Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 20th Dec 2006 21:20 UTC, submitted by mkools
Project Looking Glass has hit the magical 1.0 mark: "This release is the culmination of 3 years of work, starting with Hideya san who originally conceived of a bold, new type of window system, through the initial shake down of the proof-of-concept demo by an internal Sun community, followed by the open sourcing of the technology, which generated such enormous interest that it brought down the java.net servers several times. From that point on many people from around the globe have contributed to the project; contributing to the core, contributing applications, performing testing, writing and translating documentation, etc. The project owners (Hideya, Paul, Krishna and myself) are very grateful for all of the great contributions we have received from you, the LG community."
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Member since:
2005-07-06
and i believe that is a usage pattern that is repeated all over the world.
its interesting to think that the first windowing system did not allow for overlapping windows as it was believed to confuse users.
just the other day i made some quick sketches of a ion-like windowing system, taking into account its inability to have overlapping windows for messaging and similar.
what i ended up with was a system that could use one or more tabbed group on screen based on how big the screen was. and any "popup" dialogs would be delegated to the bottom right corner of whatever group it was relevant for (ok so it flys in the face of some "laws" of gui design, so sue me).
when one of those gets fired of it will lock input for whatever program its relevant to but will not steal focus in any way.
i even want to use said dialogs for stuff like saving files by use of drag and drop. when a save is initiated said popup will contain a icon. this icon can then be dragged to wherever one wants to save the file. risc os anyone?
i included a top bar message area that would work as a ticker (i think thats the word for it) with a permanent clock in the top right. said clock would also work as a link to a programs list, and as a "tray" (as i suspect something like that will be needed).
the ticker will naturally scroll from right to left, unless the mouse is placed on the bar. if so then putting the mouse to the left edge will scroll messages from left to right and similar on the right side. if dragged close to the center, the ticker will stop.
if a message is clicked a dialog will drop down, or the program that sent it will be focused and highlighted.
i had to design a tab based IM program tho as the normaly expected im gui do not really work inside this kind of a windowing system.
thing is that i suspect this windowing system could (with minor modifications) work equally well on a pdaphone as on a pc. but it would be unlikely that more then one window group would be open at the same time on a small screen.
in fact, one of my dream devices is a pdafone that will turn into a pc when hooked up to a keyboard, mouse, screen and bigger power supply. optionally have a computing booster that is a cpu and ram that the pdafone can offload tasks to that it cant normally manage. the keyboard and screen could potentially be able to connect together so that it becomes a kind of laptop for transportation.
yep, im nuts