Comments on: New times, new paradigms

By: Lucas Rocha » Blog Archive » Notes on the Future of GNOME: Problems and Questions

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 17:58:09 +0000

[...] project. They overlap in many ways with the opinion of some people who have already commented on the [...]

By: Silvia Pfeiffer

Silvia Pfeiffer — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 09:31:22 +0000

I think what will happen with the Desktop paradigm is that we will learn a lot from mobile phones and that will change our Desktop. The thing that is very different on mobile phones is that most of the cool and easy-to-use ones now come with a touch screen, which lets us do the zooming, pointing etc with our hand (gasp!). If that was possible on the Desktop, that would make a real difference. How many monitors do you know that have fingerprints on them? Why? Because people like to point with their fingers – it’s what hands and fingers are made for. We do not use that functionality of our bodies at all with computers because typically your laptop or desktop screen is not a touch screen. I think it should be! Then we’d get a different paradigm! But until most hardware changes, we will not see a change in the software side of things.

The other thing that will change our desktop is the introduction of multi-pointers. But that really also requires a touch screen to work nicely – or how many people do you know that could use a mouse both with their right and left hand?

By: Francis Irving

Francis Irving — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 03:03:16 +0000

Nobody has been able to come up with a radical new user interface? No, not on the desktop, but you’re looking in the wrong place.

For example, Google Docs does several of the radical things talked about in all these decadance blog posts – it’s document centric, it automatically saves (no file menu with save / save as), it’s collaborative (multiple people can edit documents at once). It has a document browser that is search based, rather than hierarchical filing system based.

Lots of these things were done by Palm over 10 years ago. There are books (such as the Human Interface, and About Face) just as old which describe how they should function in detail.

The “compelling idea” is pretty clear, really.

By: The way the GNOME desktop should go | Mirsal Ennaime

The way the GNOME desktop should go | Mirsal Ennaime — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 02:21:29 +0000

[...] huge community wide effort to discuss the future of GNOME is really amazing. following Calum Benson Christian Schaller Lucas Rocha Jono Bacon Richard Huges and the other, I’ll post my little contribution to the [...]

By: Decadence of the Enterprise Desktop

Decadence of the Enterprise Desktop — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 23:20:45 +0000

[...] Christian Schaller – Points out that there have been a few whole hearted attempts at writing the code to implement some orignal ideas for a next-gen desktop. The current stable iterative process has given us great buy-in from distros and users. [...]

By: David

David — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:29:39 +0000

Totally agree dude. I just tried Ubuntu after a 4 year gap and am amazed by the ease of use – although I also dig the fun features like compiz. I would much rather have bugs fixed and things easy to use than “the next generation experience” or whatever. In some ways, what people are describing as decadence is an indicator of success – developers have focused on polish, bug fixing, and all those things that were supposed not to “scratch an itch”.

By: dr88dr88

dr88dr88 — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:58:47 +0000

Well spoken. I also think gnome is on the right track. I have recently converted the desktop of my girlfriend and the desktop of my brother to gnome. Normal people only want stability and a good future set. A year ago I could not have confined normal people to use gnome now with ubuntu I can.

Things that I think gnome is still missing is good and simple video creation tool so people can make simple home made DVD from there Cam coders.

Also thinks like restoring items out of the wast basket is missing.

But overall gnome is in a good shape and project like telepathy, webkit and conduit are bringing gnome in a evolutionary way forward.

I have had a look at KDE 4 and it looks great but thing that i personally miss is stability and that is what gnome has and that is the key point that I use to convert people to gnome.