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Mercury OS

mercuryos.com

111–120 of 165 posts

Re: Mercury OS

#111
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like this is pretty doable in Linux with some tinkering

Not even tinkering, KDE has this builtin.

I presume you're referring to KDE Activities. I use Activities all the time, but they're still far too much of a static thing, and way too High Ceremony to create/curate/maintain.

Re: Mercury OS

#112
post #43

This 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.

That's because this OS is a speculative puff piece by a UI designer looking to drum up some business.

That may be why I thought "this might be cool to see a video game character interact with a tablet in a futuristic-theme rpg to make for like the menu screen or something."

Re: Mercury OS

#113
post #51

This 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.

I would go in a different direction too. Personally, I would like some sort of "personal workspaces". Sort of virtual desktops that were project-oriented. I would like switch to a project, find all my notes, emails, lists, files and more (terminal windows? web browsing/tabs? apps?) in that environment. and when I run out of time, shut it down. Next time I switch to it, all my context is right there, ready to jump in.…

You can do that in fvwm . Since 20 years.

Re: Mercury OS

#114
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the opposite problem. If I open too many Windows, the Windows window manager starts glitching out. When I open an app, it doesn't always come to the front and I have to go alt-tab through dozens of windows to find it. (Sometimes it ends up at the bottom, so alt-shift-tab switches to it... but sometimes it ends up in the middle ...) Also if I open too many windows, opening Windows explorer takes 1-2 or more sec…

How many are we talking about here, I'm curious about how many windows is too many for Windows? I don't often have more than 30 open, and at that point I start thinking it's excessive and that I should probably tidy up to make sure I actually complete a task rather than get distracted.

Asked ChatGPT to write me a script to count the open windows :) I have 164. Although I have quite a bit of RAM left at the moment. The OS getting sluggish is usually what prompts me to close a few open apps. So having lots of RAM is bad for my productivity...

The annoying part is just that Windows explorer gets really sluggish -- to a comical degree. For example, I'll do a file operation (copy, rename etc) and it'll take that same explorer Window 5 seconds to register the operation that it itself performed. Meanwhile, Sublime Text open in the background detects it within miliseconds.

Re: Mercury OS

#115
The three main buttons for email: Reply, forward, delete looks exactly the same. From a UI standpoint, if all buttons look the same, the usability would be low.

I wonder why this decision is made? Probably to make it more "zen" like.

As an asian myself, I feel like this guy is feeding into the oriental fetish in the western market, or rather exploiting gimmicky eastern terminologies to justify his design(ugh). I mean fog is not a Japanese exclusive, why use Kiri? He's not even Japanese....and how the Daoist Way influenced your UI transitions again?

Re: Mercury OS

#116
Yeah, it gives (assumably) simpler (more likely only different) than usual answer to trivial matters where we basically need no computers. But how about complex matters and tasks what computers are actually made for?

Re: Mercury OS

#117

The three main buttons for email: Reply, forward, delete looks exactly the same. From a UI standpoint, if all buttons look the same, the usability would be low. I wonder why this decision is made? Probably to make it more "zen" like. As an asian myself, I feel like this guy is feeding into the oriental fetish in the western market, or rather exploiting gimmicky eastern terminologies to justify his design(ugh). I mean…

It's not all bad however, I can imagine the task focused modality and gestural language could be useful if translated into a productivity app, something like Jira or Notion, but decluttered.

Re: Mercury OS

#118
You've edited your doc. It's ready to go. So you fire up a browser, connect to gmail.com, click Compose, click on the Attach button, navigate through a file browser to select the file you want to send, remember that you didn't save it, so you go back to Word, click file save, tab to the browser, tab back to Word because you don't remember the path, do File Save As... so you can copy the path, and paste it into the browse dialog when you tab back, which you do. If you're lucky, you won't have to go mining in the Drafts folder for your email-to-be which still doesn't have anything in it. And then you enter the subject, and finally the addresses, which mercifully auto-completes (maybe the one thing done right so far -- semi-intelligent integration with your contacts). And click the Send button.

vs.

You edit your document. You click the Send shortcut in the place where the toolbar (or even worse, the ribbon bar) used to be. The title and the addresses have been filled in, because AI, which is smart enough to know that the title of the email will be the title of the document. You type in the covering text, most of which auto-completes: "Please find attached, the blah blah blah for Q1." And click the "Fly, fly, little email" icon.

Verbs not apps. I definitely get the problem that's being chased here.

An even more interesting study would be to see how one could extend the paradigm to the Monster apps we live in, like word processors, code editors, 3d modelling packages, not just the apps that should really be completely invisible (like email, SMS, &c). Maybe a hamburger icon under which a complete menu system (and tedious trivialities like File As... live. (I don't think we can get rid of Filing. But File really should be a verb).

It would be interesting to see how far context-sensitive shortcuts could toward covering the functionality of a Monster app. Select text, see formatting shortcuts. Select a rectangle, see fill and outline shortcuts, select a picture, see retouching, filtering, and cropping shortcuts. The context-free UI was a nice ideal back in 1984, but it hasn't really panned out.

Re: Mercury OS

#119
post #25

This 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.

It pretty much embodies everything I hate in modern OSes. I know what I want to do and I know how I want to do it, get out of my way. Meanwhile modern OSes can't even handle simple "maybe don't steal fucking focus from window I am currently writing something in just because some other app decided to make another windows."

In KDE Plasma, a window manager, you can configure "focus stealing prevention", as well as activation and raising of windows to be on click or on hover in a fairly precise way.

Still that is fairly far from the OS layer. Microsoft and Apple sell the 'OS' as a bundle with everything (a window manager, file explorer, etc) that you cannot really configure a lot, but that is a problem with their products.

Re: Mercury OS

#120

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…

And after 4 years no download link and no system requirements ?
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