
Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity - ziburski
https://www.desktopneo.com
======
dangrossman
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 a lot more than the average
21-year-old's resume listing what courses they've taken so far.

~~~
GuiA
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 inconsistent with the overall visual style of the project

2) very implausible interactions that were clearly not prototyped (eg the 6
finger pinch... what?!)

3) work heavily inspired from other research projects and designs (10 GUI,
various tiling window managers, etc) without showing a clear unifying
interaction model. This is more of a patchwork of loosely related ideas, and
to me doesn't show clear, deep understanding of prior work (both academic and
commercial) in the covered areas.

4) awkward copy that jumps from marketing-style speak to explaining
interactions from an analytical point of view. This is the most minor of all
points but just hurts the polish of the piece.

So this tells me that the candidate is not a strong graphic designer, not a
strong prototyper, nor a strong researcher. He's looking for an internship so
only one of the three with promises in the other two would be sufficient, but
that's not apparent enough to me here.

Hope that's constructive - I see a fair number of such portfolios/resumes
every month.

EDIT: lots of hate on my comment below. The main point seems to be "well
you're not totally wrong, but he's a 21 year old intern". Sure, although that
doesn't change any of my feedback. I am assessing the work as it stands on its
own merits, independently of the designer's age. There is certain work on
which 21 year old interns don't have a lot to contribute on, such as
redesigning entire OS user interfaces. When it comes to assessing a designer's
skills, I prefer to see a series of small, focused pieces rather than one
large, sprawling one (the latter is much harder to pull of well unless you
have tons of experience). I'm looking forward to looking at how his work has
evolved a few years from now.

~~~
ianstormtaylor
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.

~~~
shkkmo
> I don't believe your comment was intended to be constructive at all.

You may have a different assessment of the candidate's potential value as an
intern. The parent clearly stated "Here's feedback as to why I'm not sending
this website to my studio lead to schedule a phone screen with the designer".

Making assumptions about the parents intent provides no value to the
discussion.

~~~
betenoire
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.

~~~
shkkmo
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.

~~~
ethanbond
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.

~~~
ctvo
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.

~~~
ethanbond
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.

------
tomc1985
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-power-user markets coexist?
Windows and taskbars and start menus are wonderful and my favorite way of
interacting with computers, why must it be taken away?

~~~
orthecreedence
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 tile them in different workspaces
as I please extremely efficiently and quickly, and move them around as needed.
I can move much faster using the keyboard than when I'm in my Windows machine.
Having this tiling ability on a tablet seems odd to me.

I am kind of getting tired of the "attacks" on the traditional desktop
interface. People just don't want to admit that just because tablets _exist_
they are not a superior interface. Just a different one.

The interface they propose is _beautiful_ but it would really have to walk a
thin, thin line between usability and screen space.

I do like the idea of a tag-based filesystem though. Obviously then you get
into the problem of managing your tags (a tree-based filesystem solves this
problem naturally).

~~~
stormbrew
I would personally kill for better mouse integration in i3 (which I use on all
my daily-use machines), and I would be extremely happy to augment it with
touch screen support (which I would largely want to use for tile
manipulation).

In fact, a main reason I use i3 is because it is literally the least
ideological tiling window manager when it comes to mouse use. The productivity
gains I get out of tiling don't come from using the keyboard, they come from
not having to deal with the (imo, especially in the post-1024x768 era) very
messy overlapping window model. Things are where I expect. I can move them
from one screen to another and sane things happen. Plugging in and unplugging
a display doesn't make hash of my organization. Things are never buried under
incomprehensible layers. And so on.

~~~
girvo
> _I would personally kill for better mouse integration in i3_

I agree, it was one of the things I was missing back when I was using i3 +
Ubuntu as my daily machine. Now, I'm using OS X with Amethyst[1], which while
it's less powerful than i3, combined with OS X's window management features I
honestly feel like I get the best of both worlds. It's quite great, to be
honest.

[1] [https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst](https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst)

------
king_magic
There are a few things I like in this (particularly the Finder bit), but so
much of this is just a bunch of extraordinary statements with absolutely no
universally-accepted justification, spoken as if they have some sort of
universally accepted justification.

For example, "Panels use screen space more efficiently and are a more elegant
way to multitask than normal windows."

Says who? You? It just drives me crazy when I see statements like these. It's
not an effective way to get your point across. You want to make your case for
something like that? Actually _make your case_. Present some evidence and your
conclusions. Not everything has to be a Jony Ive marketing video.

edit: Last thing I'll say - I just re-watched the video, and caught the last
line - "it rethinks desktop computing to help you get work done". My advice to
the author - go work for various companies for 5-10 years, and then come back
and see if that statement holds up. My ability to get work done would be
crippled with this; in fact, my work would come to a grinding halt. "Work"
just doesn't work in the kinds of idealistic ways these types of marketing-
like videos always seem to show.

And don't get me wrong, I like the author's ambition. If I was in the
internship-givin' business, hell, I'd probably consider him. I think this is a
good way to get your name out there, even if it attracts criticism (like
mine).

~~~
colmvp
Even as a designer, I think you hit the nail on one my biggest criticisms
about the profession: rationales without evidence.

Most of the time, design rationales seem like they are based on the subjective
POV of the designer rather than conclusion based on recorded feedback.

------
TrevorJ
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.

~~~
koduh
I agree whole-heartedly. I was excited when I heard Windows 10 was adding
multiple desktops, however I find they are quite lacking in use. For example
if I want to move a single window of Notepad++ to a different desktop it moves
all of the Notepad++ instances.

On top of that, I really don't want all of my software always open in a
separate desktop. There is no need for me to keep Photoshop open, using
resources, while I have transitioned from work to play time. I'd much rather
have a "working" session saved and a "gaming" session saved where-in different
programs are auto opened when I start a session.

~~~
dingo_bat
>For example if I want to move a single window of Notepad++ to a different
desktop it moves all of the Notepad++ instances.

I think this is a problem with Notepad++, because I can move around single
instances of all other apps I tried (Chrome, VS, etc).

>On top of that, I really don't want all of my software always open in a
separate desktop.

Ideally the user should not need to worry about "open" apps and the resources
they are taking up just by being open (not doing any work). It is the app's
and the OS's job to ensure that background apps do not use CPU for doing
nothing and the memory management is good enough that you always have enough
memory for what you wanna run NOW. And I think that is quite good in Windows
10 and OSX right now. I can have multiple VS projects, a couple of VMs,
multiple SSH sessions, Outlook, couple of Office docs, ~30 tabs across several
Chrome windows open and I can still create a new Desktop and play some Need
for Speed when I reach home.

------
froh42
Hmm, isn't that "just" a tiling window manager at the bottom of a few other
nice things?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiling_window_manager](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiling_window_manager)

While feeling the shortcomings of a window system, I never felt like I could
productively work with a tiling manager, since I frequently overlap windows as
a mechanism for easy access ... and there are lots of popup windows I don't
want to cover the main application.

Oh yes, and I purposefully keep my Mac apps out of Full screen mode (and use a
keyboard shortcut to maximize when needed, keeping out of full screen).

~~~
johnmaguire2013
> 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 manager as well.)

~~~
ddingus
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 middle button copy paste were awesome. Still
prefer that over other schemes.

Many people get a second screen to accomplish what can very easily be done
with one a lot of the time.

Tablets are fine consumption devices. Some create is there, like graphics, but
most create has UX requirements that exceed the simple touch sweet spots.

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

~~~
ddingus
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.

~~~
JupiterMoon
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.

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

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

------
EdSharkey
I've sometimes thought the most egalitarian way to design a GUI would be to
make it exquisitely accessible to the blind. This would force designers to
organize their GUI with sensible, navigable hierarchies of data and controls.

To me, an exquisitely blind-accessible GUI's should function like a fancy
keyboard navigable/editable graph data structure that echoes the hierarchies
and relationships represented on the sighted displays. The biggest boon to
such a GUI would be that the blind-accessible controls would function as an
"expert" mode of navigating the GUI - one would never have to touch the mouse
or trackpad to get stuff done.

Sighted users would benefit from learning these keyboard controls and we'd
inject some hyper-productivity back into our apps to counter the fisher-
price'ification that has been creeping into GUI's over the past 10 years.

~~~
doublerebel
This is a very good point. Much of this UI is based on visual clues and
accessibility seems to be an afterthought.

A three finger tap or swipe is not easy for everyone. I'd like to see more
(digital) navigation based on actual (physical) navigation -- waypoint labels
and directional paths.

~~~
sixothree
Any swipe is virtually impossible in an office situation. Not everyone works
hunched over a macbook. Reaching up to my monitor two swipe would destroy my
shoulder.

~~~
Gracana
Touch screens obviously aren't the answer here, but a good trackpad setup
might be okay. I used to use Apple's "magic trackpad" when I had a macintosh
desktop, and it did gesture inputs really well, though I always seemed to run
into discomfort/strain issues earlier than I did with a mouse (which is part
of why I switched back.) That could be unique to me, but I'd guess that the
need to hover your hand above the pad is not good for anyone. I'd be up for
trying that setup again if someone had a good idea to solve that problem.

------
rocky1138
First paragraph in and I'm already not their customer:

"We now use smartphones and tablets most of the time, since they are much
easier to use."

No. Just no. I don't want to use a touchscreen and closed ecosystem to develop
software. That would be a nightmare.

The rest of the design seems to be taken straight from 10/GUI.

~~~
eridal
I wasn't aware of 10/GUI

Thanks for share!

[http://10gui.com/](http://10gui.com/)

~~~
smartbit
It seems that the tiling windows [0] of desktopneo or 10gui would not work on
very large monitors like a UDH 40". Eg. the Philips [1] has such a large
viewing angle for the lower two corners that they are less usable. Personally
I use the middle for active windows and move others to the left & right. [0]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiling_window_manager](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiling_window_manager)
[1] [https://pcmonitors.info/reviews/philips-
bdm4065uc/](https://pcmonitors.info/reviews/philips-bdm4065uc/)

~~~
JimmyAustin
As an aside, I own the Phillips linked and it is absolutely fantastic for SWD.
My windows dev environment is essentially a poor clone of a tiled window
manager as I have zero overlap between my windows due to the insane amount of
real estate.

------
tlow
This is still hacker news, right? So hypothetically we're talking silicon
valley startups. How many of these kinds of places are heavily reliant upon
outside companies like those mentioned by @GuiA to build prototypes of their
designs?

I have seen plenty of consultants hired, but nearly every startup I've seen or
been at/around (~20) prototyped their designs in house. As an example bu.mp
hired an industrial design firm to help them make physical prototypes of a POS
competitor to NFC technology (which ultimately failed), but had their own
engineers and designers actually create and test the working prototypes.

Shortcomings notwithstanding, I think this is an example of excellent work and
a creative way to find an internship. Given the opportunity, I'd most
certainly offer this guy an internship if I could.

Nice job. Ich wünsche dir viel Glück.

------
david-given
That's weird --- I looked at some of the sample animations, and I could
_swear_ I heard a tiny voice shouting 'Oberon! Plan-9! Rio!' in my ear...

I'd like to try something like this in action; but the problem, as always, is
going to be bootstrapping. Look how badly Ubuntu manages something as simple
as putting the application's menu bar in a non-standard place.

...I worked once with a desktop environment for the PC, GEOS. It had a feature
where your application's UI was described in logical terms and this was then
mapped to a physical UI when the app loaded. It allowed pluggable look-and-
feels to drastically modify the look and behaviour of the application as they
saw fit.

If we had something like that, this would be easy. Shame we don't, really.

------
jb55
So basically xmonad + with a tagged file indexer. Although fzf +
[https://github.com/rupa/z](https://github.com/rupa/z) works for me most of
the time.

With respect to eye tracking, I had a similar idea the other day. Imagine
holding a key, then moving your gaze to see an on-screen target following
where you're looking at. You could use this as a really quick way to scroll or
highlight/copy text without leaving your home row.

I really don't like leaving my home row.

I may be crazy.

~~~
iheartmemcache
Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking. Fzf is great, it's like
anything.el/helm but works outside of emacs. Thanks!

------
mattlutze
Tags are really tough. Unstructured categorization comes with its own basket
of issues -- some distinct from structured taxonomies, but not necessarily
less tricky.

A few thoughts there:

1\. What happens when my mental schemas change in a year? The word I use to
look something up changes, and I suddenly can no longer find it.

2\. What happens when I get a little lazy in obediently tagging everything I
create? Imagining the 2 or 3 words I'll want to use in the future to look
something up (see the first thought) is really tough. Mentally taxing = a
barrier to adoption.

3\. Folders can get unnecessarily deep, stale, etc... but having the structure
available to browse can be an extremely useful trigger in reestablishing the
hallways of my desktop-stored "mind palace."

4\. Having many ways to discover information I'm looking for > having a few
ways. Search, browse, categorize, all have a purpose depending on the way a
file or piece of information imprinted on my memory.

~~~
tripzilch
Great points. I've thought about some of these.

Currently, Firefox's bookmarks is the main task where I use tags these days.
Bookmarks so quickly become quite a mess! I really like tags for the ability
to have both a mess, quickly add things without having to think too hard, and
ultimately being able to find stuff of course.

I had a quick excursion using Chromium for a few weeks--does it even have tags
in the bookmark db? They weren't picked up when I exported from Firefox. I
went back to Firefox because Chromium's address bar doesn't quite search my
bookmarks and history the way Firefox does and only displays the top five
results or so. Not something I can depend on to be able to find something
back.

I really want to get back to having a load of tags on my music collection.
Used to have that in Amarok, but I lost the DB many years ago. So useful, for
custom playlists, weird personal microgenres that make sense only to you,
tagging tracks you almost certainly don't want to hear if you put some album
into a larger playlist (Daft Punk - _Touch_ :-P) etc.

Anyway. Your thoughts:

1\. Yes. For that, I imagine a powerful and snappy interface to organize
tagged stuff. A bit like those automated MP3 ID3v2 tagger tools, but a bit
more general. Should allow for mass re-tagging operations like: add tag
#newthing to all objects tagged #onething + #otherthing but not #notthisthing.
With the title matching "* about things". Only for objects (created) older
than 1 year (because my mental schema also changed the way I used the
#otherthing tag).

That's only power-users I'm afraid. I have no idea how to solve this for
regular users. Although I've seen motivated/determined "regular" users
structuring years of digital photos with folder systems in ways that maybe
they wouldn't shy from such a tool as long as it's intuitive to use.

2\. This is a big shortcoming of Firefox's tagged bookmarks. Back when I used
del.icio.us (also many years ago), there was a bookmarklet I could use to add
a site to my del.icio.us bookmarks. The greatest thing about it was that it
would predict/suggest tags for your bookmarks, I miss this so much. It did so
in two visually distinct ways: First, predictions on your own bookmarks, afaik
it was just a set of tags that you commonly used in conjunction with the one
or two tags you've typed so far. Maybe it also matched keywords in the title
and url. If I were to implement this I'd sort them by Bayesian
P(#newtag|title-url-keywords-tags-typed-so-far). The second set of tags were
suggestions based on what other del.icio.us users had tagged that url (less
useful and less privacy).

3\. I think you could have both? But most importantly, what helps me a _lot_
to navigate and orient myself in this tagged mind-palace (nice analogy btw),
is the ability to not just sort and slice your database by tags and
combinations of tags, but to also just be able to browse everything sorted by
time. I find this in the photo gallery on my phone, which is an utter mess,
but if I really need to find something, I switch to by-date view (groups by
month). Even if I don't exactly recall what month a photo was taken (or it
could be a picture that I saved from Twitter, or maybe that someone sent me by
IM), scrolling through I see pictures through time and usually I quickly get a
familiar feeling "wait it was before _then_ , and after ... yea .. when the
thing .. ah! got it!".

It depends on how your memory works of course. But I imagine it would work
because even though you can tag and re-tag and restructure your documents, the
ordered slice of time-line of say 1.5yr ago hardly changes if at all.

4\. Yes exactly. You might notice the "solutions" or ideas in the points above
are all based in some way or another in this observation.

------
clord
Computers knowing about focus is quite a compelling future direction. There
are lots of really good possibilities. But also a few problems.

For instance, If you can track focus, you can make the monitor seem larger
than it really is. Just scale everything that isn't being looked at down a
bit. As the gaze shifts towards other objects, shift things slowly around and
overlap the enlarged window over other background windows.

You can make focus-dependent shortcuts. Imagine vim with nouns and motions
that can refer to and act on the focus point. `ytF`: yank-to-focus, where F is
a motion from cursor to focus. Lots of rich possibilities there.

The only major problem I see is that you can't really share work easily
(unless you open it up to multiple focus points somehow.) Also, it would be
frustrating to have to look where you're typing. I'll often look at something
else while typing just before switching tasks. I'm going to start paying
attention to my focus more to see if there are other potential pitfalls with
the computer knowing about it and changing modes in response.

In general I like the possibilities opened up by having focus. Heck even with
a traditional mouse+keyboard, the extra data would help the computer
understand us better. It might be more suited to a VR desktop, where the
'multiple-viewers' problem does not exist.

------
falcolas
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's no easy way to browse or select multiple tags to filter
content.

Having to move to and from the mouse a lot is a bit of a pain, and even with
the best touchpads on the market, the interaction with them can still be
annoying when trying to do things like click on a HN upvote arrow. Being able
to start the mouse from the point you're looking at, or even forgot the mouse
entirely when starting typing into the field you're looking at - those would
be fantastic additions.

I'm slightly more dubious about the voice interaction, though there are times
where "Hey Siri, set a timer for 10 minutes" is a great way to interact with
an otherwise over-complicated device.

~~~
riskable
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](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.

~~~
falcolas
> 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.

Unfortunately, there's a lot more than just photos and videos which are
unsearchable - but even with just photos and videos, there's a lot to be won
by implementing this.

> What's the this-helps-me difference between a directory structure

Simply put: any time you have a logical statement (and, or, not) between two
criteria, the folder hierarchy falls apart. Files typically live only as a
single leaf node under a hierarchical file structure, but the contents of a
file could potentially live under multiple branches.

As an example, if I have around 9,000 photos and videos, and I want to view
family photos from Christmas 2015, that have my wife and niece in them...
without tagging, I'm SOL.

------
isaiahg
A traditional desktop does everything I need. This just doesn't seem like
enough of an improvement to make me jump ship. This whole "rethinking the
desktop" buzz just seems like another fix looking for a problem.

~~~
progman
> A traditional desktop does everything I need

That's probably a reason for 40+ years of success.

It's interesting how IT steps backwards in recent years. First the "cloud"
wave came to convince us to leave our autonomous PCs and to turn back to
centralized IT servers. The current wave (Pads, Neo etc) looks like turning
back to single screen terminals. What comes next? Shall we get rid of the
mouse?

------
mintplant
> The [menu] is easily scannable and you can _search for options_ just by
> typing.

This is really important. It's 2016, search is easy, and I shouldn't have to
hunt around because I don't know whether you stuck your options dialog under
File, Edit, or Tools. I appreciate Ubuntu for implementing this OS-wide with
Unity's HUD feature.

~~~
makecheck
The OS X Help menu does this as well.

~~~
dingo_bat
Ditto for Windows. This is hardly new.

~~~
mintplant
Where on Windows?

~~~
dingo_bat
I have misunderstood your comment. This is certainly not on Windows, and it
would be a great help.

Although, Office 2016 apps have this on top of every window. You can type and
it will search every option available.

------
Raphmedia
"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 has to try."

~~~
893helios
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.

~~~
__jal
Bruce Sterling has a phrase for this: "design fiction".

Design fiction tends to be some combination of portfolio piece/job
application, argument about the direction of whatever is being designed (here,
desktop-ish UI/UX), wish fulfillment, conversation piece, and sometime social
critique.

------
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 (< 1sec)

2) Open App Control - Win key? (< 1sec)

3) Open Apps menu - Keyboard Shortcuts (< 1sec)

4) Open Finder - Win + E (< 1sec)

5) Close Panel - Alt F4 ((< 1sec)

6,7,8) Resize - Win + UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT (< 1sec)

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..

------
bobwaycott
First impression:

Conceptually, I'm really liking the approach. I could see it being a viable
refreshing of desktop paradigms. There is an interesting mix of OS X, Windows,
Linux WMs, and some other goodies from other apps here.

Visually, the biggest drawback is I could not tell while watching the video
which panel has focus. I am assuming the idea is this would be handled by
tracking eye focus. Perhaps I could get used to that, but it'd have to be
instantaneous switching. As I'm typing this in a half-width browser window
that takes up all vertical space, I have the Desktop Neo site in another half-
width browser window taking up full vertical space by its side. I'm bouncing
my eyes back and forth between the site and this textbox I'm typing in. I'm
currently staring at the Neo site while I'm typing, without any looking back.
Such a desktop paradigm would have to remain very intelligent about
recognizing that I'm currently typing in a panel while looking at, and perhaps
scrolling through another panel, _without wanting my current action to lose
focus or be interrupted in any way_. I work this way all the time.

------
vineet7kumar
The gestures for fullscreen and minimize operations need 6 fingers. Using both
hands to do anything on a touch screen seems very impractical (except for
typing with both the thumbs on a reasonably sized screen or a split keyboard).

~~~
ziburski
Yeah, the two 6 finger gestures are certainly not ideal. I imagined a much
larger touchpad, between the size of the Apple Keyboard and Apple Trackpad, so
that might make it a little easier.

It's also important to note that these two gestures perform features
(fullscreen / minimize) that can also be done by just resizing the panel
(either with 3 fingers, or by going to App Control).

~~~
tlow
Why not put touch sensitivity into the keys so we can make gestures while our
fingers are on the keyboard?

------
ricefield
For what it's worth, this feels very similar to the 10/GUI concept, which made
some waves in 2009. ([http://10gui.com/video/](http://10gui.com/video/))

~~~
azeirah
It is cited as a source of inspiration on the webpage

------
egypturnash
> Folders were a great metaphor when our files were a handful of office
> documents. But today, complex hierachies make it hard to organize and find
> what we are looking for. The concept of a file being located in a single
> place seems outdated. Content is stored, synced, backed up and shared among
> many different devices. And our most important content lives in services or
> apps, not in folders and files. While mobile devices are trying to kill file
> management completely, it’s more important today than ever. With the
> enormous amount and complexity of content, we need a new solution.

Okay, buddy. Tell me how you're going to navigate a complex project built with
multiple apps with your cool new tag-only scheme.

How would you re-organize the myriad number of source code files, library
sources, images, image source files, readmes, and other things? Hierarchical
structures are _good_ for that kind of thing. If you're going to advocate
throwing them out then I think it is imperative for you to tell me how you
will organize _real projects_ rather than just a handwave about search and
adding tags to tags. How would I reorganize the directory full of 193
Illustrator art files and a ton of subdirectories, many with multiple layers
of their own subdirectories, that make up the graphic novel I finished last
year? It's got a total of ~2.7k files in it but all of that complexity is
hidden behind a bunch of subdirectories so I can quickly find what I need at
any moment.

(And also: holy crap those sample images are so much WHITE, using this will be
like staring into a spotlight. And so impersonal - the user-set desktop
picture is a wonderful thing that makes the computer feel like it's _theirs_
and I kinda feel like this proposal completely drops affordances like that in
favor of a blown-up iPad UI.)

~~~
0xCMP
Well for your example: Tag it with your project and maybe their purpose.

I would have bought this more if you were talking about code, but even then an
IDE could simply make the project a single file (like OS X '.apps's) to
contain the whole project.

This is actually similar to how Xcode works where how you organize your
project doesn't always relate to how it is on disk.

------
terda12
Seems like too much unnecessary features to be honest.

Windows + Mouse with hotkeys is still the most comfortable set up for most
people including me. I don't need an optimized experience.

I've tried Metro, I've tried i3, I've tried bspwm, I use Vim with split
screen, and I still prefer the concept of draggable windows at the end of the
day. It feels more free to be able to drag windows and take ownership of the
layout than having a computer dictate what my layout should be.

At the end of the day, I feel like I'm more and more preferring simple UI's
rather than these multitouch optimized experiences

------
pestaa
I'd like to hear what Bret Victor would have to say about these ideas.

------
JimRoepcke
At 1:00 of the video, he says "In my document I want to make a sentence bold,
so I just select it, and then just click..."

But he doesn't explain HOW he selected the text. Since there's no mouse
cursor, I have no idea how he just did that. A glance doesn't seem to be
sufficient since it requires movement and intent.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=71&v=9WZVPM-
zZWM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=71&v=9WZVPM-zZWM)

~~~
ziburski
You are right. I left that out of the video to focus on the more interesting
features. There is a small note on the website about how text selection could
work with gaze and touch:

\---

Text Selection

Place one finger on the touchpad to adjust a cursor at the gaze position. Use
a second finger to set the end of the selection.

------
lottin
It looks really nice. That said I don't see how this interface is better
productivity -- unless your work consists entirely in reading mails and
surfing the web. Also I don't get why UI designers hate "folders" and want to
replace them with "tags". Personally I don't think you can beat a good old
file system with a bunch of tags. Of course the file system requires some
effort on the part of the user to keep things organised, but then again so do
tags.

------
legulere
I don't think tags are good enough to categorize data. Tags lack information
what is being tagged. When it's clear what's tagged then they work. On twitter
for instance it's the topic you're speaking about. What you really want is a
property system like wikidata.

Think about a music program you want to write. You want to find all artists
that music files on this computer have and when the user clicks on an artist
find all the music that belongs to this artist.

------
Too
I have a big gripe with the design of the finder window, and with all similar
good looking designs from many mockup-designers of interfaces. It only looks
good and practical at the same time when you've taken a printscreen, scaled it
down 60% and don't try to read the text.

If you try to actually use this on a normal sized and normal resolution screen
the text would be too small to read. So, to solve this you have to increase
the text size, but this means each element becomes too big so that nothing
fits, to solve this you have to reduce the padding of each element but then it
doesn't look as good anymore. The contrast of the text is also too faint and
if you make it more clear the "wow-looks" of the concepts are all gone. I
think this is why you hardly ever see designs like this in the wild.

What I mean is, open this picture[1] and resize it to comfortable reading
level, after doing so i can only see slightly more than half of it vertically.
Things that previously looked like pretty design elements now just seem to
waste space, like why would i need a thumbnail of a map and a movie-cover on
my start screen?

It's just like architects designing the block of a city, they always show
fancy renders of the place from _above_ (?!) in the best weather imaginable.
But that's not how people will actually perceive it when being there because
then you see things from street level where it doesn't look the same at all.

[1]
[https://www.desktopneo.com/assets/images/finder_2234.jpg](https://www.desktopneo.com/assets/images/finder_2234.jpg)

------
Animats
The eye-tracking GUI concept is interesting. That needs to be tried again.
It's been proposed before.[1][2] Dismissing notifications by looking at them
is an interesting concept. It's not clear whether users would like it or hate
it. That idea probably needs to come with an equally easy way to get it back.
Maybe you want to do something about the notification.

One general insight about GUIs is that easily undone mistakes aren't so bad.
That's the Amazon one-click purchase insight. The innovation is not that you
can buy with one click. It's that you can cancel for the next 10 minutes or
so. Most shopping systems had a "we have your money now, muahahaha!" attitude
on cancellation until Amazon came along.

[1]
[http://hci.stanford.edu/research/GUIDe/](http://hci.stanford.edu/research/GUIDe/)
[2]
[http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~jacob/papers/barfield.pdf](http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~jacob/papers/barfield.pdf)

------
everyone
"We now use smartphones and tablets most of the time, since they are much
easier to use."

I completely disagree with that. If you gave two people (one on a pc, the
other on a tablet or phone) some task, ie. move a file from here to here,
assuming they were both equally conversant in their chosen system, the pc user
would be able to do it in a fraction of the time of the tablet or phone user.

~~~
_rob
I assume he means more physically, and in that sense he is correct. You can
use your smartphone or tablet basically anywhere and start using it on short
notice. Something that you cannot really do with a tablet or laptop.

------
andrewrothman
I think this is fantastic. There's only two problems as I see it.

The first is the consideration of running this on current hardware. Obviously
Neo is meant to be run on hardware designed for these interactions (as shown
with the voice key on the keyboard and the gaze tracking camera) but I'd like
more detail on how this could run on systems that do not have this hardware.

The second is in professional applications. I did not see any screenshots that
deal with Photoshop or Final Cut Pro or After Effects or Solidworks or really
any of the crucially important applications for the desktop. These are exactly
what keep the desktop around, and what keep people from accepting Metro.

It'd be great if we could solve these two issues, or at least discuss them. I
think these ideas are really great and the presentation was amazing. I'm
seriously impressed, but it's a little held back from widespread adoption
until we can figure a few things out.

P.S. Also I'd like to be able to split my terminal windows horizontally please
:)

------
clapinton
This is a great example of how to get elements from mobile design (hamburger
button, left sliding menu) and adapt it to desktop, which Apple has been
slowly doing in the past versions.

My 2¢: \- 6 fingers on the trackpad means two hands on the trackpad, which
means moving one of them out of its working position. Just like you are
avoiding moving the mouse around with the look-and-tap thing, you want to
avoid users getting their hands off the keyboard, onto the trackpad, and back
to the keyboard; \- the context menu is really nice.

It is a very impressive piece of work for someone who is looking to show off
his skills while still in college. I made projects myself before graduating,
but they were always amateur-y and only for myself. I never made it to
actually share it with the world. He actually did something and put it out
there for others to see and judge.

Kudos to the guy, specially if the whole design process which he claims to
have gone through (research, target groups, user flows) is as thorough as it
sounds.

------
shib71
I found the repetitive use of "outdated" to be off-putting. It implies that
much of the value of a new interface (including this one) lies in it's
novelty. Except for a minority, the precise opposite is true - most people
aren't interested in learning how to use their computer again.

------
andy_ppp
Okay this is fine... as far as it goes. I think I still want windows
sometimes.

I would much prefer all of the things I do to be organised by the work I'm
doing. Here is an example.

If I switch to the "personal project" I get a completely clean workspace (or
whatever I left it as) with email filtered to be about only things related to
my personal project. I want only the apps that I use for this project
(browser, pycharm, photoshop, terminal) all on different screens all of these
apps only showing the work and paths I have associated with a specific
project.

Basically build GTD into all my apps and the desktop and allow me to filter
said desktop by tags, projects, people etc.

And I think I'll take this opportunity to turn on no procrast again...

------
vic-traill
I think this is very interesting content, and this is represented in the
volume of dialogue it has generated.

I found that Neo really resonated with my residential use, but not so much for
my work.

From the Author's referenced blog post 'The Desktop is Outdated': "We interact
with a lot of different content today, and a large part is outside of files".
Not in my work environment where the majority of content is inside of files.
But sitting at home - yeah, this is true for me.

It appears to me that the mobile interface cart is trying to drive the
productivity desktop horse here. I don't know to what extent I buy it, but I
like the way Neo challenges current desktop design.

I'm going to go back and read it again.

------
FatalBaboon
I keep hearing doomeries as "Laptops will kill desktops", "tablets will kill
laptops". What's next? we're going to work on smartwatches?

And here I am, with my desktop computer, comfy keyboard & screens, fully
hackable. I've had it for almost 12 years now, and I just replaced parts every
now and then to keep it somewhat current. That will never go away. Then I got
an old laptop for working away from home, but I hardly ever use it.

So when I hear touch screens will become ubiquitous and its necessary
minimalistic UX will drive the consumer computer industry, I have my doubts.

Never gonna happen.

Something being useful does not mean it will necessarily eat everyone's lunch.
Nor that is has to.

------
teknologist
"Fullscreen - click and drag outwards on a panel with 6 fingers"

AKA the "goatse" gesture.

------
alistairSH
I like this direction. Now that my primary personal laptop is a MacBook Air
11" (and my wife's is a 13"), I find we both use full-screen apps more
frequently than on larger monitors. But, it doesn't feel like the OS has kept
up, and the full-screen experience is less than ideal. Apps continue to open
in windowed mode, and I have to resize or full-screen them. Swiping moves me
from desktop to desktop, not app to app. Take some of the app-switching work
that is now present in OSX and roll it into OSX (or Windows). I haven't put a
lot of thought into this - I just know the OS "desktop" no longer feels like
it works.

~~~
gknoy
Have you tried Spectacle [0]? It has keyboard shortcuts (which you can
redefine) for things like maximization, tiling on sides, and so forth. If you
haven't tried it, consider doing so. It's really made my workflow much easier,
and is almost a tiling window manager. It's easy to open a new window, drag it
to the right workspace, and then size it with a keystroke.

For example, ctrl-alt-command is what I use for most shortcuts (and I don't
use most of the ones that come out of the box):

C-M-S + Up Arrow: maximize fully (horizontal + vertical)

C-M-S + Left or Right: maximize vertically, constrain to left or right side.
This is neat in that it cycles between making you window 1/2, 3/4, or 1/4 of
your screen wide, so you can easily have one app take up 1/4 of your screen
and another take 3/4.

shift-command-D: change which display something is on.

All of these play nicely with the dock, even when it is on the left side of
the screen instead of the bottom.

0: [https://www.spectacleapp.com/](https://www.spectacleapp.com/)

------
Namrog84
The very first thing I noticed in the first image with 2 side by side is the
example with wikipedia on the right. Wikipedia has side bars I don't care or
need to see. This is exactly the instance I'd have the left one overlapping
the roght to cover it up. Giving me more space to left. And chrome still
allows me to scroll the window behind. Without clicking or bringing focus to
it. Many applications also havesidebara or other whitespace that I normally
might cover. Sometimes as simple as a calculator app or something. I am still
open to this idea but until I see any tile manager address this well. It's a
nom starter for me.

~~~
dredmorbius
Wikipedia's mobile site (and Android app) dispense with the sidebars.

More generally: I'm finding myself prefering to _negate_ sites' own styling
increasingly, with very few exceptions. I'll reach for the "Reader Mode"
button on my browser as the page loads (which, of course, doesn't work), and
wish that that were the default instead.

Which is another area in which Desktop Neo might care to innovate. Treating
documents uniformly regardless of where they originate.

------
scrumper
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this contemplation of what desktop UIs might look
like in 3-5 years. Excellent work.

There are some very good ideas in here, notably the pop-up circular 'swipe'
menu of contextual actions (near the bottom of the page). I built one of these
into a trading system once and it was well received. Gaze tracking combined
with "Just Type" strikes me as being potentially very powerful too, if
combined with some sort of highlight thing so you know where you're going to
be typing.

There are some amusingly weird things too, like the polydactyl-only
requirement to "click and drag inwards on a panel with 6 fingers."

------
TeMPOraL
I love it. It combines exactly the three things I want to see together:

\- Tiling window manager - that I have (StumpWM), and it's awesome! (pun
intended)

\- Convenient tagging of everything - now that's been discussed for many years
already, and yet for some reason nobody actually implemented it properly.

\- Eye tracking - it's a feature I wanted to have since I started using
multiple monitors and noticed the unnecessary input action I have to make to
switch focus so that it follows what I'm looking at.

It also has one of my favourite UI patterns - wheel menu.

A great demo, IMO, and I wish someone would implement it. I'd happily try it
out, and if good enough, I'd become a paying user.

------
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?

~~~
relkor
not sure why the downvotes unless you assumed I was sarcastic? I assure you I
honestly want to know. As a programmer I only really understand one way to
create screen output. Any other mechanism to create demos as slick as that one
I would be very interested to learn about. Given that everyone in this thread
is completely ignoring how it was accomplished and only talking about the
design skill, I feel I am missing a critical piece of information about the
process of creating demos such as that. While such techniques may be common to
your industry, to those of us outside they appear as magic.

------
javipas
Fun fact: as @ziburski has acknowledged, he got some inspiration from Clayton
Miller's 10/GUI (2009), and if anyone watches the video

[https://vimeo.com/6712657](https://vimeo.com/6712657)

he will see how the organization in panels and not windows was called
"con10uum" (min 3:30). I wonder if some Microsoft designer/VP/exec saw this
and get the idea to put "Continuum" as one of the most important features of
Windows 10.

Besides from that, great work, congratulations @ziburski. Like many others I
miss shortcuts on a productivity environment, but this really could work.

------
anjc
Agreed OP, the advances that Windows 8.1 and Metro made were truly amazing.

------
tdriggs
This looks like something out of the design team for Windows 8 (in both good
and bad ways). It is visually striking, a dramatic simplification of what
currently exists, and it makes several assumptions about the real world of
what app developers need and how they can plug into OS-provided UI surfaces.
One of the most painful learnings for Microsoft with Windows 8 was that
overly-standardizing things like content sharing and tagging leads apps into
situations where the affordances don’t work.

------
jadbox
I think no one told him about "tiling managers", while not pretty, I LOVE i3.
[https://i3wm.org/](https://i3wm.org/)

------
snickmy
There are some good thoughtful points. On overall a well done presentation.

I wonder how natural touch on a touchpad is for a productivity flow in a
desktop context. I personally never managed to get it integrated in my
workflow (neither with magic mouse or trackpads). I also would be interested
in understanding the impact of a mixed input experience. Not sure if our brain
can switch context so fast. On the other hand, I see the synergy in having eye
sight + voice control.

------
OOPMan
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, another attempt to force touch-paradigms into the desktop
environment.

Can't these Apple hipsters just be happy with the iDevices and leave my WM
alone?

------
k_bx
Things I definitely don't like:

\- swiping to switch between apps (with transition animation) is a no-go, cmd-
tab is much better as it is right now \- with taking two-finger-swipe for
switching apps, you need something to go back and forward in your browser.
3-finger-swipe?

Not sure regarding tags instead of folders. Folders are simpler and easier to
understand, so this needs a lot of details review and experience
investigation.

------
darrelld
Sidebar:

I get that this is meant to be a thought provoking concept piece and I respect
that. My issue here is with the font color choices on some of the paragraphs.
It is set to have an alpha of 0.4! Why would you do that? Why make things less
legible?

I'm no designer so I've made some poor contrast choices and I can forgive
those, but why would you make the text more see through? Is this a design
pattern?

------
WhoBeI
Hmm.. not sure. Doesn't look like my kind of interface really. but I would
probably still give it a try. Just one thing... the word productivity is used
a lot but I see only webpages and file searches. Where's the cad/cam
interfaces, the triple log file tailing terminals.. How would you gesture or
speak an image to Gimp?

------
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.

------
ciaoben
Great concept. I found the idea pretty interesting, but not for desktop maybe.
I see a lot of good ideas that tablet companies could 'steal' to finally level
app the productivity on tablets. Maybe, even if this concept is 'Apple
oriented', could be a good game changer for android tablets.

------
threesixandnine
What's up with all the criticism. Jealous much?

While browsing this I found it to be inspiring and beautiful. Way better than
anything some companies that call themselves "design" put out for BIG $$$.

Screw all the negative energy here. Go man, go. You are the real deal among
all the fake critics-designers.

~~~
imtringued
The website outright neglects the keyboard. That alone sugests to me that this
is not a UI concept that targets desktops or laptops. It's still in the realm
of touch devices.

------
homulilly
Cool resume, I thought the part where it loads super compressed low detail
images for every card in the app demonstration and then loads the full detail
image when you actually show that tab was a clever way to make the ui more
responsive without adding a ton of page load time.

------
tomc1985
On another note, it has become waaaay too easy to come up with a flashy
website for a research product.

------
garblegarble
This reminds me a lot of 10/gui[1], another interesting desktop concept that
uses multitouch in a cool way to navigate based on the number of fingers you
use

[1] [http://10gui.com/video/](http://10gui.com/video/)

------
masmullin
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.

~~~
ziburski
Sadly, technology isn't good enough for eye tracking to completely replace the
mouse. Your eye will always flutter a little and wander around, so you can't
rely on eye tracking exclusively.

It's also not really practical to perform gestures with your eyes. So you'll
still want a touchpad to have quick access to common features through these
gestures.

I have actually researched this topic quite a lot, and have also been
prototyping with a Tobii EyeX tracker.

~~~
masmullin
I didn't mean to insinuate that technology is at a point where eye tracking
excellent, I meant to play along with the video where it was a requirement of
the new desktop that eye tracking be excellent.

Thus in this theoretical world where eye tracking is excellent, why is hand
gesturing not as advanced as eye tracking?

------
PascLeRasc
I think this middle vertical text
([http://imgur.com/n2KQZqO](http://imgur.com/n2KQZqO)) should be flipped to be
like book titles on a shelf, or omitted at all. It was incredibly difficult to
read that.

------
rplnt
I would _love_ to have that radial context on right hold + move. In browser at
least. Gone would be mouse gestures, but I think that this can capture quite a
few of them and make them more accessible.

Anyone? :)

~~~
dredmorbius
That's a feature of the PocketBook ebook reader Android app.

------
workitout
I prefer to overlap and manage my windows as I need to. I'd like to see a
desktop from Google based on Android but with overlapping windows, not the
confining a phone is required to use.

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saiprashanth93
Is there a history of people putting concepts out and other people building on
them? Yes, of course. The cynicism in this thread regarding this being self-
promotion is very unfortunate.

------
hellofunk
Some of the features demonstrated in their video are already in the most
recent version of OSX, fyi. Coincidentally I noticed them today and was
pleasantly surprised.

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justhw
Guys, sometimes just enjoy the work. No need to nitpick on every detail. This
is not a service and you are not a customer. It's a simple design concept.

------
mark_l_watson
I like the idea. It reminds me somewhat of sliding out a secondary app on a
new model iPad, but with many vertical panels instead of just a maximum of
two.

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lucian1900
I was surprised to realise that I already do something similar on OS X. All
windows full height and have different widths and I use a touchpad.

------
FreedomToCreate
A lot of the design paradigms they have implemented already exist in MacOS
without sacrificing the flexibility a desktop interface affords.

------
v-yadli
Talks about desktop interface, and leverages a touch pad. When falling back to
a mouse, this design language would not be effective.

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RachelF
This web page will be very useful prior art for the big companies that are
going to try and patent these ideas!

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guhcampos
That's what Gnome 3 should have been.

But please don't fork/refactor Gnome again to become this. Not yet.

------
herbst
I hoped its real :/ Looks good, would love to run this as WM/DM on my linux.

------
personjerry
One thing though, this should not be an OS as suggested, but merely a window
manager.

------
mpnordland
sort of feels like what I already do, although in a prettier package. Mostly
just fullscreen everything in it's own virtual desktop on my main screen with
a secondary for music/logs/email.

------
samstave
I personally hate interacting with machines via gesture touch controls.

------
dawnbreez
Interesting concept, but file tags would have to be an OS-level thing.

------
donpark
I like the concept and hope it will get built, hopefully for Linux.

------
profinger
I want Gaze recognition now. Where can I put my money? lol

------
dredmorbius
I've seen a hell of a lot of annoying UI/UX design over my 40+ years of
computer use. And very little that's _not_ entirely derivative of Doug
Englebart's Mother of All Demos, in December of 1968.

Lennart's selecting from among the best widespread ideas, adding in several
that are currently fringe, and coming up with a few twists of his own. The
result is several things I'd very much like to have _right now_.

Any company looking hard at the desktop would be idiotic not to make him an
offer. Lennart would be best advised to pick very carefully from among those
he's tendered, and to make clear his own expectations.

The losers will be chasing his taillights for the next 20 years. Possibly 40.

The vision here is strong, but _practical_. It's dispensing of numerous tired
elements of existing design, but replacing them with what appear to be far
more workable models. I see some weaknesses and holes in the presentation, but
at this stage these are details, not as is so often the case baked-in
architectural flaws.

The synthesis of tiling, desktop, and touch interfaces in particularly is
quite promising.

My biggest concern is that Lennart would accept an offer where his ideas would
be absorbed into the black hole of an ossified company.

The obvious contenders for him are Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Ubuntu and
Mozilla might be in the offing, and dark horses might emerge from Amazon or
one of the existing hardware vendors -- Asus, Samsung, or LG, perhaps.

I think Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon would all be mistakes. The first two are
far too wedded to their legacy platforms. Amazon is simply a horrible place to
work, and the first rule is to not work for assholes.

Google, Ubuntu, or Mozilla offer the opportunity to develop this project _and_
maintain an open-source offering. They'd probably be at the top of my list.
I've suggested Google talk to Lennart and make him an offer.

One of the major hardware vendors _might_ be of interest. I haven't kept track
of where KDE/Qt are headed, but that's another option.

What I'm most thinking is, "damn, this would be a great time for a credible
challenger for the desktop to appear". I'm not sure there is one.

But the world is Lennart's oyster.

I've commented further on the interface, and on what I see as weaknesses based
on the presentation:

[https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/bzZws5Vh...](https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/bzZws5VhqaC)

------
Arzh
So like, Windows 10?

------
dennismart
very nice, feeling like you could be fast with it

------
tripzilch
Am I the only one who has trouble with touch interfaces in general? Ever since
my burnout I developed tremors in my fingers (I'm only 35) they got less but I
don't expect them to ever completely disappear.

When I got my first smartphone, a Galaxy S4, which is nearly all-touchscreen
to the edges and only 8mm thick, I found them absolute _hell_ to use. Despite
that I love the elegance of _idea_ of touch-interfaces. If it's on, I must
hold it by the 8mm sides to not press all sorts of things, which is very hard
to keep steady. Meaning I can't do two-thumb-typing, or take sharp pictures,
having to steady it against/in my hand I press the power button by accident,
it just sucks. Many things take longer and it's not cool to be confronted with
every few minutes.

Three-finger touch gestures are going to be awful for who who can't reliably
bring three fingers down on the touchpad at the same time or can't quite rest
their hand ready for that. Either the OS will occasionally register a bunch of
one- and two-finger events before all three hit, or the OS will have to wait
and analyse what's the intent and incur latency--at which point you're no
longer doing _anyone_ a favour, not the young dexterous power users, nor the
twitchy and the elderly.

A lot of people ITT praise this guy's "design" skills, but I'm not entirely
clear what particular field of design? His graphics design skills are pretty
okay (not my taste but it looks good), but his user interface/interaction
design skills ... I can't even judge because he doesn't display them?

All he writes about, even on the "Design Process" page is basically graphics
design, mockups and daydreaming. This is what people in the industry call, _a
cute hobby_. Where are the user tests? Where's the stories? Videos? Theory?

How do children ages 9-11 work with that (long) menu list that supposedly "is
easily scannable"? (answer: they don't)

How do the elderly feel about three-finger touch gestures? (probably not very
sexy)

What about when the menu list is translated to other languages? Doubt that
even crossed his mind. But try it out, an exercise: An application with big
menus that you are very familiar with (for me GIMP, but otherwise perhaps
LibreOffice, or whatever). Switch the interface from English to a second
language you speak well, even/especially if that language is your mother
tongue. What happened to "easily scannable"?

Now switch the interface to a script you can't even read, Persian or Cyrillic.
If you can still somewhat blindly perform some tasks and relatively easily
find your way to switch back, the interface is doing pretty good. I have a fun
Xposed plugin for Cyanogenmod called "HODOR", which hooks into the OS and
changes _all the words_ everywhere to read "HODOR". It's hilarious. To switch
back you need to start Xposed, browse two levels of menus and reboot your
phone. There's only two points where I need to _guess_ (memorize), which I
think is not bad for Cyanogenmod's UX design. This is what the final reboot
dialog looks like:
[http://i.imgur.com/Yjf4Gc0.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/Yjf4Gc0.jpg) (asking
whether I want regular or soft reboot, recovery or download and to OK/Cancel).

On the Design Process page he says "during the creation of Neo, I put a big
focus on research", but then all he shows is more daydreaming and mockups.
Where _is_ the research?

This is a neat portfolio for a graphics designer but as far as user
interaction design goes, all I see is someone that doesn't take the field
seriously.

Something that is slightly worrying in the general case (also for graphics
designers), all the descriptions I see him _telling_ how it should be from his
point of view, nothing about other users, nothing about users that are not
like him. I admit that's just my impression from reading these few pages. But
that's exactly what a portfolio should provide.

No stories about him sitting down with at least 20 random (not self-selected)
people interacting with his mockups (assuming they're interactive), doing
tasks, taking notes and/or video, and documenting especially the failures and
the changes they provoked. That means either he hasn't done actual research,
or he deems it not important enough to write about on his portfolio (very
unlikel,y given the troves of information it provides if you actually do it).

Even if he didn't test on other people, I'd expect the "Design Process" page
to at least talk about, his design process. It's just screenshots of early
iterations. "Early on I identified the three most important topics as
navigation, file management and input"\--cool, how did you do that? Intuition
is not a process! In particular it's not a skill that someone at the start of
their career can plausibly demonstrate (either you can clearly explain steps
how you got there or you have a long history of intuitively being right about
such things).

------
ollybee
Awesome.

~~~
ollybee
This was a subtle reference to the tiling windows manager named awesome which
can be configured to do much of what is show here.

~~~
Zardoz84
Also, there is a few stuff that remember me a lot to plasma-tablet from KDE

------
imonabout
I'm presuming you've researched tiling window managers as part of your work on
this?

~~~
goalieca
This looks to me like an evolution of tiling windows manager with a flair of
mobile/touch. Something makes me think that windows and macos are both headed
in this direction in the long term.

~~~
wmf
It seems like Windows and OS X _should_ focus on tiling if their true goal is
productivity, but they have actually gone in the opposite direction in recent
releases by focusing on full-screening apps.

------
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.

------
ommunist
Someone -- hire this guy, give him a fellow OSX developer and build the
alternative UI for OSX. Its smoking hot! And makes use of Magic Trackpad.

------
rasz_pl
Touch and voice better than a mouse, sure. Tag with voice because its faster!
proceeds to show 8 seconds to add two words = 15 WPM.

~~~
pekk
We shouldn't just be shooting from the hip and selling, we should be actually
trying things out to see what works better. Obviously voice is not a good idea
for everything.

------
sergiotapia
Where do I download it to try it out?

------
coleifer
What is the pretentious fappery?! Use a tiling window manager and get over it.

------
obilgic
How do I get only the window/panel management features?

edit: this is nothing more than a design prototype.

------
jaked89
Boring. I almost fell asleep.

