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Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

desktopneo.com

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Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#231

Post by ksk »

I feel like these sorts of presentations are not very honest. If your claim is improved productivity, why not do a side by side? A cursory glance shows that all of these features would completely destroy my productivity.

Taking a look at the gestures...

1) Scroll through panels - Alt+TAB is unquestionably faster (2) Open App Control - Win key? (3) Open Apps menu - Keyboard Shortcuts (4) Open Finder - Win + E (5) Close Panel - Alt F4 ((6,7,8) Resize - Win + UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT (Now, sure I see some people claiming that "nobody" knows these shortcuts or that they are "not intuitive" (itself a loaded term), etc.

So,

Proposal 1 (Teach people these shortcuts)

Proposal 2 (Invent completely new gestures - teach people these new gestures, which will then slow them down because a keyboard is just crazy fast compared to touch.)

Now, I'm going off of the whole Desktop phrasing. Maybe on a mobile, all of these might make more sense..

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#233

Post by fooster »

wang_li wrote: post #202
SonicSoul wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

would be funny if this guy became the next Jonathan Ive so we could see this feedback in a different light 10 years from now.

I'm perhaps in a minority here, but Jon Ive isn't that great. I mean my iphone should have a notice/indicator light on the front. It wouldn't have been that hard to put an LED behind the glass so that if I leave my phone in the other room and I receive a message or something, then simply walking past my phone, the blinking light will catch my attention.

One of the most widely respected and awarded designer in the world... not that great. Perhaps you should re-evaluate your measure of greatness?

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#234

Post by TuringTest »

dragly wrote: post #203
TrevorJ wrote: post #140

The biggest thing I find lacking in desktop UI is the ability to save and switch between states. We need the idea of project 'sessions' where I can open up the software I need to use, pull up the files I need, set my favorite folders, etc and then hit 'save' and be able to restore back to that setup at the click of a button. Right now, switching between projects means setting all that up every single time.

I believe that is what KDE is trying to achieve with "activities".

Certainly, but KDE activities are overtly complicated and lack a unifying metaphor.

Last time I checked they were neither virtual desktops nor IDE workspaces; it was hard to think of an activity as a container that holds together all the instances of data related to a project.

They interacted with open applications in weird ways, rather than having one instance of the application associated always to the same activity as you'd expect.

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#235

Post by andrepd »

Retric wrote: post #213
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…

Windows OS is full of shortcuts that are non obvious ex: Windows + E or even the classic Alt + Tab.

Exactly. GP has a good point, but it's a problem not exclusive to Apple.

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#236

Post by mynewtb »

kijin wrote: post #230
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 ca…

Do they really have to be hierarchical? Your example would work with AND.

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#237

Post by nitrogen »

rsync wrote: post #134
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…

"Here's feedback as to why I'm not sending this website to my studio lead to schedule a phone screen with the designer:" Just curious ... how many of the folks that you have sent to your studio lead have had their project at the #1 spot on the front page of HN with 100+ comments ?

I've had personal work reach HN with lots of votes and comments that went nearly nowhere. I would have killed (metaphorically) to get concrete criticism like this; that's way more valuable than the votes.

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#239

Post by dingo_bat »

>The desktop metaphor as the basis of computer interfaces is inefficient and outdated. Today, most of our data exists outsides of files and folders.

What does this even mean? ALL my data is in files and folders. Is there a filesystem that doesn't use the concept of files and directories? If not, then isn't it best to model the system closely in the UI?

I also read the "Window management is outdated" and it completely failed to detail how windows are bad. It seems to me that windows are the most flexible UI paradigm, allowing you to decide how exactly you want to use your screen space. The challenge is on the devs to make apps with a reactive UI that changes according to the size of the window.

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#240

Post by dingo_bat »

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 ~'

To this day, I have not figured out how to switch to another desktop on my Macbook Air using a keyboard shortcut. To be fair, I use it very rarely.
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