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

221–230 of 325 posts

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#221

Post by ctvo »

ethanbond wrote: post #211
shkkmo wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a big difference between "I don't believe you were trying to be constructive", (which make assumptions about intent) and "I found your critique to be un-constructive, here's why:" The former adds nothing to the conversation and is pretty close to being a personal attack, the latter provides feedback and (may) prompt constructive debate about how to provide critique.

Sure, here's why it's not constructive: not once in the parent comment is an alternative suggested or a question raised. Just a list of things that are "wrong," according to the poster.

It's a resume piece and the parent works for a design company. He's not looking to start a discussion on the merits of the design and how to improve it, only his problems with it from a hiring perspective (polish, consistency, lack of research). It feels very constructive to me.

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#223

Post by ethanbond »

ctvo wrote: post #221
ethanbond wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, here's why it's not constructive: not once in the parent comment is an alternative suggested or a question raised. Just a list of things that are "wrong," according to the poster.

It's a resume piece and the parent works for a design company. He's not looking to start a discussion on the merits of the design and how to improve it, only his problems with it from a hiring perspective (polish, consistency, lack of research). It feels very constructive to me.

Then what separates constructive criticism from just criticism?

Parent comment supplied criticism – I'm not arguing that. But s/he did not at all help to reveal a path towards a better outcome. That's what would make it constructive.

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#224

Post by christoph »

shkkmo wrote: post #201
jdietrich wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keyboard shortcuts have good discoverability in most applications, because they're listed alongside the drop-down menu options. If you use Edit->Copy a lot, you can see in the menu that there's a keyboard shortcut. Many of Apple's UI interactions can only be discovered through guesswork or reading the docs. If you open Launchpad often, nothing alerts you to the fact that there's a touchpad gesture for that. Unlabeled…

The lack of discoverability extends to OSX's keyboard shortcuts as well. I completely changed how I work after I discovered 'Command Tab' and 'Command ~'

It's amazing how buried some of these are. Nothing tops print screen for me - Cmd + shift + 3 for the whole screen or Cmd + shift + 4 for the selection option...

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#225

Post by bitL »

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…

They actually took the "Start menu" from OS/2, which probably got inspired by some of Unix WMs back then.

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#226

Post by ddingus »

JupiterMoon wrote: post #197
ddingus wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I'm aware of and will use those features on Linux. I don't use nor like tiling much, due to overlaps and how I find myself using them. Some here are saying more iteration could improve on that. Maybe so. I'm sure not oppose to giving new things a go.

Just so you know xfce's window manager (or at least the xubuntu version version of it -- there may be patches not present in the upstream) allows focus follows mouse and has overlapping windows... EDIT I might be confused here. I'm reading that you are assuming that one has to use a tiling WM to get one of the features you want.

Not at all. It's all good. I know about xfce, etc...

I do prefer overlap with those features, among others, present.

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#227

Post by gadflea »

shkkmo wrote: post #200
betenoire wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not an assumption, the commenter also clearly stated, "I hope that's constructive". To some of us, it sounds belittling and dismissive, regardless of how well he knows his company better than us.

There is a big difference between "I don't believe you were trying to be constructive", (which make assumptions about intent) and "I found your critique to be un-constructive, here's why:" The former adds nothing to the conversation and is pretty close to being a personal attack, the latter provides feedback and (may) prompt constructive debate about how to provide critique.

Judgements on motive, while critical for investigations and character analysis, are obviously irrelevant to online tech discussions, famously impervious to baggage, ideology, and petty warble.

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#228

Post by relkor »

How did he create those demos, did he actually write a windows manager that wraps existing OS functions into his format? The amount of code that would take to give all of the functionality would be stupendous. Also how did he implement eye tracking with such robustness? Could he be kernel hacking and remapping the video memory buffer so that his shim code can take the output of working programs and then rearrange it for the purposes of his demo? Could a designer shed some light for this programmer on how exactly that video was generated. What type of tools would he have used so that I can google them on my own time?

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#229

Post by mleonhard »

I love it! I would want an angled keyboard with integrated touch-pads for each hand. I use the Goldtouch V2 keyboard. It would be great it if the keyboard was edged with 2-3 inch touchpad surfaces. Then I could keep my hands in an ergonomic position and avoid having to reach for the mouse with every interaction.

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#230

Post by kijin »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #164
orthecreedence wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>I do like the idea of a tag-based filesystem though. // Ditto, I use tags heavily for web content and photos and would love to do the same for local files. Seems that it might be possible to overload soft-links to do the job - create a hierarchy of tags and then put a soft link for each file in the relevant place. That way you could use current filesystems and filemanagers whilst you develop the concept and apps. So…

I want hierarchical tags, e.g. "comp.lang.ruby.rails" instead of just "ruby" and "rails". And of course, when I search "comp.lang.ruby", I want to see results from all of its children.

The problem with traditional hierarchical organization is that objects often belong to multiple categories. With hierarchical tags, that problem disappears because you can easily assign multiple tags to the same object.

Actually, we can already do this with hierarchical filesystems and hard (not soft) links.

Post reply on HN