On Wednesday 10 December 2008 06:00:12 John Andersen wrote:
[...] 1) What do you see in the current crop of desktops that reminds you of 1988. (Windows version 2 vintage), and which is in need of change?
Not much. The original GUI on the Apple II had a memory footprint of something like 64kB!!!
2) What, other than the aforementioned multi-media, do we do on computers today that we did not do 10, 15, or 20 years ago that requires something other than a rehash?
Generally something that works (such as the basic concept of different applications running in "windows" on a desktop) tend to hang around until it no longer works well, or some new invention arrives that allows a different approach.
I've not seen much of either.
There is one thing that I do miss from the days of running OS/2 with its Presentation Manager (akin to X) and the Workplace Shell (the "window manager"). It had a really neat feature that (I think, from memory) was called a "Workspace Folder". I can't exactly remember if that was the right term (Felix might know). If you defined a folder (on the desktop) as a Workspace folder, any documents you dropped links to into that folder would automatically open in the last state that you worked on in the correct applications. This was great if you had specific documents or files that you worked with on a regular basis e.g. a spreadsheet, database, text files, word processor documents etc. Rather than finding and opening each file or application individually, you just opened the workspace folder and everything in it opened up to where you left of last time you used them. The idea was to move the desktop from being application-centric to document- or workflow-centric. I'm not aware of anything similar on any other desktop system (there might be, but I haven't come across it anywhere else). For business users particularly, I think that would be something worth working on for KDE4.x. No, its not a new idea - IBM did it 20 years ago - but it was a good one that never really got noticed due to OS/2's failure to gain market penetration (and I'm *not* going to enter into a philosophical debate about the reasons for that...). -- =================================================== Rodney Baker VK5ZTV rodney.baker@iinet.net.au ===================================================