http://blogs.gnome.org/view/gekker/2006/08/04/0

It looks really great ! Watch the video, it is amazing !

Maybe, you will be interresting by the Atomato project, initiated by Rodrigo Moya, which could be the first steps towards this ideal desktop. The first goal of it is to “allow non programmers to build their own scripts for automating tasks without having to write a single line of code, much like Apple’s Automator.” This will be done by letting application export their functionnalities throught DBUS functions.

But if we push further this project idea we can imagine that each application could be only a set of exported function that can be registered to the desktop. So when you click on your photo pile, it will display all the application’s functions that have registered for photo related tasks.

More details here : http://blogs.gnome.org/view/rodrigo/2006/07/04/0

You “piling” aims at that a bit, but I think we could do better. Give the user a “natural” way of making stuff more or less important. Use depth.

What I’m basically thinking of is that icons will become smaller when they are placed at the upper end of the screen, and larger when they are placed “in front”. I guess that can look awesome with lowfat, too.

But it’s not just about graphics. Think of how people use piles on their desktop – the piles grow and grow, and the stuff lower in the pile gets obscured, until they actually clean up. If I had a “current documents” pile on my desktop – I have disabled all icons, since I run my windows full screen anyway, so I never would see them anyway – I would want it to behave similarly, that basically by dropping more and more stuff “atop” of each other, some stuff will go into the background.

(It might be useful to have different views on your desktop then – including a zoom in function and a birds eye, for cleaning up, or finding “covered” files)

The first part sounds similar to the general shift away from organizing information in trees and towards organizing it in sets that’s been seen in many contexts lately. I love this, because I think human brains tend to organize information in sets, making these kinds of interfaces much more natural than the hierarchical filesystems that have been ingrained in computer science since at least 1950. This shift probably started with rise of the search engine concept, which, at a fundamental level, lets people find stuff by taking the intersection of various sets (along with ranking the results). More lately, its been evident in the tagging craze and the idea of virtual folders that applications like evolution and liferea (both are just sets by another name). Moving to a completely object based or relational filesystem is probably beyond our capabilities for now, simply because of inertia, but providing a set api on top of it, as you and these other efforts are trying to do, is one way of alleviating some of the computer/brain impedance mismatch. Anyway, what I guess I’m saying is that your contextual projects sound like sets too, and could probably be representing by a tagging system, although one in which tags aren’t necessarily applied by the user. The leaftag project is attempting to add something like this to gnome, although I worry that its isn’t deep enough into the gnome infrastructure (being made part of gnome-vfs might be preferrable) and might not be powerful enough for some of the things, like this, that people will want to use it for (a namespace system for tags would help).