14 ms·

Mercury OS

162 points by sagelemur 3y ago

dang 3y ago
Related: MercuryOS – A speculative reimagining of current operating system paradigms - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29948455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29948455 - Jan 2022 (8 comments) Introducing Mercury OS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20043255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20043255 - May 2019 (2 comments) Mercury OS: Modern, Humane OS Design Concept - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20033445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20033445 - May 2019 (1 comment) Mercury OS – A speculative vision of the operating system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20033328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20033328 - May 2019 (1 comment)
pedalpete 3y ago
This is a beautiful looking OS, and the idea of "spaces" may be worth exploring. I was just reading about Facebook's failed Home phone project where rather than apps, the interface was focused on people. I thought it was a real OS, and wanted to try it, as I've got a Fire tablet gen 1 that is looking for a new use. Weird question, the credits say Mercury is dedicated to Jef Raskin. Why not have the home screen in the demos say "Good Morning Jef," instead of Jason? Who's Jason?
- Lalabadie 3y ago
  Jason Yuan. MercuryOS is his project.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
daniel_iversen 3y ago
Oh boy I’d like to play with something new and exciting like this and was sad to hear it’s just a design mock-up/idea. The OS space seems to have been quite stale for a decade or two, is there anything super exciting and different out there from a UX perspective? Remember installing Linux in the late 90s or rooting Windows phones and installing whatever latest Android OS was available in the early days of iOS and Android, and that was always quite thrilling.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  Have you looked into Sailfish? https://sailfishos.org/ https://sailfishos.org/ I'm not affiliated (nor have I actually used it) but it looks like an interesting alternative approach to phone UX, and one that you can actually use! I'd be interested to hear any stories HNers have with it.
  - vivekv 3y ago
    Says legal for use only in Europe
- ativzzz 3y ago
  The other hard part besides hardware is that an OS is useless without useful apps (or at least a browser) so the OS dev also has to recreate the entire suite of browser/email client/word processing, etc etc which now requires even more effort, or some kind of window/linux compatibility layer, but in that case you might as well just spin off another Linux distro
provenance 3y ago
Nice. Reminds me of my unfinished project “SynchronizedOS” which automatically handles securi..err, synchronicity concerns re: Cloud/Endpoints Inmates/asylum cc: dang
tyingq 3y ago
I see where they are trying to go with the "humane" approach, but the examples seem to require big companies to play along. For example, the shopping examples put the control back with the user, and companies supply basic info like pictures, pricing, descriptions. In real life, of course, they won't cede that control easily. You'll get the same sort of mess you see on Facebook Marketplace, for example..."for sale" listings of cars that put the down-payment in the sales price spot and some wording telling you to call for more info. No actual prices are shown. So, it would probably require some sort of unapproved scraping, collating, etc, to really work as intended.
- juunpp 3y ago
  Yeah, it would require standards. The web lost track after the dotcom. In the beginning there were protocols. Now we're in the corporate moat period, where N corporations build the same thing N times because each one of them wants to dominate the others. Consequently, we were left with low-level protocols and languages (http, html, css, etc); there is no standard for buying shit online, despite most businesses being online. No standard for payments, no standard for query/search/browsing, etc. Compare that with, e.g., computer graphics, where graphics vendors (except Apple) collaborate on the development of standards like OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenXR, and shit works relatively seamlessly modulo vendor bugs and extensions.
kickingvegas 3y ago
This makes me think of the Lifestreams work by Freeman and Gelertner. http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html
erybodyknows 3y ago
Has anyone attempted to implement this into an existing Linux DE? Or a full screen web app experience?
- omarfarooq 3y ago
  Latter may be a good place to start.
mdgrech23 3y ago
This is like in the 60s when they would reimagine cars w/ out steering wheels. 60 years later and we still have steering wheels. Maybe one or two ideas will stick. that's it.
stolen_biscuit 3y ago
Does this thing actually exist or is it just a pretty website?
- netr0ute 3y ago
  It literally says it's a vision concept at the bottom of the website, so it unfortunately looks like it's just a pretty website.
ehutch79 3y ago
I'm not sure how this works for more complex stuff? What about a PO in an ERP? Accounting functions? SOmeone adding records toa. general ledger? editing/viewing a 3d model? Editing a video? Multitrack audio?
- egypturnash 3y ago
  I presume that if this got beyond some pretty sketches there would eventually be some kind of way to install new "verbs" and "nouns" and "modules", maybe even a place to go exchange money for interrelated collections of these things... How this would differ from "I downloaded Plunko 3D from the App Store" remains to be seen.
  - ehutch79 3y ago
    Sure, but what does that look like under this OS? The mock-ups don’t show anything more complicated Han messaging apps. Other comments have stated that this is some student project of some sort. Like many other projects of this type it has failed to consider what most people actually do during the course of their jobs. Worse, it ignores what ‘nerds’ do on their computer while posting on a ‘nerd site’.
    - egypturnash 3y ago
      Oh yeah, all of that's very much undefined. Every attempt at a "humane" interface inspired by Raskin's post-Macintosh work always stops well before getting to that point. There may be a much better world of human-computer interaction lurking in these sorts of ideas but getting out of forty* years of refinement of the window-icon-mouse-pointer paradigm, and forty years of building all sorts of tools and toys within it that are not designed to be decomposed into separate actions usable in any context, is a huge effort. Or there may not, I feel like people have kept trying to do stuff like this over and over again and we just keep on ending up back in the world of monolithic apps that are entire toolsheds worth of tools, each with their own way to do the same things. * or more, I am counting from the release of the original Macintosh, please feel free to add on sixteen more years if you'd prefer to count from Englebart's Mother Of All Demos, or forty more if Vannevar Bush's Xanadu feels like the place to put a stake in the sands of time and say "modern computing methods began here".
rank0 3y ago
What a bunch of non statements. They’re just designing another tablet UI and renaming everything. Instead of applications, virtual desktops, and launchers we have “flows, modules, and spaces” It’d be cool to see more natural language support in OS interfaces though!
- anhner 3y ago
  I don't know if they could be more pretentious even if they tried: "Mercury rejects the Desktop Metaphor and App Ecosystems as fundamentally inhumane. " 2 pages later... "Every Module can be defined and redefined using its Locus (the action bar). Locus combines the power of a Command-Line Interface with the convenience Natural Language Processing and the discoverability of GUI." So they reject the inhumaneness of the Desktop metaphor, but replace it with another (Locus - what even does that mean?). At least I know what an action bar is. Then, it touts itself as a complete replacement of the old paradigms, focused on touch interactivity, but: "You can tap the Command key to toggle the display of available actions if you are unsure of where to start." The command key? Is this built for Apple devices only? And if it's touch centric, why do I have a key? ETA: a way more useful redesign IMO: https://uxdesign.cc/redesigning-siri-and-adding-multitasking-features-to-ios-70c2f1a1569b https://uxdesign.cc/redesigning-siri-and-adding-multitasking...
hammyhavoc 3y ago
The dark mode in this concept looks like a complete afterthought. I like consistency of UI; fluidity at the expense of muscle memory (like having the Windows 11 taskbar centered makes no sense for muscle memory with icons moving about as you open things). The shortcut system sounds laborious. Pretty? Sure. Practical? Not really.
hexomancer 3y ago
This looks like the exact opposite of what I would do if I were to redesign operating systems. The job of operating system is just to run application and get out of the way, and most importantly be deterministic and reliable. I don't need my OS to "predict what I might need", I know what I need myself.
- esrauch 3y ago
  What would you change compared to Android to improve "let me choose the application I want and run it?"
  - robofanatic 3y ago
    what could be easier than "tapping on an icon with my index finger"?
    - frodowtf 3y ago
      Cmd + D > Fuzzy search ... or whatever your OS application search is
- ilyt 3y ago
  It pretty much embodies everything I hate in modern OSes. I know what I want to do and I know how I want to do it, get out of my way. Meanwhile modern OSes can't even handle simple "maybe don't steal fucking focus from window I am currently writing something in just because some other app decided to make another windows."
  - scrubs 3y ago
    Totally agree. I'm sick and tired of apps "helping me," constantly interrupting with tips, "did you know .." rearranging my windows and so on. I want to get stuff done not start a journey and relationship with new code. And nobody knows better than the user what stuff they wanna do.
    - 3y ago
alexfringes 3y ago
Just for context: this is a 4 yo design study by friend and amazing product designer Jason Yuan, who also worked on Sprout.place and more recently some stuff at Apple (@jasonyuandesign). A lot of the comments currently seem to miss this and are focusing on immediate feasibility, “successful” design, or ability to deploy irl. That is not the point here. Things like this are both creative exposition, as well as corner stones for conversations for the rest of the community.
- ehutch79 3y ago
  That's all non obvious. As far as I can tell this was just as serious as any of the other, 'this is the future', post. See the recent humane keynote for example, and the vergecast's reaction to it. That said, it's absolutely valid to question stuff like this. A lot of design student type stuff miss HUGE usability issues.
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    Is it non-obvious? The page goes like: 1. Title 2. Screenshot 3. "Mercury is a speculative reimagining ..."
    - ehutch79 3y ago
      Yeah, that sounds like pretty standard marketing copy. Definitely nothing to say this isn't a thing someone intends on bringing to market.
      - anigbrowl 3y ago
        Speculative literally means conjectural, hypothetical, toying with an idea for its own sake, though. It's not a word I associate with product of any kind, more with a sketch than a prototype.
        EyeSayUntoThee 3y ago
        The screenshots tricked me.
c7DJTLrn 3y ago
I'm always excited to see new OS concepts. It's a shame that there's such a huge amount of work involved in building operating systems, otherwise we might have a lot more options to choose from. Back in the 80s you wrote an OS that supported one or two types of fully integrated computers. Now you're supporting any combination of hardware, much of it requiring proprietary black box drivers that depend on a specific ABI anyway. It's why I don't buy into the idea that people who wrote software in the 80s were ultra low-level wizards or something. They had a significantly easier job and could specialise.
- waboremo 3y ago
  The expectations are just so absurdly high now, it's the same problem in the browser space (which at this point is there a difference between OS and browser). There isn't a lack of attempts though, there are many tiny OS out in the wild (believe there are like a dozen alone written in Rust) to play around with but many have had to dial back their ambition purely based on hardware support alone.
- tayistay 3y ago
  Well, you wouldn't need to write whole new kernel/drivers/etc. to implement this design.
Rimintil 3y ago
> The process of moving from App to App generates friction that takes you out of flow and distracts you from your intentions. Please tell me why my workflow, which works for me, sucks more. What is this magical 'friction'? Reads like it was written by an MBA.
- catchmeifyoucan 3y ago
  Okay, consider you have 3 apps: gmail, slack and google docs In gmail, you have a shipping confirmation, a calendar invite, and a team newsletter. In slack you have a question from a customer, a review request from the team, and a poll for the next offsite. And in Docs, you have a new project summary, a budget proposal, and a post-mortem doc. You see, how you actually have 9 different things to do (intentions), but the number of apps you have is just 3? Sometimes, you'll have a thread of things across multiple apps. So despite switching "apps" there's still mental overhead of piecing things together. It's easy to overlook, but sometimes switching apps can causes an effect like walking into a new room, and forgetting why you were there in the first place. Hurting your focus/flow.
  - ilyt 3y ago
    .... so from MBA that also doesn't know browser tabs exist. Also OS doesn't fix any of that, especially for the webapps as they tend to not integrate well with anything else
    - janalsncm 3y ago
      That’s not fair. Context switching often involves a lot more than opening up another tab. And even if it’s not a problem for you, maybe it’s a problem for other people? Or you in the future? Maybe what I just outlined doesn’t require a new OS but acknowledging the problem seems in line with accepting the most charitable interpretation.
      - ilyt 3y ago
        Right. What helps(me) is 12 virtual desktops, one per app so I am single keybind away from anything I need. Not.... whatever this idea is. I went over the years pretty much from full fledged GNOME/KDE thru light alternatives (XFCE), all the way to nerded out i3 tiling manager + tilda console for the ad-hoc stuff like CLI calculator. And cute little script to display list of .pcap files in /tmp and open wireshark on chosen one coz that's handy for the job I just observed that most of the usage is "switch between a bunch of full screen apps + starting those" so I cut out the fat. I don't need icons on desktop, I don't see it most of the day, apps are ran from alt+f2 launcher, few common apps got their own shortcuts, and I have some keybinds to move them between the desktops in that once a month case I need this app on different desktop than usual. I3 matches apps to desktops by name so if I press caps_lock or hyper_l + 2 I always get firefox, if I press <mod>+4 I always get IDEA etc. I do realize that's custom customization most people won't bother to do but "distraction-less" OS should aim to do exactly that, get out of the way as much as possible from someone's chosen workflow, not try to shoehorn its own one, and one that seems to love idea of wasting space and minimum information density I would enjoy some "omni-menu" that is smart enough to figure out whether I want to * run an app * run unit conversion/calculator * search my stuff * have some shortcuts to add calendar event or todo element or "open ms teams (company cursed me with it) and call person X" But any existing ones seem to care about look more than functionality and information density so `rofi` is enough. And that office-adjacent app developers (mostly Microsoft, but Google isn't blameless) stop making integration of anything harder and harder, so stuff that should be nice and easy decades ago (like calendars and todo working from any app) isn't shit.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mason96 3y ago
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sebastianconcpt 3y ago
I love when design that optimizes the humane experience is being pushed forward. I celebrate this technology ten thousand times happier than the next hyped self serving tech framework.
KingLancelot 3y ago
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jbandela1 3y ago
Microsoft actually tried to do something like this in the mid-1990s with OLE 2.0 and Cairo which was the operating system that was supposed to embody all this. Basically, instead of applications, the user would focus on documents (kind of like the "spaces" in this). Instead of opening applications, you would invoke "verbs" on different parts of the document.
- msla 3y ago
  > Basically, instead of applications, the user would focus on documents (kind of like the "spaces" in this). It reminds me a bit of the Apple Lisa. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lisa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lisa > With Lisa, Apple presented users with what is generally, but imprecisely, known as a document-oriented paradigm. This is contrasted with program-centric design. The user focuses more on the task to be accomplished than on the tool used to accomplish it. Apple presents tasks, with Lisa, in the form of stationery. Rather than opening LisaWrite, for instance, to begin to do word processing, users initially "tear off stationery", visually, that represents the task of word processing. Either that, or they open an existing LisaWrite document that resembles that stationery. By contrast, the Macintosh and most other GUI systems focus primarily on the program that is used to accomplish a task — directing users to that first.
msla 3y ago
Ah, yes, the Anti-Me Interface: The kind of interface most likely to make me not use something. I'm sure it's "well-designed" from a theoretical perspective, and unimpeachable from the perspective of Professional UI/UX Development, but it's so inflexible and non-extensible it comes off as something between a toy and a jail cell. "You will enjoy being productive in this environment focused on channeling productivity to Approved Ends. You will enjoy using Approved Technology in Approved Ways. You will ignore everything beneath the interface, for what the Approved Technology is doing is Approved, and therefore not for you to interfere with." Cf: The Anti-Mac Interface, for a bit of a tonic https://www.nngroup.com/articles/anti-mac-interface/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/anti-mac-interface/
cwe 3y ago
This title should have a (2019) on it. But I was happy to see this pop up again here, as it’s an increasingly possible and compelling UX for AI agents, where the rest of the chrome and complexity of computing is stripped away to the core actions we really need out of the software we use. I hope they give this a fresh look and try building it. Lindy looks like a close attempt
unethical_ban 3y ago
I knew, as soon as this "OS" title didn't lead to a Unix-like general purpose OS, that there would be a lot of shitting on it. Stay in your lanes, designers! Humanity cannot improve on the taskbar/window configuration for any use case, ever.
- notsosec 3y ago
  Maybe designers should research why we are not redesigning things like power sockets, forks, knives, shoelaces every other month.
  - unethical_ban 3y ago
    One could call the desktop environment (OS frontend) an appliance, and we certainly redesign appliances and scheduling software frequently.
  - hexmiles 3y ago
    But we are... I have seen quite a few redesign for fork and knifes for people with disability. It is also very dismissive, just because current sockets works, it does not mean there is no space for improvement for more secure, or reliable socket, and the way we found out if such thing exist is with design! Like this one...
ryukafalz 3y ago
I love that this concept tries to separate content from apps. Ever since I saw some of the ways early GUIs differed from today's, I've had a feeling that we've lost something with the way apps in today's desktops are completely isolated from each other. The Alto let you compose data live from multiple windows kind of like a shell pipeline does for command-line apps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnrlSqtpOkw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnrlSqtpOkw The Locus and Flows in this concept seem like they could enable a similar workflow, as data isn't confined to "apps" the way it usually would be.
amluto 3y ago
They doubled down on iMessage’s usability problems. With iMessage, you can tell which of your contacts you are supposedly communicating with, but you can’t tell which actual identity (iCloud account email address or phone number) is involved. It looks like, in MercuryOS, you can’t even tell what means of communication you’re using.
AbraKdabra 3y ago
It's like whoever designed this doesn't know the meaning of Operating System.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
im_down_w_otp 3y ago
The premise of separating the content from applications feels very OpenDoc (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc) to me.
joshxyz 3y ago
i like it, these attempts to challenge the way we approach our os user interfaces and ux are very welcome in bringing new perspectives. this design miggt be fit for narrowed down use cases for special set of users who can really appreciate it.
kindawinda 3y ago
I think this isn't the crowd to demo this too. Majority of the people here would prefer a command line. Too bad this echo chamber can't understand what might be useful to a wider audience than their own monitor display.
- neilalexander 3y ago
  On the whole I agree with you on this. I'm so often reminded how user-hostile computers really are by my father, who recently sent me a message to ask what Bing is and why his computer keeps asking him to use it. Despite several attempts to explain it, he doesn't really understand the difference between a web browser and a web site, he doesn't really understand that web sites and applications are different, he doesn't understand that Chrome and Edge are different but also the same, he doesn't really follow why a shortcut in the Start menu to a website is different to a shortcut to an application, or where things actually go when he saves or favourites or flags them, the list goes on. Somewhere along the lines, we have built computer user experiences that bully people into trying to work how computers work, with tons of abstract concepts like "files" and "folders", applications that silo their data, difficult-to-understand application lifecycles and user interface paradigms and settings and so on. Worse is that power users and developers — the same people who have the power to do better — have come to believe that having to adapt to how computers work is an essential skill and not a failing of the computer itself. The Mercury OS design linked is arguably a massive over-simplification of where computers need to be but some of the concepts really aren't far off what I would probably want to design myself: the idea that applications are really just exposing workflow elements and sane data APIs and not a concrete "thing" you have to interact with or care about directly, so that the user thinks about _what_ they are doing and not _how_ they have to do it.
stephc_int13 3y ago
People often confuse the Shell for the OS. The Shell is the outer layer, the interface between the user and the system. This should not be considered a solved problem, more research and experimentation is welcome. In practice, systems should be designed for better Shell modularity, in many cases they can hardly be swapped.
ARandomerDude 3y ago
> Mercury rejects the Desktop Metaphor and App Ecosystems as fundamentally inhumane. Inhumane is a strange word choice, to say the least. It’s neat to think about the possibilities of future UX, but to suggest the current system is cruel just sounds ridiculous.
- hexmiles 3y ago
  i don't think inhumane is intended as cruel, more as "not aligned" with how human are/think/work.
- lproven 3y ago
  It is a direct reference to Jef Raskin's work, which he called the Humane Interface. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface He is namechecked right there in the story as a pointer. You're on the WWW. If you don't recognise the name, the idea is that you Google it and find out. That's how this stuff works. It's not 1993; you don't need to try to guess what they meant...
sillywalk 3y ago
I hate webpages like this (e.g. most of them :L) Javascript req'd. Also, I may have missed it under 'Architecture', but it doesn't say what (if anything it even runs on).. it looks like just a design concept.
apatheticonion 3y ago
OS design is in an interesting place right now. I feel like it's impossible to have a device experience that caters to everyone. The vast majority of users don't consciously register that they are using a computer with an operating system. Most don't know there are differences between tablets, laptops and phones. Most don't understand the concept of a file or a folder - "photos" are in "iCloud" and "documents" in "google docs", etc. An OS for them, laptop or mobile, is something like iOS or Android (or the demo in this post). The spanner here is compatibility. I'd wager if Android or iOS could run Windows games/apps and fit on a desktop/laptop form factor, this would suffice for almost everyone. The iPad "Pro" is an example demonstrating the potential of this concept. The non power-user professionals who use their devices for productivity purposes like spreadsheets, document writing, etc would need something that lets them multi task, wiz around and organise/optimise their workflow. Something like Windows 7 or MacOS. Something that doesn't get in their way, maximises the use of their hardware, is reliable and predictable. The power user, administrator and developer are either agnostic or never happy (I fall into the latter category). I want the Windows 7 with the classic theme experience on top of a Linux OS that features MacOS workspaces-per-monitor, with iTerm2 and where the start menu search is as good as Spotlight - but with extensions. It needs to be compatible with Windows games and where applications behave reliably, without jank. My dream operating system is a spartan productivity workhorse born out of a vaporwave fever dream - and no designer in their right mind would ever sign off on it (I'd be willing to forgo the classic theme). At the end of the day, I feel like we can't cater to everyone with one UI and the OS vendors are trying (and failing) to do just that. Windows 11 is a dumpster fire and MacOS is increasingly hostile to the experience of power users. They gotta stop fooling around with "one OS for everyone" What we need are real differences between "Windows 11", "Windows 11 Pro", "Windows 11 Linux Spartan Edition"
- notsosec 3y ago
  That productivity OS for power users does exist. It's free and you can even run Windows games in it now.
  - apatheticonion 3y ago
    Haha I know, I run Linux dual booted 50/50 with Windows now and often game on it. It still has a lot of janky behaviour though - like Chrome tabs on Wayland not being draggable (off/on the window), no dark mode support on Chrome, workspaces per monitor don't exist and I have yet to find a terminal emulator as nice as iTerm2. All-in-all though, I am pretty happy with it and will continue to use it. Happy to see a growing focus on desktop usability and hope to see that continue to grow in the near future
chunsj 3y ago
To me, this is more like UX design than OS. Or I have a big misconception on OS and UX. Anyway this approach is interesting if this could be implemented.
graypegg 3y ago
I try to stay relatively positive and open minded on this site. But I hate everything this stands for. I want tools! This whole idea feels insulting to its own users, seen by the authors as an infinitely confused people incapable of understanding any complexity at all. They can’t see every option and action for an application! They will get confused! Instead we will build them half-assed applications on-the-fly based on their ill-imagined idea of what their goal is, explained in prose. Plain prose of course being the most accurate way to describe a problem space. I’m glad this is just a concept and not a product pitch.
mrwnmonm 3y ago
Top bar doesn't have any kind of background on Windows. Is that intentional?
andai 3y ago
The author mentions being inspired by Jef Raskin. His book The Humane Interface is fantastic, and as relevant as ever.
p0w3n3d 3y ago
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." -- Frank Herbert, Dune This has just recently hit me hard. I mean people who give every thinking to the machine are really getting their head free, but also free of thought. And thought is what makes my mind exercised. I really have problems with focus recently and fighting back my "be here and now" from my phone. This "look-i'm-humane" OS sounds like a next gen stealer
- rewgs 3y ago
  Could not agree more. I'm re-reading Dune and in this age of emerging AI its focus on developing human potential in light of increased technological capability is striking me as ridiculously prescient. Offloading some parts of the human process to a computer is simply efficient and an apt use of the tool, but eventually the equation flips to where it's doing more harm than good. A computer really is best when it's a "bicycle for the mind," and it turns out that that's quite a tricky balance to achieve. It should augment us, yes, but we should always be the ones in control, both de facto and de jure.
tragicfootball 3y ago
The three main buttons for email: Reply, forward, delete looks exactly the same. From a UI standpoint, if all buttons look the same, the usability would be low. I wonder why this decision is made? Probably to make it more "zen" like. As an asian myself, I feel like this guy is feeding into the oriental fetish in the western market, or rather exploiting gimmicky eastern terminologies to justify his design(ugh). I mean fog is not a Japanese exclusive, why use Kiri? He's not even Japanese....and how the Daoist Way influenced your UI transitions again?
- tragicfootball 3y ago
  It's not all bad however, I can imagine the task focused modality and gestural language could be useful if translated into a productivity app, something like Jira or Notion, but decluttered.
mihaaly 3y ago
Yeah, it gives (assumably) simpler (more likely only different) than usual answer to trivial matters where we basically need no computers. But how about complex matters and tasks what computers are actually made for?
rerdavies 3y ago
You've edited your doc. It's ready to go. So you fire up a browser, connect to gmail.com, click Compose, click on the Attach button, navigate through a file browser to select the file you want to send, remember that you didn't save it, so you go back to Word, click file save, tab to the browser, tab back to Word because you don't remember the path, do File Save As... so you can copy the path, and paste it into the browse dialog when you tab back, which you do. If you're lucky, you won't have to go mining in the Drafts folder for your email-to-be which still doesn't have anything in it. And then you enter the subject, and finally the addresses, which mercifully auto-completes (maybe the one thing done right so far -- semi-intelligent integration with your contacts). And click the Send button. vs. You edit your document. You click the Send shortcut in the place where the toolbar (or even worse, the ribbon bar) used to be. The title and the addresses have been filled in, because AI, which is smart enough to know that the title of the email will be the title of the document. You type in the covering text, most of which auto-completes: "Please find attached, the blah blah blah for Q1." And click the "Fly, fly, little email" icon. Verbs not apps. I definitely get the problem that's being chased here. An even more interesting study would be to see how one could extend the paradigm to the Monster apps we live in, like word processors, code editors, 3d modelling packages, not just the apps that should really be completely invisible (like email, SMS, &c). Maybe a hamburger icon under which a complete menu system (and tedious trivialities like File As... live. (I don't think we can get rid of Filing. But File really should be a verb). It would be interesting to see how far context-sensitive shortcuts could toward covering the functionality of a Monster app. Select text, see formatting shortcuts. Select a rectangle, see fill and outline shortcuts, select a picture, see retouching, filtering, and cropping shortcuts. The context-free UI was a nice ideal back in 1984, but it hasn't really panned out.
rewgs 3y ago
This is not an operating system, this is a UI, and as far as I can tell, a non-functioning demo at that. That's fine, great actually, but let's at least use the correct words. Purely aesthetically, this is great. It's incredibly Apple-ish and honestly just seems like a massively simplified alternative to iPadOS -- SiriOS, maybe? -- but that's not a knock, it's extremely polished and overall fantastic design work. But just because it's nice to look at doesn't mean it's nice to use. The predictive nature honestly just seems annoying -- there's a reason people curse at their voice assistants so often. It's a gimmick that I doubt will ever be as useful as we'd like, at least not until AI takes a massive, massive leap in the direction of Jarvis and the like. My problem with these kinds of "declarative" approaches to user interaction -- anything that obfuscates the "how" things are done because apparently that's too difficult and scary -- is that it tends to encourage passive consumption, not active creation. Or, at best, you get toy creation apps that piddle around in the absolute most basic of the basic such that really they're better classified as educational apps rather than creation apps. For a totally consumption-oriented device, that might be fine for a while, but eventually I'm going to disagree with either the direction a developer has taken an app, the content it's curating for me, etc, and will surely want to deviate from its "curation" in some way or another...however, this experience looks to hijack so much control from the user that they can't configure anything. You're either along for the ride, or you don't use the device. I said this in another comment, but it bears repeating: computers are not going away, therefore computer literacy is a facet of literacy in general. And IMO literacy is a basic tenant of being free. I for one would like to see designs that give users some agency in their devices and aren't condescending in the name of offloading the "inhumanity" of...thinking about where you put your files. Come on, that's just absurd. I get what Jason is going for here, but it's completely jumped the shark from Silicon Valley into HBO's Silicon Valley. He should remember Steve Jobs' quote, that a computer is a "bicycle for the mind." The really important thing about that quote is that it's not a car, and it's certainly not a self-driving one. It's a bicycle -- it augments and multiplies what we put into it, but we still have to put something into it. If we're not in control, then who is? I would argue that it's those who are feeding you the content that you're consuming. By losing the ability to "grip" your device and actually exert some agency, and perhaps use it to create something new and novel, or at least to actively explore, you're making it so that those for whom these designs become "what a computer is" will have to climb that much higher in order to even begin to understand how to transcend the content feed, one example being that there are kids starting computer science programs today without even really understanding the concept of a filesystem, because they've never had to interact with one beyond maybe Google Drive. They're mistaking the cave for reality. Anyways, it's late and I'm not sure how to end this rant other than by simply stepping off my stool, so -- step.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
I remember Microsoft wanted to do something like that. The year was 1990, the software was called OLE, the goal was to hide files and apps from the users and let them use "documents" instead. Mostly succeeded in the files part, but not so much in the apps part.
dizhn 3y ago
This looks like a graphical design project with no concern for actually building something that has to work. I guess the "speculative" bit gives the artist license to do it. I personally would have loved to see some working code because I have no idea how this new age sounding stuff is meant to actually work to get anything done. Or is getting something done inhumane nowadays?
lproven 3y ago
This is fascinating. I've long thought we needed some ground-up thinking in this area. But I now wonder if it's also why stripped-out UIs like GNOME are favoured by so many folks in (e.g.) the Linux space... which is famously full of neurodivergent people. 15min to pick a filename?! Really? But I've seen SO MANY desktops like the pics in that blog. This made me think in different directions. I already knew some users find current models very hard... But that they were this trying for them is news to me. Maybe that's why some folk like working on iPads instead of laptops? What is horribly frustrating & limiting to me, might be their exhilarating liberation from the endless suffering of window, and file and directory, management? Could this be why so many aspie/ADHD-spectrum techies actually like GNOME or tiling window managers & lots of xterms? My favourite non-pointer-driven GUI has for >~30 years been EPOC16 from the Psion 3 series. That could have lessons to teach here. No desktop, and the launcher is also a categorised columnar file manager with automatic grouping. It was an inspired design. Screenshot gallery, but it doesn't give a good flavour of it. https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/sibo3a https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/sibo3a
jackjeff 3y ago
I’m skeptical about scaling this approach to accomplish real work. Could Mercury OS be used to write the HTML pages describing Mercury Os? What about the UX design? What about coding for it? It seems that for anything non trivial like this the whole métaphore collapses.

162 points by sagelemur 3y ago

dang 3y ago

Related: MercuryOS – A speculative reimagining of current operating system paradigms - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29948455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29948455 - Jan 2022 (8 comments) Introducing Mercury OS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20043255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20043255 - May 2019 (2 comments) Mercury OS: Modern, Humane OS Design Concept - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20033445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20033445 - May 2019 (1 comment) Mercury OS – A speculative vision of the operating system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20033328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20033328 - May 2019 (1 comment)

pedalpete 3y ago

This is a beautiful looking OS, and the idea of "spaces" may be worth exploring. I was just reading about Facebook's failed Home phone project where rather than apps, the interface was focused on people. I thought it was a real OS, and wanted to try it, as I've got a Fire tablet gen 1 that is looking for a new use. Weird question, the credits say Mercury is dedicated to Jef Raskin. Why not have the home screen in the demos say "Good Morning Jef," instead of Jason? Who's Jason?

Lalabadie 3y ago
Jason Yuan. MercuryOS is his project.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

daniel_iversen 3y ago

Oh boy I’d like to play with something new and exciting like this and was sad to hear it’s just a design mock-up/idea. The OS space seems to have been quite stale for a decade or two, is there anything super exciting and different out there from a UX perspective? Remember installing Linux in the late 90s or rooting Windows phones and installing whatever latest Android OS was available in the early days of iOS and Android, and that was always quite thrilling.

smoldesu 3y ago
Have you looked into Sailfish? https://sailfishos.org/ https://sailfishos.org/ I'm not affiliated (nor have I actually used it) but it looks like an interesting alternative approach to phone UX, and one that you can actually use! I'd be interested to hear any stories HNers have with it.
- vivekv 3y ago
  Says legal for use only in Europe
ativzzz 3y ago
The other hard part besides hardware is that an OS is useless without useful apps (or at least a browser) so the OS dev also has to recreate the entire suite of browser/email client/word processing, etc etc which now requires even more effort, or some kind of window/linux compatibility layer, but in that case you might as well just spin off another Linux distro

provenance 3y ago

Nice. Reminds me of my unfinished project “SynchronizedOS” which automatically handles securi..err, synchronicity concerns re: Cloud/Endpoints Inmates/asylum cc: dang

tyingq 3y ago

I see where they are trying to go with the "humane" approach, but the examples seem to require big companies to play along. For example, the shopping examples put the control back with the user, and companies supply basic info like pictures, pricing, descriptions. In real life, of course, they won't cede that control easily. You'll get the same sort of mess you see on Facebook Marketplace, for example..."for sale" listings of cars that put the down-payment in the sales price spot and some wording telling you to call for more info. No actual prices are shown. So, it would probably require some sort of unapproved scraping, collating, etc, to really work as intended.

juunpp 3y ago
Yeah, it would require standards. The web lost track after the dotcom. In the beginning there were protocols. Now we're in the corporate moat period, where N corporations build the same thing N times because each one of them wants to dominate the others. Consequently, we were left with low-level protocols and languages (http, html, css, etc); there is no standard for buying shit online, despite most businesses being online. No standard for payments, no standard for query/search/browsing, etc. Compare that with, e.g., computer graphics, where graphics vendors (except Apple) collaborate on the development of standards like OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenXR, and shit works relatively seamlessly modulo vendor bugs and extensions.

kickingvegas 3y ago

This makes me think of the Lifestreams work by Freeman and Gelertner. http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html

erybodyknows 3y ago

Has anyone attempted to implement this into an existing Linux DE? Or a full screen web app experience?

omarfarooq 3y ago
Latter may be a good place to start.

mdgrech23 3y ago

This is like in the 60s when they would reimagine cars w/ out steering wheels. 60 years later and we still have steering wheels. Maybe one or two ideas will stick. that's it.

stolen_biscuit 3y ago

Does this thing actually exist or is it just a pretty website?

netr0ute 3y ago
It literally says it's a vision concept at the bottom of the website, so it unfortunately looks like it's just a pretty website.

ehutch79 3y ago

I'm not sure how this works for more complex stuff? What about a PO in an ERP? Accounting functions? SOmeone adding records toa. general ledger? editing/viewing a 3d model? Editing a video? Multitrack audio?

egypturnash 3y ago
I presume that if this got beyond some pretty sketches there would eventually be some kind of way to install new "verbs" and "nouns" and "modules", maybe even a place to go exchange money for interrelated collections of these things... How this would differ from "I downloaded Plunko 3D from the App Store" remains to be seen.
- ehutch79 3y ago
  Sure, but what does that look like under this OS? The mock-ups don’t show anything more complicated Han messaging apps. Other comments have stated that this is some student project of some sort. Like many other projects of this type it has failed to consider what most people actually do during the course of their jobs. Worse, it ignores what ‘nerds’ do on their computer while posting on a ‘nerd site’.
  - egypturnash 3y ago
    Oh yeah, all of that's very much undefined. Every attempt at a "humane" interface inspired by Raskin's post-Macintosh work always stops well before getting to that point. There may be a much better world of human-computer interaction lurking in these sorts of ideas but getting out of forty* years of refinement of the window-icon-mouse-pointer paradigm, and forty years of building all sorts of tools and toys within it that are not designed to be decomposed into separate actions usable in any context, is a huge effort. Or there may not, I feel like people have kept trying to do stuff like this over and over again and we just keep on ending up back in the world of monolithic apps that are entire toolsheds worth of tools, each with their own way to do the same things. * or more, I am counting from the release of the original Macintosh, please feel free to add on sixteen more years if you'd prefer to count from Englebart's Mother Of All Demos, or forty more if Vannevar Bush's Xanadu feels like the place to put a stake in the sands of time and say "modern computing methods began here".

rank0 3y ago

What a bunch of non statements. They’re just designing another tablet UI and renaming everything. Instead of applications, virtual desktops, and launchers we have “flows, modules, and spaces” It’d be cool to see more natural language support in OS interfaces though!

anhner 3y ago
I don't know if they could be more pretentious even if they tried: "Mercury rejects the Desktop Metaphor and App Ecosystems as fundamentally inhumane. " 2 pages later... "Every Module can be defined and redefined using its Locus (the action bar). Locus combines the power of a Command-Line Interface with the convenience Natural Language Processing and the discoverability of GUI." So they reject the inhumaneness of the Desktop metaphor, but replace it with another (Locus - what even does that mean?). At least I know what an action bar is. Then, it touts itself as a complete replacement of the old paradigms, focused on touch interactivity, but: "You can tap the Command key to toggle the display of available actions if you are unsure of where to start." The command key? Is this built for Apple devices only? And if it's touch centric, why do I have a key? ETA: a way more useful redesign IMO: https://uxdesign.cc/redesigning-siri-and-adding-multitasking-features-to-ios-70c2f1a1569b https://uxdesign.cc/redesigning-siri-and-adding-multitasking...

hammyhavoc 3y ago

The dark mode in this concept looks like a complete afterthought. I like consistency of UI; fluidity at the expense of muscle memory (like having the Windows 11 taskbar centered makes no sense for muscle memory with icons moving about as you open things). The shortcut system sounds laborious. Pretty? Sure. Practical? Not really.

hexomancer 3y ago

This looks like the exact opposite of what I would do if I were to redesign operating systems. The job of operating system is just to run application and get out of the way, and most importantly be deterministic and reliable. I don't need my OS to "predict what I might need", I know what I need myself.

esrauch 3y ago
What would you change compared to Android to improve "let me choose the application I want and run it?"
- robofanatic 3y ago
  what could be easier than "tapping on an icon with my index finger"?
  - frodowtf 3y ago
    Cmd + D > Fuzzy search ... or whatever your OS application search is
ilyt 3y ago
It pretty much embodies everything I hate in modern OSes. I know what I want to do and I know how I want to do it, get out of my way. Meanwhile modern OSes can't even handle simple "maybe don't steal fucking focus from window I am currently writing something in just because some other app decided to make another windows."
- scrubs 3y ago
  Totally agree. I'm sick and tired of apps "helping me," constantly interrupting with tips, "did you know .." rearranging my windows and so on. I want to get stuff done not start a journey and relationship with new code. And nobody knows better than the user what stuff they wanna do.
  - 3y ago

alexfringes 3y ago

Just for context: this is a 4 yo design study by friend and amazing product designer Jason Yuan, who also worked on Sprout.place and more recently some stuff at Apple (@jasonyuandesign). A lot of the comments currently seem to miss this and are focusing on immediate feasibility, “successful” design, or ability to deploy irl. That is not the point here. Things like this are both creative exposition, as well as corner stones for conversations for the rest of the community.

ehutch79 3y ago
That's all non obvious. As far as I can tell this was just as serious as any of the other, 'this is the future', post. See the recent humane keynote for example, and the vergecast's reaction to it. That said, it's absolutely valid to question stuff like this. A lot of design student type stuff miss HUGE usability issues.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  Is it non-obvious? The page goes like: 1. Title 2. Screenshot 3. "Mercury is a speculative reimagining ..."
  - ehutch79 3y ago
    Yeah, that sounds like pretty standard marketing copy. Definitely nothing to say this isn't a thing someone intends on bringing to market.
    - anigbrowl 3y ago
      Speculative literally means conjectural, hypothetical, toying with an idea for its own sake, though. It's not a word I associate with product of any kind, more with a sketch than a prototype.
      - EyeSayUntoThee 3y ago
        The screenshots tricked me.

c7DJTLrn 3y ago

I'm always excited to see new OS concepts. It's a shame that there's such a huge amount of work involved in building operating systems, otherwise we might have a lot more options to choose from. Back in the 80s you wrote an OS that supported one or two types of fully integrated computers. Now you're supporting any combination of hardware, much of it requiring proprietary black box drivers that depend on a specific ABI anyway. It's why I don't buy into the idea that people who wrote software in the 80s were ultra low-level wizards or something. They had a significantly easier job and could specialise.

waboremo 3y ago
The expectations are just so absurdly high now, it's the same problem in the browser space (which at this point is there a difference between OS and browser). There isn't a lack of attempts though, there are many tiny OS out in the wild (believe there are like a dozen alone written in Rust) to play around with but many have had to dial back their ambition purely based on hardware support alone.
tayistay 3y ago
Well, you wouldn't need to write whole new kernel/drivers/etc. to implement this design.

Rimintil 3y ago

> The process of moving from App to App generates friction that takes you out of flow and distracts you from your intentions. Please tell me why my workflow, which works for me, sucks more. What is this magical 'friction'? Reads like it was written by an MBA.

catchmeifyoucan 3y ago
Okay, consider you have 3 apps: gmail, slack and google docs In gmail, you have a shipping confirmation, a calendar invite, and a team newsletter. In slack you have a question from a customer, a review request from the team, and a poll for the next offsite. And in Docs, you have a new project summary, a budget proposal, and a post-mortem doc. You see, how you actually have 9 different things to do (intentions), but the number of apps you have is just 3? Sometimes, you'll have a thread of things across multiple apps. So despite switching "apps" there's still mental overhead of piecing things together. It's easy to overlook, but sometimes switching apps can causes an effect like walking into a new room, and forgetting why you were there in the first place. Hurting your focus/flow.
- ilyt 3y ago
  .... so from MBA that also doesn't know browser tabs exist. Also OS doesn't fix any of that, especially for the webapps as they tend to not integrate well with anything else
  - janalsncm 3y ago
    That’s not fair. Context switching often involves a lot more than opening up another tab. And even if it’s not a problem for you, maybe it’s a problem for other people? Or you in the future? Maybe what I just outlined doesn’t require a new OS but acknowledging the problem seems in line with accepting the most charitable interpretation.
    - ilyt 3y ago
      Right. What helps(me) is 12 virtual desktops, one per app so I am single keybind away from anything I need. Not.... whatever this idea is. I went over the years pretty much from full fledged GNOME/KDE thru light alternatives (XFCE), all the way to nerded out i3 tiling manager + tilda console for the ad-hoc stuff like CLI calculator. And cute little script to display list of .pcap files in /tmp and open wireshark on chosen one coz that's handy for the job I just observed that most of the usage is "switch between a bunch of full screen apps + starting those" so I cut out the fat. I don't need icons on desktop, I don't see it most of the day, apps are ran from alt+f2 launcher, few common apps got their own shortcuts, and I have some keybinds to move them between the desktops in that once a month case I need this app on different desktop than usual. I3 matches apps to desktops by name so if I press caps_lock or hyper_l + 2 I always get firefox, if I press <mod>+4 I always get IDEA etc. I do realize that's custom customization most people won't bother to do but "distraction-less" OS should aim to do exactly that, get out of the way as much as possible from someone's chosen workflow, not try to shoehorn its own one, and one that seems to love idea of wasting space and minimum information density I would enjoy some "omni-menu" that is smart enough to figure out whether I want to * run an app * run unit conversion/calculator * search my stuff * have some shortcuts to add calendar event or todo element or "open ms teams (company cursed me with it) and call person X" But any existing ones seem to care about look more than functionality and information density so `rofi` is enough. And that office-adjacent app developers (mostly Microsoft, but Google isn't blameless) stop making integration of anything harder and harder, so stuff that should be nice and easy decades ago (like calendars and todo working from any app) isn't shit.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

mason96 3y ago

[dead]

sebastianconcpt 3y ago

I love when design that optimizes the humane experience is being pushed forward. I celebrate this technology ten thousand times happier than the next hyped self serving tech framework.

KingLancelot 3y ago

[dead]

jbandela1 3y ago

Microsoft actually tried to do something like this in the mid-1990s with OLE 2.0 and Cairo which was the operating system that was supposed to embody all this. Basically, instead of applications, the user would focus on documents (kind of like the "spaces" in this). Instead of opening applications, you would invoke "verbs" on different parts of the document.

msla 3y ago
> Basically, instead of applications, the user would focus on documents (kind of like the "spaces" in this). It reminds me a bit of the Apple Lisa. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lisa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lisa > With Lisa, Apple presented users with what is generally, but imprecisely, known as a document-oriented paradigm. This is contrasted with program-centric design. The user focuses more on the task to be accomplished than on the tool used to accomplish it. Apple presents tasks, with Lisa, in the form of stationery. Rather than opening LisaWrite, for instance, to begin to do word processing, users initially "tear off stationery", visually, that represents the task of word processing. Either that, or they open an existing LisaWrite document that resembles that stationery. By contrast, the Macintosh and most other GUI systems focus primarily on the program that is used to accomplish a task — directing users to that first.

msla 3y ago

Ah, yes, the Anti-Me Interface: The kind of interface most likely to make me not use something. I'm sure it's "well-designed" from a theoretical perspective, and unimpeachable from the perspective of Professional UI/UX Development, but it's so inflexible and non-extensible it comes off as something between a toy and a jail cell. "You will enjoy being productive in this environment focused on channeling productivity to Approved Ends. You will enjoy using Approved Technology in Approved Ways. You will ignore everything beneath the interface, for what the Approved Technology is doing is Approved, and therefore not for you to interfere with." Cf: The Anti-Mac Interface, for a bit of a tonic https://www.nngroup.com/articles/anti-mac-interface/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/anti-mac-interface/

cwe 3y ago

This title should have a (2019) on it. But I was happy to see this pop up again here, as it’s an increasingly possible and compelling UX for AI agents, where the rest of the chrome and complexity of computing is stripped away to the core actions we really need out of the software we use. I hope they give this a fresh look and try building it. Lindy looks like a close attempt

unethical_ban 3y ago

I knew, as soon as this "OS" title didn't lead to a Unix-like general purpose OS, that there would be a lot of shitting on it. Stay in your lanes, designers! Humanity cannot improve on the taskbar/window configuration for any use case, ever.

notsosec 3y ago
Maybe designers should research why we are not redesigning things like power sockets, forks, knives, shoelaces every other month.
- unethical_ban 3y ago
  One could call the desktop environment (OS frontend) an appliance, and we certainly redesign appliances and scheduling software frequently.
- hexmiles 3y ago
  But we are... I have seen quite a few redesign for fork and knifes for people with disability. It is also very dismissive, just because current sockets works, it does not mean there is no space for improvement for more secure, or reliable socket, and the way we found out if such thing exist is with design! Like this one...

ryukafalz 3y ago

I love that this concept tries to separate content from apps. Ever since I saw some of the ways early GUIs differed from today's, I've had a feeling that we've lost something with the way apps in today's desktops are completely isolated from each other. The Alto let you compose data live from multiple windows kind of like a shell pipeline does for command-line apps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnrlSqtpOkw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnrlSqtpOkw The Locus and Flows in this concept seem like they could enable a similar workflow, as data isn't confined to "apps" the way it usually would be.

amluto 3y ago

They doubled down on iMessage’s usability problems. With iMessage, you can tell which of your contacts you are supposedly communicating with, but you can’t tell which actual identity (iCloud account email address or phone number) is involved. It looks like, in MercuryOS, you can’t even tell what means of communication you’re using.

AbraKdabra 3y ago

It's like whoever designed this doesn't know the meaning of Operating System.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

im_down_w_otp 3y ago

The premise of separating the content from applications feels very OpenDoc (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc) to me.

joshxyz 3y ago

i like it, these attempts to challenge the way we approach our os user interfaces and ux are very welcome in bringing new perspectives. this design miggt be fit for narrowed down use cases for special set of users who can really appreciate it.

kindawinda 3y ago

I think this isn't the crowd to demo this too. Majority of the people here would prefer a command line. Too bad this echo chamber can't understand what might be useful to a wider audience than their own monitor display.

neilalexander 3y ago
On the whole I agree with you on this. I'm so often reminded how user-hostile computers really are by my father, who recently sent me a message to ask what Bing is and why his computer keeps asking him to use it. Despite several attempts to explain it, he doesn't really understand the difference between a web browser and a web site, he doesn't really understand that web sites and applications are different, he doesn't understand that Chrome and Edge are different but also the same, he doesn't really follow why a shortcut in the Start menu to a website is different to a shortcut to an application, or where things actually go when he saves or favourites or flags them, the list goes on. Somewhere along the lines, we have built computer user experiences that bully people into trying to work how computers work, with tons of abstract concepts like "files" and "folders", applications that silo their data, difficult-to-understand application lifecycles and user interface paradigms and settings and so on. Worse is that power users and developers — the same people who have the power to do better — have come to believe that having to adapt to how computers work is an essential skill and not a failing of the computer itself. The Mercury OS design linked is arguably a massive over-simplification of where computers need to be but some of the concepts really aren't far off what I would probably want to design myself: the idea that applications are really just exposing workflow elements and sane data APIs and not a concrete "thing" you have to interact with or care about directly, so that the user thinks about _what_ they are doing and not _how_ they have to do it.

stephc_int13 3y ago

People often confuse the Shell for the OS. The Shell is the outer layer, the interface between the user and the system. This should not be considered a solved problem, more research and experimentation is welcome. In practice, systems should be designed for better Shell modularity, in many cases they can hardly be swapped.

ARandomerDude 3y ago

> Mercury rejects the Desktop Metaphor and App Ecosystems as fundamentally inhumane. Inhumane is a strange word choice, to say the least. It’s neat to think about the possibilities of future UX, but to suggest the current system is cruel just sounds ridiculous.

hexmiles 3y ago
i don't think inhumane is intended as cruel, more as "not aligned" with how human are/think/work.
lproven 3y ago
It is a direct reference to Jef Raskin's work, which he called the Humane Interface. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface He is namechecked right there in the story as a pointer. You're on the WWW. If you don't recognise the name, the idea is that you Google it and find out. That's how this stuff works. It's not 1993; you don't need to try to guess what they meant...

sillywalk 3y ago

I hate webpages like this (e.g. most of them :L) Javascript req'd. Also, I may have missed it under 'Architecture', but it doesn't say what (if anything it even runs on).. it looks like just a design concept.

apatheticonion 3y ago

OS design is in an interesting place right now. I feel like it's impossible to have a device experience that caters to everyone. The vast majority of users don't consciously register that they are using a computer with an operating system. Most don't know there are differences between tablets, laptops and phones. Most don't understand the concept of a file or a folder - "photos" are in "iCloud" and "documents" in "google docs", etc. An OS for them, laptop or mobile, is something like iOS or Android (or the demo in this post). The spanner here is compatibility. I'd wager if Android or iOS could run Windows games/apps and fit on a desktop/laptop form factor, this would suffice for almost everyone. The iPad "Pro" is an example demonstrating the potential of this concept. The non power-user professionals who use their devices for productivity purposes like spreadsheets, document writing, etc would need something that lets them multi task, wiz around and organise/optimise their workflow. Something like Windows 7 or MacOS. Something that doesn't get in their way, maximises the use of their hardware, is reliable and predictable. The power user, administrator and developer are either agnostic or never happy (I fall into the latter category). I want the Windows 7 with the classic theme experience on top of a Linux OS that features MacOS workspaces-per-monitor, with iTerm2 and where the start menu search is as good as Spotlight - but with extensions. It needs to be compatible with Windows games and where applications behave reliably, without jank. My dream operating system is a spartan productivity workhorse born out of a vaporwave fever dream - and no designer in their right mind would ever sign off on it (I'd be willing to forgo the classic theme). At the end of the day, I feel like we can't cater to everyone with one UI and the OS vendors are trying (and failing) to do just that. Windows 11 is a dumpster fire and MacOS is increasingly hostile to the experience of power users. They gotta stop fooling around with "one OS for everyone" What we need are real differences between "Windows 11", "Windows 11 Pro", "Windows 11 Linux Spartan Edition"

notsosec 3y ago
That productivity OS for power users does exist. It's free and you can even run Windows games in it now.
- apatheticonion 3y ago
  Haha I know, I run Linux dual booted 50/50 with Windows now and often game on it. It still has a lot of janky behaviour though - like Chrome tabs on Wayland not being draggable (off/on the window), no dark mode support on Chrome, workspaces per monitor don't exist and I have yet to find a terminal emulator as nice as iTerm2. All-in-all though, I am pretty happy with it and will continue to use it. Happy to see a growing focus on desktop usability and hope to see that continue to grow in the near future

chunsj 3y ago

To me, this is more like UX design than OS. Or I have a big misconception on OS and UX. Anyway this approach is interesting if this could be implemented.

graypegg 3y ago

I try to stay relatively positive and open minded on this site. But I hate everything this stands for. I want tools! This whole idea feels insulting to its own users, seen by the authors as an infinitely confused people incapable of understanding any complexity at all. They can’t see every option and action for an application! They will get confused! Instead we will build them half-assed applications on-the-fly based on their ill-imagined idea of what their goal is, explained in prose. Plain prose of course being the most accurate way to describe a problem space. I’m glad this is just a concept and not a product pitch.

mrwnmonm 3y ago

Top bar doesn't have any kind of background on Windows. Is that intentional?

andai 3y ago

The author mentions being inspired by Jef Raskin. His book The Humane Interface is fantastic, and as relevant as ever.

p0w3n3d 3y ago

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." -- Frank Herbert, Dune This has just recently hit me hard. I mean people who give every thinking to the machine are really getting their head free, but also free of thought. And thought is what makes my mind exercised. I really have problems with focus recently and fighting back my "be here and now" from my phone. This "look-i'm-humane" OS sounds like a next gen stealer

rewgs 3y ago
Could not agree more. I'm re-reading Dune and in this age of emerging AI its focus on developing human potential in light of increased technological capability is striking me as ridiculously prescient. Offloading some parts of the human process to a computer is simply efficient and an apt use of the tool, but eventually the equation flips to where it's doing more harm than good. A computer really is best when it's a "bicycle for the mind," and it turns out that that's quite a tricky balance to achieve. It should augment us, yes, but we should always be the ones in control, both de facto and de jure.

tragicfootball 3y ago

The three main buttons for email: Reply, forward, delete looks exactly the same. From a UI standpoint, if all buttons look the same, the usability would be low. I wonder why this decision is made? Probably to make it more "zen" like. As an asian myself, I feel like this guy is feeding into the oriental fetish in the western market, or rather exploiting gimmicky eastern terminologies to justify his design(ugh). I mean fog is not a Japanese exclusive, why use Kiri? He's not even Japanese....and how the Daoist Way influenced your UI transitions again?

tragicfootball 3y ago
It's not all bad however, I can imagine the task focused modality and gestural language could be useful if translated into a productivity app, something like Jira or Notion, but decluttered.

mihaaly 3y ago

Yeah, it gives (assumably) simpler (more likely only different) than usual answer to trivial matters where we basically need no computers. But how about complex matters and tasks what computers are actually made for?

rerdavies 3y ago

You've edited your doc. It's ready to go. So you fire up a browser, connect to gmail.com, click Compose, click on the Attach button, navigate through a file browser to select the file you want to send, remember that you didn't save it, so you go back to Word, click file save, tab to the browser, tab back to Word because you don't remember the path, do File Save As... so you can copy the path, and paste it into the browse dialog when you tab back, which you do. If you're lucky, you won't have to go mining in the Drafts folder for your email-to-be which still doesn't have anything in it. And then you enter the subject, and finally the addresses, which mercifully auto-completes (maybe the one thing done right so far -- semi-intelligent integration with your contacts). And click the Send button. vs. You edit your document. You click the Send shortcut in the place where the toolbar (or even worse, the ribbon bar) used to be. The title and the addresses have been filled in, because AI, which is smart enough to know that the title of the email will be the title of the document. You type in the covering text, most of which auto-completes: "Please find attached, the blah blah blah for Q1." And click the "Fly, fly, little email" icon. Verbs not apps. I definitely get the problem that's being chased here. An even more interesting study would be to see how one could extend the paradigm to the Monster apps we live in, like word processors, code editors, 3d modelling packages, not just the apps that should really be completely invisible (like email, SMS, &c). Maybe a hamburger icon under which a complete menu system (and tedious trivialities like File As... live. (I don't think we can get rid of Filing. But File really should be a verb). It would be interesting to see how far context-sensitive shortcuts could toward covering the functionality of a Monster app. Select text, see formatting shortcuts. Select a rectangle, see fill and outline shortcuts, select a picture, see retouching, filtering, and cropping shortcuts. The context-free UI was a nice ideal back in 1984, but it hasn't really panned out.

rewgs 3y ago

This is not an operating system, this is a UI, and as far as I can tell, a non-functioning demo at that. That's fine, great actually, but let's at least use the correct words. Purely aesthetically, this is great. It's incredibly Apple-ish and honestly just seems like a massively simplified alternative to iPadOS -- SiriOS, maybe? -- but that's not a knock, it's extremely polished and overall fantastic design work. But just because it's nice to look at doesn't mean it's nice to use. The predictive nature honestly just seems annoying -- there's a reason people curse at their voice assistants so often. It's a gimmick that I doubt will ever be as useful as we'd like, at least not until AI takes a massive, massive leap in the direction of Jarvis and the like. My problem with these kinds of "declarative" approaches to user interaction -- anything that obfuscates the "how" things are done because apparently that's too difficult and scary -- is that it tends to encourage passive consumption, not active creation. Or, at best, you get toy creation apps that piddle around in the absolute most basic of the basic such that really they're better classified as educational apps rather than creation apps. For a totally consumption-oriented device, that might be fine for a while, but eventually I'm going to disagree with either the direction a developer has taken an app, the content it's curating for me, etc, and will surely want to deviate from its "curation" in some way or another...however, this experience looks to hijack so much control from the user that they can't configure anything. You're either along for the ride, or you don't use the device. I said this in another comment, but it bears repeating: computers are not going away, therefore computer literacy is a facet of literacy in general. And IMO literacy is a basic tenant of being free. I for one would like to see designs that give users some agency in their devices and aren't condescending in the name of offloading the "inhumanity" of...thinking about where you put your files. Come on, that's just absurd. I get what Jason is going for here, but it's completely jumped the shark from Silicon Valley into HBO's Silicon Valley. He should remember Steve Jobs' quote, that a computer is a "bicycle for the mind." The really important thing about that quote is that it's not a car, and it's certainly not a self-driving one. It's a bicycle -- it augments and multiplies what we put into it, but we still have to put something into it. If we're not in control, then who is? I would argue that it's those who are feeding you the content that you're consuming. By losing the ability to "grip" your device and actually exert some agency, and perhaps use it to create something new and novel, or at least to actively explore, you're making it so that those for whom these designs become "what a computer is" will have to climb that much higher in order to even begin to understand how to transcend the content feed, one example being that there are kids starting computer science programs today without even really understanding the concept of a filesystem, because they've never had to interact with one beyond maybe Google Drive. They're mistaking the cave for reality. Anyways, it's late and I'm not sure how to end this rant other than by simply stepping off my stool, so -- step.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago

I remember Microsoft wanted to do something like that. The year was 1990, the software was called OLE, the goal was to hide files and apps from the users and let them use "documents" instead. Mostly succeeded in the files part, but not so much in the apps part.

dizhn 3y ago

This looks like a graphical design project with no concern for actually building something that has to work. I guess the "speculative" bit gives the artist license to do it. I personally would have loved to see some working code because I have no idea how this new age sounding stuff is meant to actually work to get anything done. Or is getting something done inhumane nowadays?

lproven 3y ago

This is fascinating. I've long thought we needed some ground-up thinking in this area. But I now wonder if it's also why stripped-out UIs like GNOME are favoured by so many folks in (e.g.) the Linux space... which is famously full of neurodivergent people. 15min to pick a filename?! Really? But I've seen SO MANY desktops like the pics in that blog. This made me think in different directions. I already knew some users find current models very hard... But that they were this trying for them is news to me. Maybe that's why some folk like working on iPads instead of laptops? What is horribly frustrating & limiting to me, might be their exhilarating liberation from the endless suffering of window, and file and directory, management? Could this be why so many aspie/ADHD-spectrum techies actually like GNOME or tiling window managers & lots of xterms? My favourite non-pointer-driven GUI has for >~30 years been EPOC16 from the Psion 3 series. That could have lessons to teach here. No desktop, and the launcher is also a categorised columnar file manager with automatic grouping. It was an inspired design. Screenshot gallery, but it doesn't give a good flavour of it. https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/sibo3a https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/sibo3a

jackjeff 3y ago

I’m skeptical about scaling this approach to accomplish real work. Could Mercury OS be used to write the HTML pages describing Mercury Os? What about the UX design? What about coding for it? It seems that for anything non trivial like this the whole métaphore collapses.