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What happens if you put work into the second dimension?

norbertkozsir.com

1–10 of 62 posts

Re: What happens if you put work into the second dimension?

#7
I've found that working in a style similar to this is very useful for managing multiple threads of work at the same time.

I use virtual desktops, where each desktop contains a single thing that I am working on, and everything related to it. Then any good window manager can switch between them quickly and even give you a spatial sense of where you are. I organize them as a priority stack, so the topmost priority is in top position and then it goes downward from there

There's a lot that this "campus" product does that isn't present in such a set up (multi user, zooming, etc...) but virtual desktops give you a lot of the benefit and come built in to most of our operating systems

Re: What happens if you put work into the second dimension?

#8
Very cool interface and reminiscent of figma/excalidraw in the way they provide an infinite 2d canvas for shapes and figures. Most tools of these types tend to implement layers as well, which might be loosely analogous to multiple desktops and could be a neat interface element to explore. The impetus for layering in a drawing tool is very different from the impetus for doing such in a desktop windowing tool.

The 3d demos are similar to what you experience when using a VR headset with desktop emulation software. I ran experiments with that for several months and while the concepts were interesting, context switching in a simulated physical space was actually a lot slower than alt+tabbing between things.

Re: What happens if you put work into the second dimension?

#9

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface They mostly do not gain a lot of users. Good luck!

this stuff was huge for a while, 20-25 years ago, digital libraries, information exploration, ... consider even things like minority report, or more prosaically, all the demos coming out of MIT medialab.

It never really caught on, completed got clobbered by free text search, now AI chat interfaces I guess.

Am glad to see it bubble up again, because have good memories working on this stuff.

Re: What happens if you put work into the second dimension?

#10

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface They mostly do not gain a lot of users. Good luck!

I think (work)spaces like macOS Spaces because they make access easier; with a single continuous space you have to work, whereas a workspace is a hotkey away. They make for nice demos and movie scenes though.

After having used such things since the 80s (starting with DESQview) I find myself simply minimizing or leaving secondary applications in the background of a single workspace. When I do use other spaces it is for full screen view. I don't usually need to see multiple windows at the same time, but that would be a task for a tiling manager...

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