I think ISV’s would be happy with that, in the same way microsoft saw they’d be happy with the now defunct winfs

People writing applications won’t want their “babies” to be hidden in activities. Think of a professional ISV. They want their application to be some kind of a showcase for their company.

If everything is activity-based instead of application-based, commercial ISV might not bite at it. If they don’t, they will remain on the other system that is much friendlier to them. With the current monopoly it has, people will remain used to the application-based metaphor (and their favorite apps) and won’t want to switch to our much better activty-base metaphor.

Worse: I suppose Gnome will have one application for each task, each one being hidden by the more global interface of “viewing or editing files”. This means existing apps by the community won’t fit into this new model. People will lose the applications they like. This might feel a lot like some dictator is imposing us how to use our computers.

I’m not criticizing the activity-based metaphor (I’m only discovering it with Sugar for a very little time), I’m just saying it could be a very long and difficult way (but if it’s for the better, it could be worth it .

My ideas?
http://blog.ibeentoubuntu.com/2008/10/concept-desktop-basic-sketch.html

Two of these are shown all the time, and will lauch another instance, two are related to the currently running version but the other two will still be available and clickable.

In my ideal desktop, I’d like a notification area shared by all applications with a simple icon to show new activity which when clicked shows something like:
New Notifications
[PIDGIN ICON] Josh has sent you a message: Hey buddy I was…
[THUNDERBIRD ICON] You have a new email from ‘jenny@collabora….’
————————–
Recent Notifications
[EPIPHANY ICON] File ‘fedora8.iso’ has finished downloading

The idea of the menu would need to be revised, there should be one icon for an application. Perhaps the Mac dock is a good inspiration but perhaps the current Gnome model of an Upper launcher icon could be there which could then ‘drip’ down to a lower bar showing it is now running or some other type of visualisation.

I think the desktop should have no user icons but Home, Devices and Trash should be present on all of them.

An area for recent documents/Timelined docuements or actions should be encorporated. These are things that would make a system usable for me without the need to redefine menus or the paradigm too much, just a natural evolution of making the user the focus, not the applications.

@Sebastián Benítez, I understand that people do those things as well, and that they’re not exactly part of a task, however there are things people are doing that are task related, as I said, we want to use some underlying AI to gather *special* metadata, Dashboard was doing something like this, back in the day however I have a different goal in mind. The task orientation isn’t imposed its just there to help you index things. With this kind of symbiosis of technologies for indexing, journaling and revision control etc… we’re just adding to the available classification.

@rawsausage, what you’re missing is the inherent unboxedness of the whole thing. For instance objects are not constrained to task boundaries, tasks are tagged to objects, a relationship is created between them and its not an exclusive relationship, not that I’ve created a container and bunged it in there.

@Michael Croes, flame much? I put a lot of the ideas out there as things which I already understand will need some user testing, like real world user testing. But I seriously think the context menu is in need of a 21st century update.

@Mike, the default opening choice could be definable I suppose, it should also be aware of files too, for instance I would by default just want to play a movie file, so instead of seeing view/edit I see one button for play. However when I open a PDF I don’t want to edit it…

I see your point, well made

@foo, hmm, imaginative OLPC was something I’d kinda been watching as their UI grew, its a fantastic project and amazing people work there. The UI has a lot of similarities here, but there are actually lots of people who’ve been kinda thinking in this direction. Even *them* … http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winfs

@david, document centric is dead, semantic file systems improve this situation somewhat, however at the end of the day its more about what I want to do with my document that counts.

@Alexander Larsson, that stuff you mention, that’s already aced, applications like those are quite easy metaphors to disguise and obviously, not everything has to fit into a box of tasks. Although, browsing the web, instant message buddy, send email are tasks… They are tasks which exist only for the duration at which they are undertaken. We don’t even have to use the word task if you like, but at the end of the day the “doing something” metaphor is obvious.

@rvl, the AI is essentially a passive AI that just noses through your stuff and grows knowledge about you and your work on the computer. You’ve also made a similar mistake to a few others in thinking that a task is a container rather than a property, its wayyy more flexible when its just another property or relationship for the object.

Reducing the importance of Programs/Applications is urgently needed, if only because so many have silly names. Some apps (or should I say “tasks”?) like Cheese, Monkey Bubble, emacs, still need to be in a menu. But I would prefer most apps to be launched from a template, like you say.

I don’t think it’s necessary to the computer to organize tasks for the user. The task is only in the user’s mind. Just give him “Documents” as first class objects, easy to store, easy to find. Make it easy to load up and flip between groups of documents.

Interesting about the single viewer for all documents. Something like gthumb, except not just for photos? Sounds like we need to bring back Bonobo embedding. Maybe it’s enough for all editors to have a read-only mode and make them all look and act in a similar way.

It’s great how many people are writing about such topics on p.g.o. They have great resonance with me when e.g. I have just helped gf who was trying to use GTK file selector as her file manager. Strangely she manages OK on Windows. Last night she asked what extension to rename a MP3 to so it can be burnt to a CD as audio. “Change the paradigm” — I Agree!

* surf the web, reading news and fun stuff
* read/send email to friends
* use IM clients to chat with friends
* play games
* use social sites like facebook
* listen to music
* watch movies

Its kind of weird to call any of these “tasks”, and they certainly aren’t a part of some “project”. “activities” does seem to categorize them better though.

So, imho tasks are not really a general enough concept to describe a lot of things users do with computers.

Instead of trying to disguise applications by calling them “tasks”, let’s try to get rid of them altogether. And let’s make GNOME at least as document-centric and application-agnostic as Xerox’s systems back in the 70s!

my only gripe would be that the default should be to view a file, not to edit it. Maybe its that I’m in a profession that requires a lot of reading and reviewing, but I view files about 90% of the time and edit them only 10%. From that perspective as well as your nautilus menu, I think viewing programs should have a button or Menu option to “edit file” which would then launch your preferred editor for that file type. (a plus would be visual continuity. not closing document and opening it again in new program, but having editing program appear around the opened document. But that can come later;) )

I think you might have some good ideas with the whole ‘people do tasks’ stuff, but I think it’s way over your head… A good test would probably be to write everything you mentioned, get drunk, and test it. If you succeed, then maybe it could be something for other people as well…

Your post is otherwise very good. People don’t want to use computers. People don’t want to use applications. They have real tasks to accomplish. They can be having fun, writing the darned memo about the meeting or whatever, but there’s always a task.

Your mockup of the Nautilus context menu is funny, because it is the same colour and opacity as mine

So here’s part of what I came up with, to get the thoughts flowing:
http://img79.imageshack.us/my.php?image=calciumpopupmockupws3.png
(And yes, if you look closely you’ll see it’s called Calcium. Basically a library with magical integrated building blocks for a shell. I like to think that the shell is made up of every application on your computer, not just a single application that is there when you start it up. That is how things are now, even, except right now such a thing was not planned for so it’s all rather disjointed).

With mine, the thought is a bit different. One thing that inspired me was how totally bizarre and unintuitive an action double clicking is. With my idea, that popup would expand over an icon when it is selected (clicked once – yes, this kills single click to open /and/ double click to open, rendering the debate redundant). Clicking the preview icon a second time would open the last program used to edit the file, to keep /those people/ happy, but the magic would occur with the extra Actions at the bottom. Arguably little difference between it and the Open With menu, except that Open With generally lists redundant things like various text editors. Actions would be determined a bit more intelligently based on document metadata like dimensions, folder contents and regexes, to be a bit more useful and a bit more accurate at guessing what the user wants.

This would encourage a different, more natural direction where the user can have a certain file be the centerpiece of his project, then performs various actions on that one file.

The big problem with the shell right now is that it works in two directions, largely thanks to cruft left over from certain popular operating systems which did not multi-task. (Thanks, Steve! All three of you!). You can open an editing tool, then open the file you want to edit through that; or you can open the file with the editing tool; or if you’re crazy like me, you can do it half and half via drag and drop. To make matters worse, every direction uses a different file manager with a different perspective on what the user wants to view. Let’s say the user normally uses a photo manager like F-Spot. If he wants to “edit the photo”, he will find a lot of pain hunting for it with the GTK file manager that GIMP pops up because it is not how he had organized them in F-Spot. Further, if he edits F-Spot’s image by opening it via GIMP directly, that will lose the Original version. In a sense, we are forcing users to think of thier Photos, their Music and their Essays as generic “files with x kilobytes of data”. That is the opposite of what these user interfaces are meant to achieve.

What if a web form asks the user to upload a picture of himself? Well, he has a webcam, so he just has to snap a picture for the site. Right now:
-Open Cheese (know what Cheese does)
-Take a picture, then save it to Desktop (I’m going easy; normally the user would just take the picture and expect it to be magically found)
-Return to the web site, and click to browse for a file…
-Find the file saved from Cheese and upload.

It’s a major mess in too many ways to describe. That there requires we think in both directions!

What if the user could do it in a single motion, instead?
-Click to Browse on the web site (because of course the interwebs target our broken competition in Redmond)
-File dialog realizes that the program wants an image file! It locates programs that will output image/png or image/jpeg files via a magical interface. Presents a generic file browser (Nautilus), F-Spot, gthumb, GIMP, MeMaker and Cheese with short descriptions of what they each do.
-The user chooses Cheese, which launches in a slightly special in-line mode. User snaps a photo, accepts it and the photo gets returned to the web page.

It’s all about the shell.

So kudos to you guys for dreaming up solutions. Hopefully we’ll all agree on something great

I wonder how you will eliminate applications entirely? Could it be via plugins for the editor so gedit knows about matlab actions when you are editing a .m file?

I also agree that today applications are too much like silos, we need the operating system to know much more about the files. This requires massive amount of work but I think it will pay of in the end.