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Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

• Karawebnetwork 11y ago
  "About this Concept 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 11y ago
    Soooo sad. I want this now!
  • 893helios 11y ago
    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.
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    • __jal 11y ago
      Bruce Sterling has a phrase for this: "design fiction". Design fiction tends to be some combination of portfolio piece/job application, argument about the direction of whatever is being designed (here, desktop-ish UI/UX), wish fulfillment, conversation piece, and sometime social critique.
    • protomyth 11y ago
      Well, since the person who did this is looking for an internship, the point is self-promotion and, I would guess, to flesh out the idea. Someone else might take the ball a bit farther and from there it might become real.
• pestaa 11y ago
  I'd like to hear what Bret Victor would have to say about these ideas.
• imonabout 11y ago
  I'm presuming you've researched tiling window managers as part of your work on this?
  • goalieca 11y ago
    This looks to me like an evolution of tiling windows manager with a flair of mobile/touch. Something makes me think that windows and macos are both headed in this direction in the long term.
    • wmf 11y ago
      It seems like Windows and OS X should focus on tiling if their true goal is productivity, but they have actually gone in the opposite direction in recent releases by focusing on full-screening apps.
    • jplur 11y ago
      Wouldn't mind a web browser with a tiling UI.
    • taurath 11y ago
      I use sizeup (http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/ http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/) and multiple desktops on my mac so that I rarely have to touch my mouse to resize and organize windows. I've also considered a tagging system for links - bookmarks are honestly far too much manual management - I'd like a quick hotkey and a tagging interface possibly hooked up with a calendar. I'd be even better to group context from multiple sources such as emails, calendar events, web links and chat protocols so that for my 3PM meeting it could load a screen with all the context I need, allowing me to set up tasks beforehand.
  • fuzzywalrus 11y ago
    I had the same thought. While looting mobile for some our better interactions (Swipe gestures for OS X), I don't see how this is more efficient that what we have. Mobile work flows are far more convoluted and time sucking that current desktop models. This seems to introduce unnecessary steps, and is completely touch pad dependent. Tagging exists in modern OSes already, plus there's a strong use case for folders. There's a reason why dropbox is popular on iOS.
• alistairSH 11y ago
  I like this direction. Now that my primary personal laptop is a MacBook Air 11" (and my wife's is a 13"), I find we both use full-screen apps more frequently than on larger monitors. But, it doesn't feel like the OS has kept up, and the full-screen experience is less than ideal. Apps continue to open in windowed mode, and I have to resize or full-screen them. Swiping moves me from desktop to desktop, not app to app. Take some of the app-switching work that is now present in OSX and roll it into OSX (or Windows). I haven't put a lot of thought into this - I just know the OS "desktop" no longer feels like it works.
  • gknoy 11y ago
    Have you tried Spectacle [0]? It has keyboard shortcuts (which you can redefine) for things like maximization, tiling on sides, and so forth. If you haven't tried it, consider doing so. It's really made my workflow much easier, and is almost a tiling window manager. It's easy to open a new window, drag it to the right workspace, and then size it with a keystroke. For example, ctrl-alt-command is what I use for most shortcuts (and I don't use most of the ones that come out of the box): C-M-S + Up Arrow: maximize fully (horizontal + vertical) C-M-S + Left or Right: maximize vertically, constrain to left or right side. This is neat in that it cycles between making you window 1/2, 3/4, or 1/4 of your screen wide, so you can easily have one app take up 1/4 of your screen and another take 3/4. shift-command-D: change which display something is on. All of these play nicely with the dock, even when it is on the left side of the screen instead of the bottom. 0: https://www.spectacleapp.com/ https://www.spectacleapp.com/
• froh42 11y ago
  Hmm, isn't that "just" a tiling window manager at the bottom of a few other nice things? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiling_window_manager 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).
  • johnmaguire2013 11y ago
    > I never felt like I could productively work with a tiling manager, since I frequently overlap windows as a mechanism for easy access Part of the idea of most tiling window managers is that you use the keyboard to control them, not the mouse. As such, you no longer need to overlap windows to quickly switch to the one you want. You have keybinds to do so (which actually exist in the default Windows and OSX window manager as well.)
    • ddingus 11y ago
      Seeing more than one at a time is high value. I personally hate the basic tile schemes, and full screen in many of my use cases. Yes, when I'm using one app hard, full screen is good. When I'm using multiple ones, I often want to copy paste info, or just refer to it. Auto pop to foreground is toxic, it forces a change in state when there is no need for that change most of the time. On IRIX, focus follows mouse, and middle button copy paste were awesome. Still prefer that over other schemes. Many people get a second screen to accomplish what can very easily be done with one a lot of the time. Tablets are fine consumption devices. Some create is there, like graphics, but most create has UX requirements that exceed the simple touch sweet spots.
      • fnordo 11y ago
        i3 defaults to focus following the mouse and middle pasting
• ricefield 11y ago
  For what it's worth, this feels very similar to the 10/GUI concept, which made some waves in 2009. (http://10gui.com/video/ http://10gui.com/video/)
  • azeirah 11y ago
    It is cited as a source of inspiration on the webpage
• lucian1900 11y ago
  I was surprised to realise that I already do something similar on OS X. All windows full height and have different widths and I use a touchpad.
• tomc1985 11y ago
  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?
  • fuzzywalrus 11y ago
    Agreed, the folder metaphor works as its a direct visualization of the hierarchy of the computer.
    • dangoor 11y ago
      I remember what Yahoo! was originally like: a nice, hierarchical categorization of websites. That was great when there were 1,000 websites. Maybe even okay for 10,000. Google quickly became an obviously superior approach. Back when Yahoo! was a categorized directory of sites, my computer had probably 1GB of storage. I didn't have a digital camera or many thousands of email messages. I didn't have as many documents that I either created myself or was given by someone else. I didn't have ebooks. Or mp3 files. The hierarchy that we have is not necessarily a given and even if it exists on disk, the UI metaphor does not need to be tied to that paradigm. Perhaps there is a better way for the things we do today?
      • tomc1985 11y ago
        Perhaps, but I think the answer lies more in backend tweaks than a UI/UX overhaul. File/folder tagging, for example, could integrate easily into existing UI paradigms without having to overhaul (or remove) the files/folders analogy. I agree that dealing with folders gets too complicated above a certain threshold, but to me that signals a need for additional (thoughtful) tooling.
      • dman 11y ago
• anjc 11y ago
  Agreed OP, the advances that Windows 8.1 and Metro made were truly amazing.
• david-given 11y ago
  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.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• jb55 11y ago
  So basically xmonad + with a tagged file indexer. Although fzf + https://github.com/rupa/z 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. I really don't like leaving my home row. I may be crazy.
  • iheartmemcache 11y ago
    Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking. Fzf is great, it's like anything.el/helm but works outside of emacs. Thanks!
• obilgic 11y ago
  How do I get only the window/panel management features? edit: this is nothing more than a design prototype.
• ollybee 11y ago
  Awesome.
  • ollybee 11y ago
    This was a subtle reference to the tiling windows manager named awesome which can be configured to do much of what is show here.
    • Zardoz84 11y ago
      Also, there is a few stuff that remember me a lot to plasma-tablet from KDE
• Arzh 11y ago
  So like, Windows 10?
• isaiahg 11y ago
  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.
  • progman 11y ago
    > A traditional desktop does everything I need 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 11y ago
    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.
• tomc1985 11y ago
  On another note, it has become waaaay too easy to come up with a flashy website for a research product.
• rocky1138 11y ago
  First paragraph in and I'm already not their customer: "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.
  • theandrewbailey 11y ago
    "We now use smartphones and tablets most of the time, since they are much easier to use." Isn't this the kind of thinking behind Windows 8?
  • _lce0 11y ago
    I wasn't aware of 10/GUI Thanks for share! http://10gui.com/ http://10gui.com/
    • smartbit 11y ago
      It seems that the tiling windows [0] of desktopneo or 10gui would not work on very large monitors like a UDH 40". Eg. the Philips [1] has such a large viewing angle for the lower two corners that they are less usable. Personally I use the middle for active windows and move others to the left & right. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiling_window_manager https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiling_window_manager [1] https://pcmonitors.info/reviews/philips-bdm4065uc/ https://pcmonitors.info/reviews/philips-bdm4065uc/
      • JimmyAustin 11y ago
        As an aside, I own the Phillips linked and it is absolutely fantastic for SWD. My windows dev environment is essentially a poor clone of a tiled window manager as I have zero overlap between my windows due to the insane amount of real estate.
    • david-given 11y ago
      I haven't seen that. That's really cool, and current applications should drop right into it, too. Disconnecting the touch surface from the mouse solves a lot of the current problems with touch screens. Does the kind of large multitouch surface with flyover support needed by 10/GUI actually exist? Because I think I want one.
• coleifer 11y ago
  What is the pretentious fappery?! Use a tiling window manager and get over it.
• clord 11y ago
  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.
• FreedomToCreate 11y ago
  A lot of the design paradigms they have implemented already exist in MacOS without sacrificing the flexibility a desktop interface affords.
• andy_ppp 11y ago
  Okay this is fine... as far as it goes. I think I still want windows sometimes. I would much prefer all of the things I do to be organised by the work I'm doing. Here is an example. If I switch to the "personal project" I get a completely clean workspace (or whatever I left it as) with email filtered to be about only things related to my personal project. I want only the apps that I use for this project (browser, pycharm, photoshop, terminal) all on different screens all of these apps only showing the work and paths I have associated with a specific project. Basically build GTD into all my apps and the desktop and allow me to filter said desktop by tags, projects, people etc. And I think I'll take this opportunity to turn on no procrast again...
• vineet7kumar 11y ago
  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).
  • ziburski 11y ago
    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).
    • tlow 11y ago
      Why not put touch sensitivity into the keys so we can make gestures while our fingers are on the keyboard?
• dangrossman 11y ago
  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.
  • atm0sphere 11y ago
    I agree with everything you said. This is a brilliant resume and he ought to be looking for gainful employment, rather than just an internship.
    • jchendy 11y ago
      > he should be looking for gainful employment, rather than just an internship. Presumably he wants to finish college, in which case an internship totally makes sense.
      • ethanbond 11y ago
        Besides, tech internships are very gainful.
    • mhsenkow 11y ago
      Agreed, he's much more skilled than many designers I know.
    • Themistocles 11y ago
      me too
  • falcolas 11y ago
    To be fair, it's also a good, cohesive amalgamation of UI interaction concepts as well. If someone did realize this design, I'd be on-board for trying it out.
• darrelld 11y ago
  Sidebar: I get that this is meant to be a thought provoking concept piece and I respect that. My issue here is with the font color choices on some of the paragraphs. It is set to have an alpha of 0.4! Why would you do that? Why make things less legible? I'm no designer so I've made some poor contrast choices and I can forgive those, but why would you make the text more see through? Is this a design pattern?
• falcolas 11y ago
  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.
  • riskable 11y ago
    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 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.
• personjerry 11y ago
  One thing though, this should not be an OS as suggested, but merely a window manager.
• mpnordland 11y ago
  sort of feels like what I already do, although in a prettier package. Mostly just fullscreen everything in it's own virtual desktop on my main screen with a secondary for music/logs/email.
• sergiotapia 11y ago
  Where do I download it to try it out?
• jaked89 11y ago
  Boring. I almost fell asleep.
• masmullin 11y ago
  Why something as intuitive as eye tracking, but something as clunky as touchpad gestures? Surely if technology is good enough to track the eye, we don't need a touchpad to track hand gestures? I really like this concept, but when I heard "three finger scroll" I died a little inside.
  • ziburski 11y ago
    Sadly, technology isn't good enough for eye tracking to completely replace the mouse. Your eye will always flutter a little and wander around, so you can't rely on eye tracking exclusively. It's also not really practical to perform gestures with your eyes. So you'll still want a touchpad to have quick access to common features through these gestures. I have actually researched this topic quite a lot, and have also been prototyping with a Tobii EyeX tracker.
    • masmullin 11y ago
      I didn't mean to insinuate that technology is at a point where eye tracking excellent, I meant to play along with the video where it was a requirement of the new desktop that eye tracking be excellent. Thus in this theoretical world where eye tracking is excellent, why is hand gesturing not as advanced as eye tracking?
• Namrog84 11y ago
  The very first thing I noticed in the first image with 2 side by side is the example with wikipedia on the right. Wikipedia has side bars I don't care or need to see. This is exactly the instance I'd have the left one overlapping the roght to cover it up. Giving me more space to left. And chrome still allows me to scroll the window behind. Without clicking or bringing focus to it. Many applications also havesidebara or other whitespace that I normally might cover. Sometimes as simple as a calculator app or something. I am still open to this idea but until I see any tile manager address this well. It's a nom starter for me.
  • dredmorbius 11y ago
    Wikipedia's mobile site (and Android app) dispense with the sidebars. More generally: I'm finding myself prefering to negate sites' own styling increasingly, with very few exceptions. I'll reach for the "Reader Mode" button on my browser as the page loads (which, of course, doesn't work), and wish that that were the default instead. Which is another area in which Desktop Neo might care to innovate. Treating documents uniformly regardless of where they originate.
• homulilly 11y ago
  Cool resume, I thought the part where it loads super compressed low detail images for every card in the app demonstration and then loads the full detail image when you actually show that tab was a clever way to make the ui more responsive without adding a ton of page load time.
• terda12 11y ago
  Seems like too much unnecessary features to be honest. Windows + Mouse with hotkeys is still the most comfortable set up for most people including me. I don't need an optimized experience. I've tried Metro, I've tried i3, I've tried bspwm, I use Vim with split screen, and I still prefer the concept of draggable windows at the end of the day. It feels more free to be able to drag windows and take ownership of the layout than having a computer dictate what my layout should be. At the end of the day, I feel like I'm more and more preferring simple UI's rather than these multitouch optimized experiences
• donpark 11y ago
  I like the concept and hope it will get built, hopefully for Linux.
• mark_l_watson 11y ago
  I like the idea. It reminds me somewhat of sliding out a secondary app on a new model iPad, but with many vertical panels instead of just a maximum of two.
• EdSharkey 11y ago
  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.
  • doublerebel 11y ago
    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.
    • sixothree 11y ago
      Any swipe is virtually impossible in an office situation. Not everyone works hunched over a macbook. Reaching up to my monitor two swipe would destroy my shoulder.
      • Gracana 11y ago
        Touch screens obviously aren't the answer here, but a good trackpad setup might be okay. I used to use Apple's "magic trackpad" when I had a macintosh desktop, and it did gesture inputs really well, though I always seemed to run into discomfort/strain issues earlier than I did with a mouse (which is part of why I switched back.) That could be unique to me, but I'd guess that the need to hover your hand above the pad is not good for anyone. I'd be up for trying that setup again if someone had a good idea to solve that problem.
• andrewrothman 11y ago
  I think this is fantastic. There's only two problems as I see it. The first is the consideration of running this on current hardware. Obviously Neo is meant to be run on hardware designed for these interactions (as shown with the voice key on the keyboard and the gaze tracking camera) but I'd like more detail on how this could run on systems that do not have this hardware. The second is in professional applications. I did not see any screenshots that deal with Photoshop or Final Cut Pro or After Effects or Solidworks or really any of the crucially important applications for the desktop. These are exactly what keep the desktop around, and what keep people from accepting Metro. It'd be great if we could solve these two issues, or at least discuss them. I think these ideas are really great and the presentation was amazing. I'm seriously impressed, but it's a little held back from widespread adoption until we can figure a few things out. P.S. Also I'd like to be able to split my terminal windows horizontally please :)
• mintplant 11y ago
  > 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.
  • makecheck 11y ago
    The OS X Help menu does this as well.
    • dingo_bat 11y ago
      Ditto for Windows. This is hardly new.
      • mintplant 11y ago
        Where on Windows?
        • dingo_bat 11y ago
          I have misunderstood your comment. This is certainly not on Windows, and it would be a great help. Although, Office 2016 apps have this on top of every window. You can type and it will search every option available.
• king_magic 11y ago
  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).
  • colmvp 11y ago
    Even as a designer, I think you hit the nail on one my biggest criticisms about the profession: rationales without evidence. Most of the time, design rationales seem like they are based on the subjective POV of the designer rather than conclusion based on recorded feedback.
  • tripzilch 11y ago
    No, no, he's done research, right from the start. Says so right on the page titled "design process". That's how he knows, I'm sure. He wouldn't just be making that stuff up out of thin air, and surely the "research" and "design process" did not exclusively consist out of the previous iterations of mockups we can see on that page. Certainly he's also written the technical design document that describes a clearly outlined goal at the start, works that out referring to well-known theories, studies and previous research done in the field of UX design. Obviously the statements about efficiency have been corroborated by hard numbers obtained from use cases, user studies--done on people other than himself or his professors--about discoverability, efficiency, employing user tasks and scripts (as described in the literature he must be familiar with). He's a student of interaction design on a university. So he must certainly know that research implies science and interaction design involves actual social studies and that building mockups, animations and a gorgeous website with demo video is only a tiny and not even that important part of the field. Certainly it can't be that this guy is in fact quite talented at marketing and that's why he's currently at the top of HN.
• TeMPOraL 11y ago
  I love it. It combines exactly the three things I want to see together: - Tiling window manager - that I have (StumpWM), and it's awesome! (pun intended) - Convenient tagging of everything - now that's been discussed for many years already, and yet for some reason nobody actually implemented it properly. - Eye tracking - it's a feature I wanted to have since I started using multiple monitors and noticed the unnecessary input action I have to make to switch focus so that it follows what I'm looking at. It also has one of my favourite UI patterns - wheel menu. A great demo, IMO, and I wish someone would implement it. I'd happily try it out, and if good enough, I'd become a paying user.
• lottin 11y ago
  It looks really nice. That said I don't see how this interface is better productivity -- unless your work consists entirely in reading mails and surfing the web. Also I don't get why UI designers hate "folders" and want to replace them with "tags". Personally I don't think you can beat a good old file system with a bunch of tags. Of course the file system requires some effort on the part of the user to keep things organised, but then again so do tags.
• scrumper 11y ago
  I thoroughly enjoyed reading this contemplation of what desktop UIs might look like in 3-5 years. Excellent work. There are some very good ideas in here, notably the pop-up circular 'swipe' menu of contextual actions (near the bottom of the page). I built one of these into a trading system once and it was well received. Gaze tracking combined with "Just Type" strikes me as being potentially very powerful too, if combined with some sort of highlight thing so you know where you're going to be typing. There are some amusingly weird things too, like the polydactyl-only requirement to "click and drag inwards on a panel with 6 fingers."
• tlow 11y ago
  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. Nice job. Ich wünsche dir viel Glück.
• snickmy 11y ago
  There are some good thoughtful points. On overall a well done presentation. I wonder how natural touch on a touchpad is for a productivity flow in a desktop context. I personally never managed to get it integrated in my workflow (neither with magic mouse or trackpads). I also would be interested in understanding the impact of a mixed input experience. Not sure if our brain can switch context so fast. On the other hand, I see the synergy in having eye sight + voice control.
• everyone 11y ago
  "We now use smartphones and tablets most of the time, since they are much easier to use." I completely disagree with that. If you gave two people (one on a pc, the other on a tablet or phone) some task, ie. move a file from here to here, assuming they were both equally conversant in their chosen system, the pc user would be able to do it in a fraction of the time of the tablet or phone user.
  • _rob 11y ago
    I assume he means more physically, and in that sense he is correct. You can use your smartphone or tablet basically anywhere and start using it on short notice. Something that you cannot really do with a tablet or laptop.
• TrevorJ 11y ago
  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.
  • koduh 11y ago
    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.
    • dingo_bat 11y ago
      >For example if I want to move a single window of Notepad++ to a different desktop it moves all of the Notepad++ instances. I think this is a problem with Notepad++, because I can move around single instances of all other apps I tried (Chrome, VS, etc). >On top of that, I really don't want all of my software always open in a separate desktop. Ideally the user should not need to worry about "open" apps and the resources they are taking up just by being open (not doing any work). It is the app's and the OS's job to ensure that background apps do not use CPU for doing nothing and the memory management is good enough that you always have enough memory for what you wanna run NOW. And I think that is quite good in Windows 10 and OSX right now. I can have multiple VS projects, a couple of VMs, multiple SSH sessions, Outlook, couple of Office docs, ~30 tabs across several Chrome windows open and I can still create a new Desktop and play some Need for Speed when I reach home.
  • Flammy 11y ago
    Hey Trevor, You should check out atlas.co and sign up for the beta for an invite. I'm currently working on this project, and it is exactly aimed at the problem you're describing. More details: techcrunch.com/2015/11/24/contextual-search-platform-atlas-is-ivy-softworks-first-spinoff/ www.geekwire.com/2015/innovation-studio-ivy-softworks-unveils-first-product-atlas-search-engine-digital-life/
• hellofunk 11y ago
  Some of the features demonstrated in their video are already in the most recent version of OSX, fyi. Coincidentally I noticed them today and was pleasantly surprised.
• justhw 11y ago
  Guys, sometimes just enjoy the work. No need to nitpick on every detail. This is not a service and you are not a customer. It's a simple design concept.
• tdriggs 11y ago
  This looks like something out of the design team for Windows 8 (in both good and bad ways). It is visually striking, a dramatic simplification of what currently exists, and it makes several assumptions about the real world of what app developers need and how they can plug into OS-provided UI surfaces. One of the most painful learnings for Microsoft with Windows 8 was that overly-standardizing things like content sharing and tagging leads apps into situations where the affordances don’t work.
• JimRoepcke 11y ago
  At 1:00 of the video, he says "In my document I want to make a sentence bold, so I just select it, and then just click..." But he doesn't explain HOW he selected the text. Since there's no mouse cursor, I have no idea how he just did that. A glance doesn't seem to be sufficient since it requires movement and intent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=71&v=9WZVPM-zZWM https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=71&v=9WZVPM-zZWM
  • ziburski 11y ago
    You are right. I left that out of the video to focus on the more interesting features. There is a small note on the website about how text selection could work with gaze and touch: --- Text Selection Place one finger on the touchpad to adjust a cursor at the gaze position. Use a second finger to set the end of the selection.
• profinger 11y ago
  I want Gaze recognition now. Where can I put my money? lol
• bobwaycott 11y ago
  First impression: 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.
• PascLeRasc 11y ago
  I think this middle vertical text (http://imgur.com/n2KQZqO http://imgur.com/n2KQZqO) should be flipped to be like book titles on a shelf, or omitted at all. It was incredibly difficult to read that.
• rplnt 11y ago
  I would love to have that radial context on right hold + move. In browser at least. Gone would be mouse gestures, but I think that this can capture quite a few of them and make them more accessible. Anyone? :)
  • dredmorbius 11y ago
    That's a feature of the PocketBook ebook reader Android app.
• rasz_pl 11y ago
  Touch and voice better than a mouse, sure. Tag with voice because its faster! proceeds to show 8 seconds to add two words = 15 WPM.
  • pekk 11y ago
    We shouldn't just be shooting from the hip and selling, we should be actually trying things out to see what works better. Obviously voice is not a good idea for everything.
• mattlutze 11y ago
  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.
  • tripzilch 11y ago
    Great points. I've thought about some of these. 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.
• clapinton 11y ago
  This is a great example of how to get elements from mobile design (hamburger button, left sliding menu) and adapt it to desktop, which Apple has been slowly doing in the past versions. My 2¢: - 6 fingers on the trackpad means two hands on the trackpad, which means moving one of them out of its working position. Just like you are avoiding moving the mouse around with the look-and-tap thing, you want to avoid users getting their hands off the keyboard, onto the trackpad, and back to the keyboard; - the context menu is really nice. It is a very impressive piece of work for someone who is looking to show off his skills while still in college. I made projects myself before graduating, but they were always amateur-y and only for myself. I never made it to actually share it with the world. He actually did something and put it out there for others to see and judge. Kudos to the guy, specially if the whole design process which he claims to have gone through (research, target groups, user flows) is as thorough as it sounds.
• FatalBaboon 11y ago
  I keep hearing doomeries as "Laptops will kill desktops", "tablets will kill laptops". What's next? we're going to work on smartwatches? And here I am, with my desktop computer, comfy keyboard & screens, fully hackable. I've had it for almost 12 years now, and I just replaced parts every now and then to keep it somewhat current. That will never go away. Then I got an old laptop for working away from home, but I hardly ever use it. So when I hear touch screens will become ubiquitous and its necessary minimalistic UX will drive the consumer computer industry, I have my doubts. Never gonna happen. Something being useful does not mean it will necessarily eat everyone's lunch. Nor that is has to.
• jadbox 11y ago
  I think no one told him about "tiling managers", while not pretty, I LOVE i3. https://i3wm.org/ https://i3wm.org/
• guhcampos 11y ago
  That's what Gnome 3 should have been. But please don't fork/refactor Gnome again to become this. Not yet.
• WhoBeI 11y ago
  Hmm.. not sure. Doesn't look like my kind of interface really. but I would probably still give it a try. Just one thing... the word productivity is used a lot but I see only webpages and file searches. Where's the cad/cam interfaces, the triple log file tailing terminals.. How would you gesture or speak an image to Gimp?
• workitout 11y ago
  I prefer to overlap and manage my windows as I need to. I'd like to see a desktop from Google based on Android but with overlapping windows, not the confining a phone is required to use.
• relkor 11y ago
  How did he create those demos, did he actually write a windows manager that wraps existing OS functions into his format? The amount of code that would take to give all of the functionality would be stupendous. Also how did he implement eye tracking with such robustness? Could he be kernel hacking and remapping the video memory buffer so that his shim code can take the output of working programs and then rearrange it for the purposes of his demo? Could a designer shed some light for this programmer on how exactly that video was generated. What type of tools would he have used so that I can google them on my own time?
  • relkor 11y ago
    not sure why the downvotes unless you assumed I was sarcastic? I assure you I honestly want to know. As a programmer I only really understand one way to create screen output. Any other mechanism to create demos as slick as that one I would be very interested to learn about. Given that everyone in this thread is completely ignoring how it was accomplished and only talking about the design skill, I feel I am missing a critical piece of information about the process of creating demos such as that. While such techniques may be common to your industry, to those of us outside they appear as magic.
• mleonhard 11y ago
  I love it! I would want an angled keyboard with integrated touch-pads for each hand. I use the Goldtouch V2 keyboard. It would be great it if the keyboard was edged with 2-3 inch touchpad surfaces. Then I could keep my hands in an ergonomic position and avoid having to reach for the mouse with every interaction.
• ksk 11y ago
  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..
• RachelF 11y ago
  This web page will be very useful prior art for the big companies that are going to try and patent these ideas!
• samstave 11y ago
  I personally hate interacting with machines via gesture touch controls.
• dingo_bat 11y ago
  >The desktop metaphor as the basis of computer interfaces is inefficient and outdated. Today, most of our data exists outsides of files and folders. What does this even mean? ALL my data is in files and folders. Is there a filesystem that doesn't use the concept of files and directories? If not, then isn't it best to model the system closely in the UI? I also read the "Window management is outdated" and it completely failed to detail how windows are bad. It seems to me that windows are the most flexible UI paradigm, allowing you to decide how exactly you want to use your screen space. The challenge is on the devs to make apps with a reactive UI that changes according to the size of the window.
• Themistocles 11y ago
  well, I Don't Know
• Themistocles 11y ago
  hi
• egypturnash 11y ago
  > Folders were a great metaphor when our files were a handful of office documents. But today, complex hierachies make it hard to organize and find what we are looking for. The concept of a file being located in a single place seems outdated. Content is stored, synced, backed up and shared among many different devices. And our most important content lives in services or apps, not in folders and files. While mobile devices are trying to kill file management completely, it’s more important today than ever. With the enormous amount and complexity of content, we need a new solution. Okay, buddy. Tell me how you're going to navigate a complex project built with multiple apps with your cool new tag-only scheme. How would you re-organize the myriad number of source code files, library sources, images, image source files, readmes, and other things? Hierarchical structures are good for that kind of thing. If you're going to advocate throwing them out then I think it is imperative for you to tell me how you will organize real projects rather than just a handwave about search and adding tags to tags. How would I reorganize the directory full of 193 Illustrator art files and a ton of subdirectories, many with multiple layers of their own subdirectories, that make up the graphic novel I finished last year? It's got a total of ~2.7k files in it but all of that complexity is hidden behind a bunch of subdirectories so I can quickly find what I need at any moment. (And also: holy crap those sample images are so much WHITE, using this will be like staring into a spotlight. And so impersonal - the user-set desktop picture is a wonderful thing that makes the computer feel like it's theirs and I kinda feel like this proposal completely drops affordances like that in favor of a blown-up iPad UI.)
  • 0xCMP 11y ago
    Well for your example: Tag it with your project and maybe their purpose. I would have bought this more if you were talking about code, but even then an IDE could simply make the project a single file (like OS X '.apps's) to contain the whole project. This is actually similar to how Xcode works where how you organize your project doesn't always relate to how it is on disk.
• teknologist 11y ago
  "Fullscreen - click and drag outwards on a panel with 6 fingers" AKA the "goatse" gesture.
• shib71 11y ago
  I found the repetitive use of "outdated" to be off-putting. It implies that much of the value of a new interface (including this one) lies in it's novelty. Except for a minority, the precise opposite is true - most people aren't interested in learning how to use their computer again.
• dredmorbius 11y ago
  I've seen a hell of a lot of annoying UI/UX design over my 40+ years of computer use. And very little that's not entirely derivative of Doug Englebart's Mother of All Demos, in December of 1968. Lennart's selecting from among the best widespread ideas, adding in several that are currently fringe, and coming up with a few twists of his own. The result is several things I'd very much like to have right now. Any company looking hard at the desktop would be idiotic not to make him an offer. Lennart would be best advised to pick very carefully from among those he's tendered, and to make clear his own expectations. The losers will be chasing his taillights for the next 20 years. Possibly 40. The vision here is strong, but practical. It's dispensing of numerous tired elements of existing design, but replacing them with what appear to be far more workable models. I see some weaknesses and holes in the presentation, but at this stage these are details, not as is so often the case baked-in architectural flaws. The synthesis of tiling, desktop, and touch interfaces in particularly is quite promising. My biggest concern is that Lennart would accept an offer where his ideas would be absorbed into the black hole of an ossified company. The obvious contenders for him are Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Ubuntu and Mozilla might be in the offing, and dark horses might emerge from Amazon or one of the existing hardware vendors -- Asus, Samsung, or LG, perhaps. I think Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon would all be mistakes. The first two are far too wedded to their legacy platforms. Amazon is simply a horrible place to work, and the first rule is to not work for assholes. Google, Ubuntu, or Mozilla offer the opportunity to develop this project and maintain an open-source offering. They'd probably be at the top of my list. I've suggested Google talk to Lennart and make him an offer. One of the major hardware vendors might be of interest. I haven't kept track of where KDE/Qt are headed, but that's another option. What I'm most thinking is, "damn, this would be a great time for a credible challenger for the desktop to appear". I'm not sure there is one. But the world is Lennart's oyster. I've commented further on the interface, and on what I see as weaknesses based on the presentation: https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/bzZws5VhqaC https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/bzZws5Vh...
• OOPMan 11y ago
  Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, another attempt to force touch-paradigms into the desktop environment. Can't these Apple hipsters just be happy with the iDevices and leave my WM alone?
• v-yadli 11y ago
  Talks about desktop interface, and leverages a touch pad. When falling back to a mouse, this design language would not be effective.
• Animats 11y ago
  The eye-tracking GUI concept is interesting. That needs to be tried again. It's been proposed before.[1][2] Dismissing notifications by looking at them is an interesting concept. It's not clear whether users would like it or hate it. That idea probably needs to come with an equally easy way to get it back. Maybe you want to do something about the notification. One general insight about GUIs is that easily undone mistakes aren't so bad. That's the Amazon one-click purchase insight. The innovation is not that you can buy with one click. It's that you can cancel for the next 10 minutes or so. Most shopping systems had a "we have your money now, muahahaha!" attitude on cancellation until Amazon came along. [1] http://hci.stanford.edu/research/GUIDe/ http://hci.stanford.edu/research/GUIDe/ [2] http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~jacob/papers/barfield.pdf http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~jacob/papers/barfield.pdf
• saiprashanth93 11y ago
  Is there a history of people putting concepts out and other people building on them? Yes, of course. The cynicism in this thread regarding this being self-promotion is very unfortunate.
• ciaoben 11y ago
  Great concept. I found the idea pretty interesting, but not for desktop maybe. I see a lot of good ideas that tablet companies could 'steal' to finally level app the productivity on tablets. Maybe, even if this concept is 'Apple oriented', could be a good game changer for android tablets.
• legulere 11y ago
  I don't think tags are good enough to categorize data. Tags lack information what is being tagged. When it's clear what's tagged then they work. On twitter for instance it's the topic you're speaking about. What you really want is a property system like wikidata. Think about a music program you want to write. You want to find all artists that music files on this computer have and when the user clicks on an artist find all the music that belongs to this artist.
• k_bx 11y ago
  Things I definitely don't like: - swiping to switch between apps (with transition animation) is a no-go, cmd-tab is much better as it is right now - with taking two-finger-swipe for switching apps, you need something to go back and forward in your browser. 3-finger-swipe? Not sure regarding tags instead of folders. Folders are simpler and easier to understand, so this needs a lot of details review and experience investigation.
• garblegarble 11y ago
  This reminds me a lot of 10/gui[1], another interesting desktop concept that uses multitouch in a cool way to navigate based on the number of fingers you use [1] http://10gui.com/video/ http://10gui.com/video/
• dennismart 11y ago
  very nice, feeling like you could be fast with it
• threesixandnine 11y ago
  What's up with all the criticism. Jealous much? While browsing this I found it to be inspiring and beautiful. Way better than anything some companies that call themselves "design" put out for BIG $$$. Screw all the negative energy here. Go man, go. You are the real deal among all the fake critics-designers.
  • imtringued 11y ago
    The website outright neglects the keyboard. That alone sugests to me that this is not a UI concept that targets desktops or laptops. It's still in the realm of touch devices.
• ommunist 11y ago
  Someone -- hire this guy, give him a fellow OSX developer and build the alternative UI for OSX. Its smoking hot! And makes use of Magic Trackpad.
• javipas 11y ago
  Fun fact: as @ziburski has acknowledged, he got some inspiration from Clayton Miller's 10/GUI (2009), and if anyone watches the video https://vimeo.com/6712657 https://vimeo.com/6712657 he will see how the organization in panels and not windows was called "con10uum" (min 3:30). I wonder if some Microsoft designer/VP/exec saw this and get the idea to put "Continuum" as one of the most important features of Windows 10. Besides from that, great work, congratulations @ziburski. Like many others I miss shortcuts on a productivity environment, but this really could work.
• vic-traill 11y ago
  I think this is very interesting content, and this is represented in the volume of dialogue it has generated. I found that Neo really resonated with my residential use, but not so much for my work. From the Author's referenced blog post 'The Desktop is Outdated': "We interact with a lot of different content today, and a large part is outside of files". Not in my work environment where the majority of content is inside of files. But sitting at home - yeah, this is true for me. It appears to me that the mobile interface cart is trying to drive the productivity desktop horse here. I don't know to what extent I buy it, but I like the way Neo challenges current desktop design. I'm going to go back and read it again.
• herbst 11y ago
  I hoped its real :/ Looks good, would love to run this as WM/DM on my linux.
• dawnbreez 11y ago
  Interesting concept, but file tags would have to be an OS-level thing.
• Too 11y ago
  I have a big gripe with the design of the finder window, and with all similar good looking designs from many mockup-designers of interfaces. It only looks good and practical at the same time when you've taken a printscreen, scaled it down 60% and don't try to read the text. If you try to actually use this on a normal sized and normal resolution screen the text would be too small to read. So, to solve this you have to increase the text size, but this means each element becomes too big so that nothing fits, to solve this you have to reduce the padding of each element but then it doesn't look as good anymore. The contrast of the text is also too faint and if you make it more clear the "wow-looks" of the concepts are all gone. I think this is why you hardly ever see designs like this in the wild. What I mean is, open this picture[1] and resize it to comfortable reading level, after doing so i can only see slightly more than half of it vertically. Things that previously looked like pretty design elements now just seem to waste space, like why would i need a thumbnail of a map and a movie-cover on my start screen? It's just like architects designing the block of a city, they always show fancy renders of the place from above(?!) in the best weather imaginable. But that's not how people will actually perceive it when being there because then you see things from street level where it doesn't look the same at all. [1] https://www.desktopneo.com/assets/images/finder_2234.jpg https://www.desktopneo.com/assets/images/finder_2234.jpg
• tripzilch 11y ago
  Am I the only one who has trouble with touch interfaces in general? Ever since my burnout I developed tremors in my fingers (I'm only 35) they got less but I don't expect them to ever completely disappear. When I got my first smartphone, a Galaxy S4, which is nearly all-touchscreen to the edges and only 8mm thick, I found them absolute hell to use. Despite that I love the elegance of idea of touch-interfaces. If it's on, I must hold it by the 8mm sides to not press all sorts of things, which is very hard to keep steady. Meaning I can't do two-thumb-typing, or take sharp pictures, having to steady it against/in my hand I press the power button by accident, it just sucks. Many things take longer and it's not cool to be confronted with every few minutes. Three-finger touch gestures are going to be awful for who who can't reliably bring three fingers down on the touchpad at the same time or can't quite rest their hand ready for that. Either the OS will occasionally register a bunch of one- and two-finger events before all three hit, or the OS will have to wait and analyse what's the intent and incur latency--at which point you're no longer doing anyone a favour, not the young dexterous power users, nor the twitchy and the elderly. A lot of people ITT praise this guy's "design" skills, but I'm not entirely clear what particular field of design? His graphics design skills are pretty okay (not my taste but it looks good), but his user interface/interaction design skills ... I can't even judge because he doesn't display them? All he writes about, even on the "Design Process" page is basically graphics design, mockups and daydreaming. This is what people in the industry call, a cute hobby. Where are the user tests? Where's the stories? Videos? Theory? How do children ages 9-11 work with that (long) menu list that supposedly "is easily scannable"? (answer: they don't) How do the elderly feel about three-finger touch gestures? (probably not very sexy) What about when the menu list is translated to other languages? Doubt that even crossed his mind. But try it out, an exercise: An application with big menus that you are very familiar with (for me GIMP, but otherwise perhaps LibreOffice, or whatever). Switch the interface from English to a second language you speak well, even/especially if that language is your mother tongue. What happened to "easily scannable"? Now switch the interface to a script you can't even read, Persian or Cyrillic. If you can still somewhat blindly perform some tasks and relatively easily find your way to switch back, the interface is doing pretty good. I have a fun Xposed plugin for Cyanogenmod called "HODOR", which hooks into the OS and changes all the words everywhere to read "HODOR". It's hilarious. To switch back you need to start Xposed, browse two levels of menus and reboot your phone. There's only two points where I need to guess (memorize), which I think is not bad for Cyanogenmod's UX design. This is what the final reboot dialog looks like: http://i.imgur.com/Yjf4Gc0.jpg http://i.imgur.com/Yjf4Gc0.jpg (asking whether I want regular or soft reboot, recovery or download and to OK/Cancel). On the Design Process page he says "during the creation of Neo, I put a big focus on research", but then all he shows is more daydreaming and mockups. Where is the research? This is a neat portfolio for a graphics designer but as far as user interaction design goes, all I see is someone that doesn't take the field seriously. Something that is slightly worrying in the general case (also for graphics designers), all the descriptions I see him telling how it should be from his point of view, nothing about other users, nothing about users that are not like him. I admit that's just my impression from reading these few pages. But that's exactly what a portfolio should provide. No stories about him sitting down with at least 20 random (not self-selected) people interacting with his mockups (assuming they're interactive), doing tasks, taking notes and/or video, and documenting especially the failures and the changes they provoked. That means either he hasn't done actual research, or he deems it not important enough to write about on his portfolio (very unlikel,y given the troves of information it provides if you actually do it). Even if he didn't test on other people, I'd expect the "Design Process" page to at least talk about, his design process. It's just screenshots of early iterations. "Early on I identified the three most important topics as navigation, file management and input"--cool, how did you do that? Intuition is not a process! In particular it's not a skill that someone at the start of their career can plausibly demonstrate (either you can clearly explain steps how you got there or you have a long history of intuitively being right about such things).