Linked by Kroc Camen on Thu 5th Nov 2009 21:05 UTC
There's no right way to do it, only ideas that are better than others in certain situations. But if you had the opportunity to head up the design of a new OS, one to Put Things Right, one that could be radical enough to varnish out those UI/X bumps that have clung on for years, but practical enough to be used every day, what would you design? How would you handle application management? What about file types and compatibility? Where would you cherry pick the best bits from other OSes and where would you throw away tradition? I've tackled this challenge for myself and present (an unfinished idea): KrocOS (warning: HTML5 site, will display without CSS in IE/older browsers). OSnews Asks: What would make your perfect OS?
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Member since:
2005-11-10
No, I would _never_ have the computer guess, that’s annoying. Windows XP does it, and it’s annoying. You would set folder types as and when required.
Again, just purely ideas and I never designed it to be a solution to 3rd parties disagreeing with each other. If I could make an OS that regular people could accomplish everything they ever needed, easily, then it would still be a success—even if you couldn’t install Word on it.
Vi/emacs in particular would be system utilities—under the hood stuff like the command line, an area I haven’t described yet.
I never for a moment thought about my design as a 'desktop metaphor'. I just personally like my devices on the desktop picture, like we have on OS X, Amiga OS and even as I was doing so in the 1980s with GeOS. It’s one less screen to go through to get to something, unlike Windows—I hate the clunkiness of “My Computer”.
An oversight, I will think about a better way of doing that. (Remember, the computer is personal).
File filters would be centralised like Amiga OS, so they could at least be easily plugged in and all apps would gain the ability to understand new file types.
- What if you have a photo-retouching app and a painter app. Both could open images. Which one is Edit depends on who you are, so which is Edit? (And what is the other called?) You could say "Retouch" and "Paint" but sooner or later this question must be answered for the generic case.
1. this is contrived because these things would have to be ported, and that would be unlikely, the built in editor would be as good as GIMP to begin with, and those needing something even better could swap out the built-in editor with a new binary (keeping the same verb), or use a new verb of their choosing ('Photoshop'
Haven’t done much about this, but one idea I had was perhaps a workspace manager could minimise / maximise entire sets of windows into an icon on the desktop. Instead of virtual desktops, you would have groups of windows that could all be hidden or shown together when you wanted, and this information stored as a file that you could name and move around. Thus you can setup a screen full of windows for a particular task (like debugging) and save this session to a file that you can open at any time.
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Thanks for comments. Do note though, that KrocOS is just a pipe-dream and no serious attempt to solve anything, as it would never come to exist anyway. It’s just how I would design a computer ecosystem if I was like Steve Jobs, being tasked with unswervingly driving an OS how I see fit.