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I think this is the dream, but we're paddling upstream here as the OS itself is app-centric and apps are mostly document-centric. Xerox Star & Smalltalk had th

I think this is the dream, but we're paddling upstream here as the OS itself is app-centric and apps are mostly document-centric. Xerox Star & Smalltalk had the task-centric approach and Alan Kay @alankay has said that Steve Jobs/Apple missed that aspect in their takeaway from their visit: "(they) missed a few things about the GUI. For example, that it had unlimited and persistent “desktops” which could be used to sustain work/projects over time without having to tear down and build up, and without stovepiped apps, etc." https://www.quora.com/What-was-it-like-to-be-at-Xerox-PARC-when-Steve-Jobs-visited https://www.quora.com/What-was-it-like-to-be-at-Xerox-PARC-w... So happy that I could remember enough of this story to find that link.

kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
The Lisa was doc-centric so Apple definitely didn't miss that aspect. They abandoned it because harddrives were expensive and needed a cheaper base system running single apps off floppy.
- msephton 2y ago
  I think they called them "contexts" on Lisa, but as you say it was referred to as document-centric. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1CvRKdV0Ls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1CvRKdV0Ls But Alan Kay was talking about task-centric, not document-centric, which I'd argue Lisa wasn't quite doing fully. Happy to talk about this more if you think I'm mistaken. And you'll need to let Alan Kay know :)
dredmorbius 2y ago
Crossing the streams (see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41217330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41217330>, and I know msephton has), task-centric UI seems to me to have traditionally been accomplished on Unix-like platforms through directories (often task/project-related), and Makefiles, which can combine a set of related operations across a large number of tools in a single context. Neither of these are, of course, user-friendly for the vast majority of people. But they do afford some thoughts, concepts, and mechanisms which might be used in task-oriented UI design.

kevin_thibedeau 2y ago

The Lisa was doc-centric so Apple definitely didn't miss that aspect. They abandoned it because harddrives were expensive and needed a cheaper base system running single apps off floppy.

msephton 2y ago
I think they called them "contexts" on Lisa, but as you say it was referred to as document-centric. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1CvRKdV0Ls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1CvRKdV0Ls But Alan Kay was talking about task-centric, not document-centric, which I'd argue Lisa wasn't quite doing fully. Happy to talk about this more if you think I'm mistaken. And you'll need to let Alan Kay know :)

dredmorbius 2y ago

Crossing the streams (see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41217330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41217330>, and I know msephton has), task-centric UI seems to me to have traditionally been accomplished on Unix-like platforms through directories (often task/project-related), and Makefiles, which can combine a set of related operations across a large number of tools in a single context. Neither of these are, of course, user-friendly for the vast majority of people. But they do afford some thoughts, concepts, and mechanisms which might be used in task-oriented UI design.