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Mercury OS

mercuryos.com

31–40 of 165 posts

Re: Mercury OS

#32

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…

I don’t know how to feel about a promising designer only spending 2ish years with ADT and bolting. Perhaps if this work is paired with a personality of similar righteousness, that could be a team issue - otherwise to have someone attempt to do great things and see them immediately (in the relative product roadmap sense) leave, is troubling from the outside.

Re: Mercury OS

#33

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 AB…

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.

Re: Mercury OS

#34

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?

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.

Re: Mercury OS

#35

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…

Being corner stones for conversations means that people are going to talk about things that matters to them, like usability or ability to deploy. These are good things! That's what design studies are supposed to do!

I don't know why you're attempting to discourage this.

Re: Mercury OS

#36

> 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.

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 t…

So just add all the apps' functions to emacs and we're golden. Got it.

Re: Mercury OS

#37

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…

It's worth discussing implementation feasibility of product designs. While I think a modern Canon Cat would be awesome, there are reasons why such a device doesn't exist.

For example: When you make a non-dedicated device, you are outsourcing a lot of the functionality to third parties (e.g. via an app-store). This significantly affects the costs of a product launch.

Re: Mercury OS

#38

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 And…

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

Re: Mercury OS

#40

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…

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.

Is it non-obvious? The page goes like:

1. Title

2. Screenshot

3. "Mercury is a speculative reimagining ..."

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