Pinboard

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This is a page onto which notes, thoughts, references and ideas can be thrown.

Notes

  • Like 'Web Services' on the Mac, might there be a similar non-mac tool to run HTML etc as a service within an application? I'm thinking some core tools might be built with a web front end. This may benefit any plans for an 'online desktop' or similar. See here for a nice interface example: http://well-formed-data.net/experiments/elastic_lists/
  • setfs
  • dbfs - the closest project in terms of direction and scope to Meta Desktop.
  • WinFS Interesting new fs from Microsoft where the type of data is known to the fs so multiple applications can more intelligently work with the data. Also has some kind of database structure. According to my skim-read of the article linked, there's no support for semantic linking of data on the fs, so it's not looking like a system for our purposes.

Some References & links

Don Gentner and Jakob Nielsen's 1995 paper, The Anti-Mac Interface.

Metadata - http://dublincore.org/index.shtml

Thinking about ontologies may well be useful for such a system. Most discussion I'm aware of refers to the semantic web, machine readability and so on. I need to look into this all further, but it seems likely that such ideas might work in a local file system, especially where applications extract meaningful information from file content for the purpose of useful tagging. May be useful looking at things with network interoperability in mind anyway. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework - http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/

Alternative X based windowing system. Sounds interesting. They call their enterprise a 'desktop shell'. To be honest it doesn't sound so radical to me, but perhaps I'm missing something. While it does look better than some other window managers there are screenshots on their site which are visually criminal. - http://www.enlightenment.org/

x.org - http://www.x.org/wiki/

Design Principle 'Worse is Better'. There are valuable things in here. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

Unix Haters Handbook with lots on X - p161 - (and ironically hosted at microsoft.com!) - "the Iran-Contra of graphical user interfaces: a tragedy of political compromises, entangled alliances, marketing hype, and just plain greed." - http://research.microsoft.com/~daniel/uhh-download.html

Others, of course are looking into similar things. There are a couple of projects concerned with semantic web on the desktop, but the principle is firmly machine readability here, rather than enhanced usability. - http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/xwiki/ - http://www.semanticdesktop.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/

This looks like a semantic web-on-the-desktop application - http://www.gnowsis.org/


Next: Some Thoughts on Current Desktop Systems: Current X Window Managers

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