Mercury OS

The ability of deployment of an operating (observe the word!) system is paramount and it IS the point here!

Designers should lay off of approaching functional tasks through vague and coined phylosophical mission statements in pace of pragmatism, it is like sawing the coat to the pretty button with esoteric properties.

Forgive me being harsh but I am pretty fed up by the trend in our time when product design is approached like pompous famous fashion designers make weird clothes only suitable for the catwalk and celebrate each other on the otherwise useless piece of textile.

We can instead express creativity and converse ideas through actual usability, we must discuss operating(!) systems through actual usability, through something could be realized and deployed, actually being possible to use for its purpose!

Could not agree more. I'm re-reading Dune and in this age of emerging AI its focus on developing human potential in light of increased technological capability is striking me as ridiculously prescient. Offloading some parts of the human process to a computer is simply efficient and an apt use of the tool, but eventually the equation flips to where it's doing more harm than good.

A computer really is best when it's a "bicycle for the mind," and it turns out that that's quite a tricky balance to achieve. It should augment us, yes, but we should always be the ones in control, both de facto and de jure.

This is not an operating system, this is a UI, and as far as I can tell, a non-functioning demo at that. That's fine, great actually, but let's at least use the correct words.

Purely aesthetically, this is great. It's incredibly Apple-ish and honestly just seems like a massively simplified alternative to iPadOS -- SiriOS, maybe? -- but that's not a knock, it's extremely polished and overall fantastic design work.

But just because it's nice to look at doesn't mean it's nice to use. The predictive nature honestly just seems annoying -- there's a reason people curse at their voice assistants so often. It's a gimmick that I doubt will ever be as useful as we'd like, at least not until AI takes a massive, massive leap in the direction of Jarvis and the like.

My problem with these kinds of "declarative" approaches to user interaction -- anything that obfuscates the "how" things are done because apparently that's too difficult and scary -- is that it tends to encourage passive consumption, not active creation. Or, at best, you get toy creation apps that piddle around in the absolute most basic of the basic such that really they're better classified as educational apps rather than creation apps.

For a totally consumption-oriented device, that might be fine for a while, but eventually I'm going to disagree with either the direction a developer has taken an app, the content it's curating for me, etc, and will surely want to deviate from its "curation" in some way or another...however, this experience looks to hijack so much control from the user that they can't configure anything. You're either along for the ride, or you don't use the device.

I said this in another comment, but it bears repeating: computers are not going away, therefore computer literacy is a facet of literacy in general. And IMO literacy is a basic tenant of being free. I for one would like to see designs that give users some agency in their devices and aren't condescending in the name of offloading the "inhumanity" of...thinking about where you put your files. Come on, that's just absurd. I get what Jason is going for here, but it's completely jumped the shark from Silicon Valley into HBO's Silicon Valley. He should remember Steve Jobs' quote, that a computer is a "bicycle for the mind." The really important thing about that quote is that it's not a car, and it's certainly not a self-driving one. It's a bicycle -- it augments and multiplies what we put into it, but we still have to put something into it. If we're not in control, then who is? I would argue that it's those who are feeding you the content that you're consuming. By losing the ability to "grip" your device and actually exert some agency, and perhaps use it to create something new and novel, or at least to actively explore, you're making it so that those for whom these designs become "what a computer is" will have to climb that much higher in order to even begin to understand how to transcend the content feed, one example being that there are kids starting computer science programs today without even really understanding the concept of a filesystem, because they've never had to interact with one beyond maybe Google Drive. They're mistaking the cave for reality.

Anyways, it's late and I'm not sure how to end this rant other than by simply stepping off my stool, so -- step.

I remember Microsoft wanted to do something like that. The year was 1990, the software was called OLE, the goal was to hide files and apps from the users and let them use "documents" instead. Mostly succeeded in the files part, but not so much in the apps part.

I'm going to disagree with you here. Concepts have their place in the world, one cannot just have pragmatic ideas in a society, nor can you just have idealistic ideas, there must be a balance, they both feed each other.

While those weird clothes by pompous designers can only be worn on the red carpet, they offer cues for things to trickle down to the clothes you and I wear. They're big ideas, exaggerated themes, like an extract, you don't consume the extract alone, you dilute, you mix.

Car concepts are the same, you never see a car's concept version go all the way till production, they're the concept, the idea is to shoot big, dump everything, write it all out, you can edit later.

We've got enough people on this earth that a great many of them can stay up in the clouds as astronauts of ideas, intermittently communicating to us their findings from the vast universe of creativity, with no impact on society's advancement, in fact to great benefit.

Just my 2 cents