Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

desktopneo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 325 posts

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#121

Post by ianstormtaylor »

GuiA wrote: post #73
dangrossman wrote: post #47

It seems like a lot of people skimmed without reading the top or bottom of this site: It's not a company. It's not a product. You're not being asked to buy it or buy into it, just to discuss the concept if you'd like. This website is a portfolio piece for a 21-year-old university student hoping to find an internship. In my opinion, it's an impressive demonstration of his design and technical skills. It certainly says…

I work at a company where we hire people for exactly that kind of gig, with a heavy focus on building prototypes of your designs that are actually usable because that's the only viable way to design interfaces. Here's feedback as to why I'm not sending this website to my studio lead to schedule a phone screen with the designer: 1) reused assets from other companies (big no no, even for just a mockup) that are inconsi…

I don't believe your comment was intended to be constructive at all. It sounds much more like jealousy and looking for an excuse to tear down someone who's put in great effort.

The concept and presentation of it are definitely impressive, especially for someone who's only 21 and still looking for internship-level work. He's easily in the top 5%, probably top 1% of designers, in terms of being able to see a complicated concept through from ideation to execution.

#1 — There's nothing wrong with using assets from other companies like Amazon, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc. in a concept mockup. If anything, it's nice to see realistic assets being used instead of stock junk that won't actually work in real-world situations.

#2 — Yup, the 6-finger-pinch would probably be too convoluted, I agree. But that's easily replaced with a regular pinch. Easy to get little details like this wrong in the scheme of things, especially for the more minor gestures.

#3 — Who cares? If anything this shows that he knows about what's out there in terms of prior art, and is able to build on it in an inspiring way. That's a good sign in my book, not a deal breaker.

#4 — The fact that he was able to put together this page, with all of the marketing copy, and the well-design screenshots (with zooming), etc. already shows that for a visual and interaction designer he's way ahead of the curve in terms of marketing.

I'm not saying the concept is perfect, but it's definitely well presented, and well thought out. Add in the fact that the designer is 21 and looking for an internship, and he is an absolutely obvious candidate for a phone screen. I'd be surprised if he isn't able to land internships with any of the big tech companies (Apple, Google, Facebook, etc.) with this piece as part of a larger portfolio. He's clearly good at coming up with, polishing, and communicating ideas.

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#122

Post by Mikeb85 »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #96
orky56 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This guy has the chops to come up with a well designed concept and should have the opportunity to defend & iterate on it based on constructive feedback. Some of these comments provide that feedback while others flatly have an issue with the idea of a concept altogether. It's unfortunate that desktop UI has remained stuck for quite awhile and only MS & Apple can really provide a new paradigm for people to adopt. Both…

>t's unfortunate that desktop UI has remained stuck for quite awhile A lot of things get "stuck" and for good reason. Steering wheel, gas, and brake. Sight, trigger, stock. Underwear, pants, socks, etc. Personally, I think the NT team really nailed the concept of the desktop back in 1993 with 3.1. The start button which hid programs and allowed access to other functions was incredibly handy, a bit like how a desk has…

I think part of it too is that on the desktop, we generally stay in one or two applications for long amounts of time. For example, we'll spend hours inside 1 or 2 browser windows. All the changes is the content within the browser, the positioning will stay static for hours. Or an IDE, spreadsheet, wordprocessor, etc... - all are long-running apps, constant opening and closing or resizing isn't needed. Current DEs also get app launching right, you can have workspaces, etc... The practical difference between using the OSX, Gnome Shell, KDE Plasma 5 or KDE 4, Ubuntu Unity, even Windows - isn't all that big. You can open your app with search, resize it to half the screen or maximize it easily, and you can switch through apps easily. They've all converged with a similar set of features for everyday use, the main differences are simply little widgets here and there.

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#123

Post by artifaxx »

huuu wrote: post #53
tomc1985 wrote: post #12

The problem with the tablet analogy is nobody seems to know how to design complex, professional-level (like Photoshop, or Blender) applications in that paradigm. Tablet apps are overwhelmingly consumption-oriented, and those that aren't all seem to be oriented around popular (and populist) appeal. Why is everyone out for the blood of the desktop/windows paradigm? Why can't the simplified-tablet market and the desktop…

Talking about Blender: I think that the way windows work in Blender could make a great OS window manager. Devide the panels the way you like and select a program or part of a program you like to show inside the panel. There are window manager who can do this but imho not as simple as Blender.

It would definitely take some changes to make it work at an OS level, but Blender's modular window organization system would be awesome for more uses! It definitely is power user only, such a UI style would overwhelm most users with the raw number of choices.

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#124

Post by TeMPOraL »

tomc1985 wrote: post #12

The problem with the tablet analogy is nobody seems to know how to design complex, professional-level (like Photoshop, or Blender) applications in that paradigm. Tablet apps are overwhelmingly consumption-oriented, and those that aren't all seem to be oriented around popular (and populist) appeal. Why is everyone out for the blood of the desktop/windows paradigm? Why can't the simplified-tablet market and the desktop…

I can see the reason from the power user's point of view. I've noticed that quite a lot of power users don't use desktops (or window affordances) at all! Their only use is to provide a place for a cool background picture. I see a couple of reasons:

- having to use a mouse (or, God help us, a touchpad) is annoying when you have to switch between it and the keyboard

- using the mouse is slow

- windows on traditional desktops take way too much space (compare with how much better they look on tiling WMs)

- ALT+TAB (and equivalents) suck - you can only switch back and forth between two applications; anything else requires paying attention

- window locations and sizes are ephemeral, which again is annoying when you want to set up a good working environment

- wheel menus are awesome and the fact that pretty much nobody is doing them baffles me

Tablets suck for creative work, I agree, but the way I see this project is not as a nod towards touch interfaces. On the contrary, it's about using sane(r) window management, combined with tags, eye-tracking, voice control and wheel menus to minimize the amount of effort you need to make to issue commands or search for things. It sounds like a perfect addition to keyboard-driven work style.

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#125

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

api wrote: post #49
tomc1985 wrote: post #12

The problem with the tablet analogy is nobody seems to know how to design complex, professional-level (like Photoshop, or Blender) applications in that paradigm. Tablet apps are overwhelmingly consumption-oriented, and those that aren't all seem to be oriented around popular (and populist) appeal. Why is everyone out for the blood of the desktop/windows paradigm? Why can't the simplified-tablet market and the desktop…

I think some of that results from the limitations of mobile OSes: everything is tied to an app store, jailed, etc. A mobile device is not a "real computer" not because of any hardware limitation but because the OS is designed for it to be a dumb terminal to access the cloud and consume content and rapid-interaction services. It maps well to the sorts of things you want to do with a tiny device in your pocket, but it'…

Also, the screen is smaller.

A lot of tiling problems on the desktop would disappear if monitors were two or three times (or more...) as large on each side and wall-mounted.

Being able to see most of your windows at the same time and work in any one without moving or switching would be revolutionary.

I'd never heard of GUI/10. I don't particularly like the windowing scheme, but I think a ten-way touch interface which flipped between being a multi-pointer and a text keyboard - possibly with a touch point in one corner to switch modes, and not that show/hide thing tablets do now - would be a very interesting thing.

It wasn't practical when 10/GUI was first discussed. It's getting more and more practical now.

>It would really be nice if Linux desktop efforts stopped trying to deliver Windows 95 or early versions of MacOSX in 2016 and actually innovated.

Any innovation has to be much better than current practice. If it's "interesting, but..." it's not enough to get people to switch.

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#126

Post by soylentcola »

superuser2 wrote: post #98
tomc1985 wrote: post #12

The problem with the tablet analogy is nobody seems to know how to design complex, professional-level (like Photoshop, or Blender) applications in that paradigm. Tablet apps are overwhelmingly consumption-oriented, and those that aren't all seem to be oriented around popular (and populist) appeal. Why is everyone out for the blood of the desktop/windows paradigm? Why can't the simplified-tablet market and the desktop…

In my world (music, concert, theater production) we depend on a lot of equipment which is basically a computer and a custom physical control surface, retailing for 10x the price of the computer. The keyboard and mouse interface is simply not good enough to replicate faders and knobs. The tablet interface, on the other hand, is. This has important implications for light boards, sound boards, and DAW controllers. For m…

There's a lot of this sort of thing showing up in the DJ/VJ space and with visual and audio performance in general.

I think there are definitely strengths and weaknesses to the use of touch-oriented control surfaces. On the negative side, they require you to look at the control surface a lot more often than a setup featuring jog wheels and sliders. But on the positive side, being able to customize the control surface and allow a level of more "analog" control compared to pointing and clicking or typing.

There are a lot of less expensive options that use more common USB interfaces to map hardware controls to software functions which can really help if your only other option is that pro (read: expensive and proprietary) gear you mentioned. Still, you're always limited by the number and layout of pads, buttons, sliders, and dials that can be mapped to software functions.

I've played around a bit with software like TouchDesigner which is meant for creating custom touch interfaces and programming the ways that each control affects parameters in software. It's like a more open and flexible alternative to the old Crestron and similar systems where you could define the control surface in software but were limited to their processors and peripherals.

It's something I don't really do much in my work (since we use those aforementioned Crestron-type systems) but in my spare time, I like playing around with using software-defined interfaces to make interactive audiovisual projects.

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#127

Post by EC1 »

doyoulikeworms wrote: post #88
GuiA wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at a company where we hire people for exactly that kind of gig, with a heavy focus on building prototypes of your designs that are actually usable because that's the only viable way to design interfaces. Here's feedback as to why I'm not sending this website to my studio lead to schedule a phone screen with the designer: 1) reused assets from other companies (big no no, even for just a mockup) that are inconsi…

I have no experience in your field, but I'm very surprised to hear that this isn't worth a phone screen for a 21 year old. Tough industry!

It is, he's just finding reasons to be an asshole. It's only tough because people like him make it needlessly tough due to some inferiority complex.

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#128

Post by elliotec »

orliesaurus wrote: post #111
doyoulikeworms wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no experience in your field, but I'm very surprised to hear that this isn't worth a phone screen for a 21 year old. Tough industry!

+1 I thought it was quite impressive until reading that comment from someone who works in the design field!

Don't believe that guy, it's still impressive.

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#129

Post by danseagrave »

orthecreedence wrote: post #33
tomc1985 wrote: post #12

The problem with the tablet analogy is nobody seems to know how to design complex, professional-level (like Photoshop, or Blender) applications in that paradigm. Tablet apps are overwhelmingly consumption-oriented, and those that aren't all seem to be oriented around popular (and populist) appeal. Why is everyone out for the blood of the desktop/windows paradigm? Why can't the simplified-tablet market and the desktop…

Right, this seems to me to be a tiling window manager with a touch interface. This is kind of an odd combination too, because most tiling WMs are keyboard oriented, whereas most non-tiling WMs are pointer oriented. Maybe that's just historical and doesn't really make much of a difference though. But with i3, I have keybindings to "open the last browser window i used" or "open the last gvim window i opened." I can til…

Talk of tag/DB based file systems always reminds me of WinFS[1]. Microsoft were trying to build a tag (well relational database) backed file system since 1990... eventually abandoned - presumably due to back-compat issues.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#130

Post by throwaway45842 »

ianstormtaylor wrote: post #121
GuiA wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at a company where we hire people for exactly that kind of gig, with a heavy focus on building prototypes of your designs that are actually usable because that's the only viable way to design interfaces. Here's feedback as to why I'm not sending this website to my studio lead to schedule a phone screen with the designer: 1) reused assets from other companies (big no no, even for just a mockup) that are inconsi…

I don't believe your comment was intended to be constructive at all. It sounds much more like jealousy and looking for an excuse to tear down someone who's put in great effort. The concept and presentation of it are definitely impressive, especially for someone who's only 21 and still looking for internship-level work. He's easily in the top 5%, probably top 1% of designers, in terms of being able to see a complicate…

I agree. This is the typical kind of comment you'll get from anyone who gets a bunch of people they have to vet or say no to. It's the same reason VC's don't really have much vision.

I find the poster's "reasons" to be completely spurious. This presentation got to the #1 spot on HN, which is more than the person offering the "constructive" criticism ever would do. I would never work with the person in our thread, but it's obvious that it's easy to do great work with the person who made this presentation. They have vision.

I wouldn't give them an internship, I'd give them $1 million (make them CEO) and a pipeline of six great hires. But that's just me.

in sum - http://imgur.com/d2DvlTk

Post reply on HN