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.
Mercury OS
11–20 of 165 posts
Re: Mercury OS
#12Oh 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 And…
Have you looked into Sailfish? 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.
Re: Mercury OS
#13Does this thing actually exist or is it just a pretty website?
Re: Mercury OS
#14Does this thing actually exist or is it just a pretty website?
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.
Re: Mercury OS
#15I'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?
Re: Mercury OS
#16What 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!
Re: Mercury OS
#17The 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.
Re: Mercury OS
#18This 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.
Re: Mercury OS
#19Just 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.
Re: Mercury OS
#20I'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.