mess! I really like tags for the ability to have both a mess, quickly add things without having to think too hard, and ultimately being able to find stuff of course.
I had a quick excursion using Chromium for a few weeks--does it even have tags in the bookmark db? They weren't picked up when I exported from Firefox. I went back to Firefox because Chromium's address bar doesn't quite search my bookmarks and history the way Firefox does and only displays the top five results or so. Not something I can depend on to be able to find something back.
I really want to get back to having a load of tags on my music collection. Used to have that in Amarok, but I lost the DB many years ago. So useful, for custom playlists, weird personal microgenres that make sense only to you, tagging tracks you almost certainly don't want to hear if you put some album into a larger playlist (Daft Punk - Touch :-P) etc.
Anyway. Your thoughts:
1. Yes. For that, I imagine a powerful and snappy interface to organize tagged stuff. A bit like those automated MP3 ID3v2 tagger tools, but a bit more general. Should allow for mass re-tagging operations like: add tag #newthing to all objects tagged #onething + #otherthing but not #notthisthing. With the title matching "* about things". Only for objects (created) older than 1 year (because my mental schema also changed the way I used the #otherthing tag).
That's only power-users I'm afraid. I have no idea how to solve this for regular users. Although I've seen motivated/determined "regular" users structuring years of digital photos with folder systems in ways that maybe they wouldn't shy from such a tool as long as it's intuitive to use.
2. This is a big shortcoming of Firefox's tagged bookmarks. Back when I used del.icio.us (also many years ago), there was a bookmarklet I could use to add a site to my del.icio.us bookmarks. The greatest thing about it was that it would predict/suggest tags for your bookmarks, I miss this so much. It did so in two visually distinct ways: First, predictions on your own bookmarks, afaik it was just a set of tags that you commonly used in conjunction with the one or two tags you've typed so far. Maybe it also matched keywords in the title and url. If I were to implement this I'd sort them by Bayesian P(#newtag|title-url-keywords-tags-typed-so-far). The second set of tags were suggestions based on what other del.icio.us users had tagged that url (less useful and less privacy).
3. I think you could have both? But most importantly, what helps me a lot to navigate and orient myself in this tagged mind-palace (nice analogy btw), is the ability to not just sort and slice your database by tags and combinations of tags, but to also just be able to browse everything sorted by time. I find this in the photo gallery on my phone, which is an utter mess, but if I really need to find something, I switch to by-date view (groups by month). Even if I don't exactly recall what month a photo was taken (or it could be a picture that I saved from Twitter, or maybe that someone sent me by IM), scrolling through I see pictures through time and usually I quickly get a familiar feeling "wait it was before then, and after ... yea .. when the thing .. ah! got it!".
It depends on how your memory works of course. But I imagine it would work because even though you can tag and re-tag and restructure your documents, the ordered slice of time-line of say 1.5yr ago hardly changes if at all.
4. Yes exactly. You might notice the "solutions" or ideas in the points above are all based in some way or another in this observation.
Computers knowing about focus is quite a compelling future direction. There are lots of really good possibilities. But also a few problems.
For instance, If you can track focus, you can make the monitor seem larger than it really is. Just scale everything that isn't being looked at down a bit. As the gaze shifts towards other objects, shift things slowly around and overlap the enlarged window over other background windows.
You can make focus-dependent shortcuts. Imagine vim with nouns and motions that can refer to and act on the focus point. `ytF`: yank-to-focus, where F is a motion from cursor to focus. Lots of rich possibilities there.
The only major problem I see is that you can't really share work easily (unless you open it up to multiple focus points somehow.) Also, it would be frustrating to have to look where you're typing. I'll often look at something else while typing just before switching tasks. I'm going to start paying attention to my focus more to see if there are other potential pitfalls with the computer knowing about it and changing modes in response.
In general I like the possibilities opened up by having focus. Heck even with a traditional mouse+keyboard, the extra data would help the computer understand us better. It might be more suited to a VR desktop, where the 'multiple-viewers' problem does not exist.
Tiling window manager, with easy back-and-forth? Works for me.
I have to say, I really like tagging-as-filesystem concept (where you can also meta-tag something), and the gaze/touch interaction proposed would be awesome to have in my opinion.
The current interaction with tagging (basing off OS X) is still pretty clunky. It's a separate field, the new vs previous tag selection is aggravating with a keyboard, and there's no easy way to browse or select multiple tags to filter content.
Having to move to and from the mouse a lot is a bit of a pain, and even with the best touchpads on the market, the interaction with them can still be annoying when trying to do things like click on a HN upvote arrow. Being able to start the mouse from the point you're looking at, or even forgot the mouse entirely when starting typing into the field you're looking at - those would be fantastic additions.
I'm slightly more dubious about the voice interaction, though there are times where "Hey Siri, set a timer for 10 minutes" is a great way to interact with an otherwise over-complicated device.
Hierarchical tagging is a good idea for a filesystem. The only problem with it is "where do you store that metadata?" In the individual files (requiring format-specific support)? In the filesystem (requiring applications that know how to read and write it)?
When KDE 4 was released it included Nepomuk (https://userbase.kde.org/Nepomuk) as a universal tagging-and-search mechanism to do precisely this kind of thing. Unfortunately, not very many people use it and even those that do only use it in a very limited fashion. Partly because it only works in KDE apps and also because tagging all your files after-the-fact is a very time consuming process.
Then there's this problem: What if I never had any trouble finding my documents? What will I gain by tagging everything?
Tagging makes a lot of sense for things like photos and videos where search-by-content just doesn't work. For everything else you can just index your files and search normally.
Another problem with tagging is that--if you're going to be disciplined about it--you're not really getting much benefit over just "staying organized" with directories/folders. What's the this-helps-me difference between a directory structure like, "Company X/Clients" or a hierarchical tagging structure such as "#company/#clients"? Sure, with tags you're not limited to the parent->child concept but ultimately--if you don't stay organized with a hierarchy--you'll end up with a huge mess that can only be navigated with an intelligent tag-based search tool.
A traditional desktop does everything I need. This just doesn't seem like enough of an improvement to make me jump ship. This whole "rethinking the desktop" buzz just seems like another fix looking for a problem.
That's probably a reason for 40+ years of success.
It's interesting how IT steps backwards in recent years. First the "cloud" wave came to convince us to leave our autonomous PCs and to turn back to centralized IT servers. The current wave (Pads, Neo etc) looks like turning back to single screen terminals. What comes next? Shall we get rid of the mouse?
I also think the simplicity of tablet/phone UI's is not applicable. There's always a trade off in design; you cannot make one UI good for everything. As it stands, the desktop UI is a bit too complicated for simple app/game/media consumption. But similarly the tablet/phone UI is way too simple for most desktop applications.
Tablet applications literally do less so they don't need as complex of a UI. You can't take that simplicity and apply to more complex applications.
> The [menu] is easily scannable and you can search for options just by typing.
This is really important. It's 2016, search is easy, and I shouldn't have to hunt around because I don't know whether you stuck your options dialog under File, Edit, or Tools. I appreciate Ubuntu for implementing this OS-wide with Unity's HUD feature.
Neo was designed to inspire and provoke discussions about the future of productive computing. It is not going to be a real working operating system interface, it is just a concept. I am not saying that these ideas would definitely work and that this is the future of computing. However, there is large potential in rethinking the core interfaces of desktop computing for modern needs, and somebody has to try."
Argh! What's the point of developing of fully fleshed out work piece like this that doesn't and won't exist! Well other than self-promotion and a fear of it actually totally sucking after it hits the real world of people.
I feel like these sorts of presentations are not very honest. If your claim is improved productivity, why not do a side by side? A cursory glance shows that all of these features would completely destroy my productivity.
Taking a look at the gestures...
1) Scroll through panels - Alt+TAB is unquestionably faster (< 1sec)
2) Open App Control - Win key? (< 1sec)
3) Open Apps menu - Keyboard Shortcuts (< 1sec)
4) Open Finder - Win + E (< 1sec)
5) Close Panel - Alt F4 ((< 1sec)
6,7,8) Resize - Win + UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT (< 1sec)
Now, sure I see some people claiming that "nobody" knows these shortcuts or that they are "not intuitive" (itself a loaded term), etc.
So,
Proposal 1 (Teach people these shortcuts)
Proposal 2 (Invent completely new gestures - teach people these new gestures, which will then slow them down because a keyboard is just crazy fast compared to touch.)
Now, I'm going off of the whole Desktop phrasing. Maybe on a mobile, all of these might make more sense..
Conceptually, I'm really liking the approach. I could see it being a viable refreshing of desktop paradigms. There is an interesting mix of OS X, Windows, Linux WMs, and some other goodies from other apps here.
Visually, the biggest drawback is I could not tell while watching the video which panel has focus. I am assuming the idea is this would be handled by tracking eye focus. Perhaps I could get used to that, but it'd have to be instantaneous switching. As I'm typing this in a half-width browser window that takes up all vertical space, I have the Desktop Neo site in another half-width browser window taking up full vertical space by its side. I'm bouncing my eyes back and forth between the site and this textbox I'm typing in. I'm currently staring at the Neo site while I'm typing, without any looking back. Such a desktop paradigm would have to remain very intelligent about recognizing that I'm currently typing in a panel while looking at, and perhaps scrolling through another panel, without wanting my current action to lose focus or be interrupted in any way. I work this way all the time.
The gestures for fullscreen and minimize operations need 6 fingers. Using both hands to do anything on a touch screen seems very impractical (except for typing with both the thumbs on a reasonably sized screen or a split keyboard).
Yeah, the two 6 finger gestures are certainly not ideal. I imagined a much larger touchpad, between the size of the Apple Keyboard and Apple Trackpad, so that might make it a little easier.
It's also important to note that these two gestures perform features (fullscreen / minimize) that can also be done by just resizing the panel (either with 3 fingers, or by going to App Control).
[+] [-] dangrossman|10 years ago|reply
It's not a company. It's not a product. You're not being asked to buy it or buy into it, just to discuss the concept if you'd like.
This website is a portfolio piece for a 21-year-old university student hoping to find an internship. In my opinion, it's an impressive demonstration of his design and technical skills. It certainly says a lot more than the average 21-year-old's resume listing what courses they've taken so far.
[+] [-] tomc1985|10 years ago|reply
Why is everyone out for the blood of the desktop/windows paradigm? Why can't the simplified-tablet market and the desktop-power-user markets coexist? Windows and taskbars and start menus are wonderful and my favorite way of interacting with computers, why must it be taken away?
[+] [-] orthecreedence|10 years ago|reply
But with i3, I have keybindings to "open the last browser window i used" or "open the last gvim window i opened." I can tile them in different workspaces as I please extremely efficiently and quickly, and move them around as needed. I can move much faster using the keyboard than when I'm in my Windows machine. Having this tiling ability on a tablet seems odd to me.
I am kind of getting tired of the "attacks" on the traditional desktop interface. People just don't want to admit that just because tablets exist they are not a superior interface. Just a different one.
The interface they propose is beautiful but it would really have to walk a thin, thin line between usability and screen space.
I do like the idea of a tag-based filesystem though. Obviously then you get into the problem of managing your tags (a tree-based filesystem solves this problem naturally).
[+] [-] ziburski|10 years ago|reply
I don't want to replace the complexity of the desktop with interfaces that are easier. I want them to be better, to be more efficient for professionals.
Concepts like panels, tags and touch input are probably way harder to understand than windows, folders and mouse input. But it doesn’t matter, because professionals spend so much time on desktop computers that it's worth the effort to master the interface.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|10 years ago|reply
- having to use a mouse (or, God help us, a touchpad) is annoying when you have to switch between it and the keyboard
- using the mouse is slow
- windows on traditional desktops take way too much space (compare with how much better they look on tiling WMs)
- ALT+TAB (and equivalents) suck - you can only switch back and forth between two applications; anything else requires paying attention
- window locations and sizes are ephemeral, which again is annoying when you want to set up a good working environment
- wheel menus are awesome and the fact that pretty much nobody is doing them baffles me
Tablets suck for creative work, I agree, but the way I see this project is not as a nod towards touch interfaces. On the contrary, it's about using sane(r) window management, combined with tags, eye-tracking, voice control and wheel menus to minimize the amount of effort you need to make to issue commands or search for things. It sounds like a perfect addition to keyboard-driven work style.
[+] [-] superuser2|10 years ago|reply
Existing desktop workflows may not be improved, but existing custom-control-surface workflows can be made vastly cheaper and more flexible, consolidated onto relatively commodotized hardware, and in some niches this is happening.
[+] [-] api|10 years ago|reply
It maps well to the sorts of things you want to do with a tiny device in your pocket, but it's not suitable for producing anything other than selfies.
This is the hole in the "mobile is the future" argument. Mobile (as it exists today) is only the future if nobody has anything substantial to say or create and we are all just passive consumers.
This is really great desktop UI work and I do hope someone takes a look and gets inspired. It would really be nice if Linux desktop efforts stopped trying to deliver Windows 95 or early versions of MacOSX in 2016 and actually innovated.
[+] [-] huuu|10 years ago|reply
There are window manager who can do this but imho not as simple as Blender.
[+] [-] unicornporn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seltzered_|10 years ago|reply
The OP had a similar thing with the radial marking menu, though I've shied away from that approach since it doesn't scale with lots of icons/options unless you do hierarchies - also I simply just wanted to try something different. One random thing I stumbled upon yesterday is an old Autodesk Research video looking testing these versus other methods: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHZB0d20640
[+] [-] munchbunny|10 years ago|reply
The answer to designing complex, professional-level applications in that paradigm is "make it fullscreen, and use a keyboard and mouse". Tablets just don't give you the precision and screen space to work with extremely complex tools.
I think Windows 10 actually manages this well. I'm using a Surface Book, and despite its various issues, this tablet/notebook hybrid actually works quite well. Plug the screen into the base and I have a full blown, high res screen with a keyboard and dedicated GPU for my coding/Photoshop/Blender. But if I just want to consume, I can pull the screen off and sit on the couch.
[+] [-] wnevets|10 years ago|reply
Honestly I think a large part is because microsoft dominations the desktop market and is failing in the tablet market.
[+] [-] wyaeld|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fuzzywalrus|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] king_magic|10 years ago|reply
For example, "Panels use screen space more efficiently and are a more elegant way to multitask than normal windows."
Says who? You? It just drives me crazy when I see statements like these. It's not an effective way to get your point across. You want to make your case for something like that? Actually make your case. Present some evidence and your conclusions. Not everything has to be a Jony Ive marketing video.
edit: Last thing I'll say - I just re-watched the video, and caught the last line - "it rethinks desktop computing to help you get work done". My advice to the author - go work for various companies for 5-10 years, and then come back and see if that statement holds up. My ability to get work done would be crippled with this; in fact, my work would come to a grinding halt. "Work" just doesn't work in the kinds of idealistic ways these types of marketing-like videos always seem to show.
And don't get me wrong, I like the author's ambition. If I was in the internship-givin' business, hell, I'd probably consider him. I think this is a good way to get your name out there, even if it attracts criticism (like mine).
[+] [-] TrevorJ|10 years ago|reply
Right now, switching between projects means setting all that up every single time.
[+] [-] koduh|10 years ago|reply
On top of that, I really don't want all of my software always open in a separate desktop. There is no need for me to keep Photoshop open, using resources, while I have transitioned from work to play time. I'd much rather have a "working" session saved and a "gaming" session saved where-in different programs are auto opened when I start a session.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|10 years ago|reply
Being able to specify a workspace state and return to it is hugely significant. But that requires deep stateful awareness of pretty much every app, including terminals, and the command / console-mode tools running within them.
But at the higher level, I'm liking what I'm seeing here.
[+] [-] froh42|10 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiling_window_manager
While feeling the shortcomings of a window system, I never felt like I could productively work with a tiling manager, since I frequently overlap windows as a mechanism for easy access ... and there are lots of popup windows I don't want to cover the main application.
Oh yes, and I purposefully keep my Mac apps out of Full screen mode (and use a keyboard shortcut to maximize when needed, keeping out of full screen).
[+] [-] EdSharkey|10 years ago|reply
To me, an exquisitely blind-accessible GUI's should function like a fancy keyboard navigable/editable graph data structure that echoes the hierarchies and relationships represented on the sighted displays. The biggest boon to such a GUI would be that the blind-accessible controls would function as an "expert" mode of navigating the GUI - one would never have to touch the mouse or trackpad to get stuff done.
Sighted users would benefit from learning these keyboard controls and we'd inject some hyper-productivity back into our apps to counter the fisher-price'ification that has been creeping into GUI's over the past 10 years.
[+] [-] doublerebel|10 years ago|reply
A three finger tap or swipe is not easy for everyone. I'd like to see more (digital) navigation based on actual (physical) navigation -- waypoint labels and directional paths.
[+] [-] rocky1138|10 years ago|reply
"We now use smartphones and tablets most of the time, since they are much easier to use."
No. Just no. I don't want to use a touchscreen and closed ecosystem to develop software. That would be a nightmare.
The rest of the design seems to be taken straight from 10/GUI.
[+] [-] ziburski|10 years ago|reply
And yep, the first part about using panels was very much inspired by 10/GUI. I am linking to that concept on the website, and also talked to Clayton Miller before publishing Desktop Neo.
[+] [-] _lce0|10 years ago|reply
Thanks for share!
http://10gui.com/
[+] [-] progman|10 years ago|reply
Interesting. I have the opposite impression. I think _customization_ is the key for real productivity. The more customizable the system the more productive I can be with it.
Phones and Tablets are easier to use as long as we deal not with more than two apps at a time. The Neo GUI is an interesting idea but what productivity for? As for me, I prefer a window pager where I can address any window instantly with just one mouse click. Swapping between several pages all the time would confuse me.
> "Windows are now inefficient and incompatible with modern productivity interfaces. ... "Window Management is Outdated"."
No, surely not. I would always prefer a PC with a customizable GUI (KDE and OpenBox for instance). I barely use my phone and pad because they are only useful for basic things.
[+] [-] theandrewbailey|10 years ago|reply
Isn't this the kind of thinking behind Windows 8?
[+] [-] Etheryte|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tlow|10 years ago|reply
I have seen plenty of consultants hired, but nearly every startup I've seen or been at/around (~20) prototyped their designs in house. As an example bu.mp hired an industrial design firm to help them make physical prototypes of a POS competitor to NFC technology (which ultimately failed), but had their own engineers and designers actually create and test the working prototypes.
Shortcomings notwithstanding, I think this is an example of excellent work and a creative way to find an internship. Given the opportunity, I'd most certainly offer this guy an internship if I could.
Nice job. Ich wünsche dir viel Glück.
[+] [-] david-given|10 years ago|reply
I'd like to try something like this in action; but the problem, as always, is going to be bootstrapping. Look how badly Ubuntu manages something as simple as putting the application's menu bar in a non-standard place.
...I worked once with a desktop environment for the PC, GEOS. It had a feature where your application's UI was described in logical terms and this was then mapped to a physical UI when the app loaded. It allowed pluggable look-and-feels to drastically modify the look and behaviour of the application as they saw fit.
If we had something like that, this would be easy. Shame we don't, really.
[+] [-] jb55|10 years ago|reply
With respect to eye tracking, I had a similar idea the other day. Imagine holding a key, then moving your gaze to see an on-screen target following where you're looking at. You could use this as a really quick way to scroll or highlight/copy text without leaving your home row.
I really don't like leaving my home row.
I may be crazy.
[+] [-] iheartmemcache|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattlutze|10 years ago|reply
A few thoughts there:
1. What happens when my mental schemas change in a year? The word I use to look something up changes, and I suddenly can no longer find it.
2. What happens when I get a little lazy in obediently tagging everything I create? Imagining the 2 or 3 words I'll want to use in the future to look something up (see the first thought) is really tough. Mentally taxing = a barrier to adoption.
3. Folders can get unnecessarily deep, stale, etc... but having the structure available to browse can be an extremely useful trigger in reestablishing the hallways of my desktop-stored "mind palace."
4. Having many ways to discover information I'm looking for > having a few ways. Search, browse, categorize, all have a purpose depending on the way a file or piece of information imprinted on my memory.
[+] [-] tripzilch|10 years ago|reply
Currently, Firefox's bookmarks is the main task where I use tags these days. Bookmarks so quickly become quite a mess! I really like tags for the ability to have both a mess, quickly add things without having to think too hard, and ultimately being able to find stuff of course.
I had a quick excursion using Chromium for a few weeks--does it even have tags in the bookmark db? They weren't picked up when I exported from Firefox. I went back to Firefox because Chromium's address bar doesn't quite search my bookmarks and history the way Firefox does and only displays the top five results or so. Not something I can depend on to be able to find something back.
I really want to get back to having a load of tags on my music collection. Used to have that in Amarok, but I lost the DB many years ago. So useful, for custom playlists, weird personal microgenres that make sense only to you, tagging tracks you almost certainly don't want to hear if you put some album into a larger playlist (Daft Punk - Touch :-P) etc.
Anyway. Your thoughts:
1. Yes. For that, I imagine a powerful and snappy interface to organize tagged stuff. A bit like those automated MP3 ID3v2 tagger tools, but a bit more general. Should allow for mass re-tagging operations like: add tag #newthing to all objects tagged #onething + #otherthing but not #notthisthing. With the title matching "* about things". Only for objects (created) older than 1 year (because my mental schema also changed the way I used the #otherthing tag).
That's only power-users I'm afraid. I have no idea how to solve this for regular users. Although I've seen motivated/determined "regular" users structuring years of digital photos with folder systems in ways that maybe they wouldn't shy from such a tool as long as it's intuitive to use.
2. This is a big shortcoming of Firefox's tagged bookmarks. Back when I used del.icio.us (also many years ago), there was a bookmarklet I could use to add a site to my del.icio.us bookmarks. The greatest thing about it was that it would predict/suggest tags for your bookmarks, I miss this so much. It did so in two visually distinct ways: First, predictions on your own bookmarks, afaik it was just a set of tags that you commonly used in conjunction with the one or two tags you've typed so far. Maybe it also matched keywords in the title and url. If I were to implement this I'd sort them by Bayesian P(#newtag|title-url-keywords-tags-typed-so-far). The second set of tags were suggestions based on what other del.icio.us users had tagged that url (less useful and less privacy).
3. I think you could have both? But most importantly, what helps me a lot to navigate and orient myself in this tagged mind-palace (nice analogy btw), is the ability to not just sort and slice your database by tags and combinations of tags, but to also just be able to browse everything sorted by time. I find this in the photo gallery on my phone, which is an utter mess, but if I really need to find something, I switch to by-date view (groups by month). Even if I don't exactly recall what month a photo was taken (or it could be a picture that I saved from Twitter, or maybe that someone sent me by IM), scrolling through I see pictures through time and usually I quickly get a familiar feeling "wait it was before then, and after ... yea .. when the thing .. ah! got it!".
It depends on how your memory works of course. But I imagine it would work because even though you can tag and re-tag and restructure your documents, the ordered slice of time-line of say 1.5yr ago hardly changes if at all.
4. Yes exactly. You might notice the "solutions" or ideas in the points above are all based in some way or another in this observation.
[+] [-] clord|10 years ago|reply
For instance, If you can track focus, you can make the monitor seem larger than it really is. Just scale everything that isn't being looked at down a bit. As the gaze shifts towards other objects, shift things slowly around and overlap the enlarged window over other background windows.
You can make focus-dependent shortcuts. Imagine vim with nouns and motions that can refer to and act on the focus point. `ytF`: yank-to-focus, where F is a motion from cursor to focus. Lots of rich possibilities there.
The only major problem I see is that you can't really share work easily (unless you open it up to multiple focus points somehow.) Also, it would be frustrating to have to look where you're typing. I'll often look at something else while typing just before switching tasks. I'm going to start paying attention to my focus more to see if there are other potential pitfalls with the computer knowing about it and changing modes in response.
In general I like the possibilities opened up by having focus. Heck even with a traditional mouse+keyboard, the extra data would help the computer understand us better. It might be more suited to a VR desktop, where the 'multiple-viewers' problem does not exist.
[+] [-] falcolas|10 years ago|reply
I have to say, I really like tagging-as-filesystem concept (where you can also meta-tag something), and the gaze/touch interaction proposed would be awesome to have in my opinion.
The current interaction with tagging (basing off OS X) is still pretty clunky. It's a separate field, the new vs previous tag selection is aggravating with a keyboard, and there's no easy way to browse or select multiple tags to filter content.
Having to move to and from the mouse a lot is a bit of a pain, and even with the best touchpads on the market, the interaction with them can still be annoying when trying to do things like click on a HN upvote arrow. Being able to start the mouse from the point you're looking at, or even forgot the mouse entirely when starting typing into the field you're looking at - those would be fantastic additions.
I'm slightly more dubious about the voice interaction, though there are times where "Hey Siri, set a timer for 10 minutes" is a great way to interact with an otherwise over-complicated device.
[+] [-] riskable|10 years ago|reply
When KDE 4 was released it included Nepomuk (https://userbase.kde.org/Nepomuk) as a universal tagging-and-search mechanism to do precisely this kind of thing. Unfortunately, not very many people use it and even those that do only use it in a very limited fashion. Partly because it only works in KDE apps and also because tagging all your files after-the-fact is a very time consuming process.
Then there's this problem: What if I never had any trouble finding my documents? What will I gain by tagging everything?
Tagging makes a lot of sense for things like photos and videos where search-by-content just doesn't work. For everything else you can just index your files and search normally.
Another problem with tagging is that--if you're going to be disciplined about it--you're not really getting much benefit over just "staying organized" with directories/folders. What's the this-helps-me difference between a directory structure like, "Company X/Clients" or a hierarchical tagging structure such as "#company/#clients"? Sure, with tags you're not limited to the parent->child concept but ultimately--if you don't stay organized with a hierarchy--you'll end up with a huge mess that can only be navigated with an intelligent tag-based search tool.
[+] [-] isaiahg|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] progman|10 years ago|reply
That's probably a reason for 40+ years of success.
It's interesting how IT steps backwards in recent years. First the "cloud" wave came to convince us to leave our autonomous PCs and to turn back to centralized IT servers. The current wave (Pads, Neo etc) looks like turning back to single screen terminals. What comes next? Shall we get rid of the mouse?
[+] [-] wvenable|10 years ago|reply
Tablet applications literally do less so they don't need as complex of a UI. You can't take that simplicity and apply to more complex applications.
[+] [-] mintplant|10 years ago|reply
This is really important. It's 2016, search is easy, and I shouldn't have to hunt around because I don't know whether you stuck your options dialog under File, Edit, or Tools. I appreciate Ubuntu for implementing this OS-wide with Unity's HUD feature.
[+] [-] makecheck|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Karawebnetwork|10 years ago|reply
Neo was designed to inspire and provoke discussions about the future of productive computing. It is not going to be a real working operating system interface, it is just a concept. I am not saying that these ideas would definitely work and that this is the future of computing. However, there is large potential in rethinking the core interfaces of desktop computing for modern needs, and somebody has to try."
[+] [-] hckr1292|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 893helios|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksk|10 years ago|reply
Taking a look at the gestures...
1) Scroll through panels - Alt+TAB is unquestionably faster (< 1sec)
2) Open App Control - Win key? (< 1sec)
3) Open Apps menu - Keyboard Shortcuts (< 1sec)
4) Open Finder - Win + E (< 1sec)
5) Close Panel - Alt F4 ((< 1sec)
6,7,8) Resize - Win + UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT (< 1sec)
Now, sure I see some people claiming that "nobody" knows these shortcuts or that they are "not intuitive" (itself a loaded term), etc.
So,
Proposal 1 (Teach people these shortcuts)
Proposal 2 (Invent completely new gestures - teach people these new gestures, which will then slow them down because a keyboard is just crazy fast compared to touch.)
Now, I'm going off of the whole Desktop phrasing. Maybe on a mobile, all of these might make more sense..
[+] [-] bobwaycott|10 years ago|reply
Conceptually, I'm really liking the approach. I could see it being a viable refreshing of desktop paradigms. There is an interesting mix of OS X, Windows, Linux WMs, and some other goodies from other apps here.
Visually, the biggest drawback is I could not tell while watching the video which panel has focus. I am assuming the idea is this would be handled by tracking eye focus. Perhaps I could get used to that, but it'd have to be instantaneous switching. As I'm typing this in a half-width browser window that takes up all vertical space, I have the Desktop Neo site in another half-width browser window taking up full vertical space by its side. I'm bouncing my eyes back and forth between the site and this textbox I'm typing in. I'm currently staring at the Neo site while I'm typing, without any looking back. Such a desktop paradigm would have to remain very intelligent about recognizing that I'm currently typing in a panel while looking at, and perhaps scrolling through another panel, without wanting my current action to lose focus or be interrupted in any way. I work this way all the time.
[+] [-] vineet7kumar|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ziburski|10 years ago|reply
It's also important to note that these two gestures perform features (fullscreen / minimize) that can also be done by just resizing the panel (either with 3 fingers, or by going to App Control).
[+] [-] ricefield|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azeirah|10 years ago|reply