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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

#61
post #30
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I never felt like I could productively work with a tiling manager, since I frequently overlap windows as a mechanism for easy access Part of the idea of most tiling window managers is that you use the keyboard to control them, not the mouse. As such, you no longer need to overlap windows to quickly switch to the one you want. You have keybinds to do so (which actually exist in the default Windows and OSX window man…

Seeing more than one at a time is high value. I personally hate the basic tile schemes, and full screen in many of my use cases. Yes, when I'm using one app hard, full screen is good. When I'm using multiple ones, I often want to copy paste info, or just refer to it. Auto pop to foreground is toxic, it forces a change in state when there is no need for that change most of the time. On IRIX, focus follows mouse, and m…

Linux uses middle click for one of its clipboards. Most window mangers have focus follows mouse as an option.

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#62
post #60

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…

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…

He's interested in the feedback and is here participating in the discussion (@ziburski). I just felt compelled to write something after reading a couple silly "you lost me as a customer" and "what's the point" comments.

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#63

"About this Concept Neo was designed to inspire and provoke discussions about the future of productive computing. It is not going to be a real working operating system interface, it is just a concept. I am not saying that these ideas would definitely work and that this is the future of computing. However, there is large potential in rethinking the core interfaces of desktop computing for modern needs, and somebody ha…

Argh! What's the point of developing of fully fleshed out work piece like this that doesn't and won't exist! Well other than self-promotion and a fear of it actually totally sucking after it hits the real world of people.

Well, since the person who did this is looking for an internship, the point is self-promotion and, I would guess, to flesh out the idea. Someone else might take the ball a bit farther and from there it might become real.

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#67
post #57

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…

In case, for the tag-based filesystem, there are tmsu [1]. I will try it soon with ranger [2], I think managing tags with it won't be a problem as you can call the shell where you want. [1] http://tmsu.org/ [2] http://ranger.nongnu.org/

Looks great but what happens when you move files from one system to another? Can one keep the tags?

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#68

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'm reminded of that run of "brilliant new design for " linkbait posts on tech sites a few years back, touting the incomparable benefits of some colorful, curvy piece of hardware over anything out there. The original source was always some design student's portfolio, and the "brilliant" design was never more than a colorful, curvy housing that didn't exist outside a rendering.

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#69

Tiling window manager, with easy back-and-forth? Works for me. I have to say, I really like tagging-as-filesystem concept (where you can also meta-tag something), and the gaze/touch interaction proposed would be awesome to have in my opinion. The current interaction with tagging (basing off OS X) is still pretty clunky. It's a separate field, the new vs previous tag selection is aggravating with a keyboard, and there…

Hierarchical tagging is a good idea for a filesystem. The only problem with it is "where do you store that metadata?" In the individual files (requiring format-specific support)? In the filesystem (requiring applications that know how to read and write it)?

When KDE 4 was released it included Nepomuk (https://userbase.kde.org/Nepomuk) as a universal tagging-and-search mechanism to do precisely this kind of thing. Unfortunately, not very many people use it and even those that do only use it in a very limited fashion. Partly because it only works in KDE apps and also because tagging all your files after-the-fact is a very time consuming process.

Then there's this problem: What if I never had any trouble finding my documents? What will I gain by tagging everything?

Tagging makes a lot of sense for things like photos and videos where search-by-content just doesn't work. For everything else you can just index your files and search normally.

Another problem with tagging is that--if you're going to be disciplined about it--you're not really getting much benefit over just "staying organized" with directories/folders. What's the this-helps-me difference between a directory structure like, "Company X/Clients" or a hierarchical tagging structure such as "#company/#clients"? Sure, with tags you're not limited to the parent->child concept but ultimately--if you don't stay organized with a hierarchy--you'll end up with a huge mess that can only be navigated with an intelligent tag-based search tool.

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#70
Why something as intuitive as eye tracking, but something as clunky as touchpad gestures?

Surely if technology is good enough to track the eye, we don't need a touchpad to track hand gestures?

I really like this concept, but when I heard "three finger scroll" I died a little inside.

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