The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is filled to the brim with product announcements and new useful (and useless) gadgets, but some stand out more than others. One item that topped the headlines the past few days is Palm's announcement of its brand new operating system.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2008-11-18
The point is its not the apps that matters, its the functions you'd like from these apps. What I'm trying to say: All apps do right now is they're a compilation of different functions + a user interface to invoke them. This made a lot of sense when the concept was developed, as you couldn't load features on demand or were restricted by resources.
What I'm thinking is the future is a different model. In my opinion Palm is moving in this direction: Every app will publish a data model and be extensible, so that anyone can integrate their data and manipulate it. Of course some security should be applied, but the point is in order to use some specific editing feature you won't switch the model or the app entirely, just something similar to a plugin.
Huge apps, which claim to do everything the user wants are what prevents choice.
Member since:2005-07-06
Yes, of course, but until apps are modular in a way that makes them easy to combine in various ways the apps will matter. Any interface that does away with apps before the apps have this kind of modularity is bad.
If the new palm's apps really have this kind of modularity, then that should be the big news, not the UI.
Edited 2009-01-09 13:38 UTC
Member since:2006-09-29
I bought my first Mac because of a technology called OpenDoc. I have always thought the approach made a lot of sense. That said it is such a different approach that is causes a lot of problems for folks to grasp in practice. It is nice to see the idea make a comeback.
You can find out more about OpenDoc at wikipedia here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opendoc
Member since:
2005-07-06
> Palm is changing all this with its card-based
> interface, where the application is irrelevant
But the application is not irrelevant! At least not to me. Sometimes I want to browse the web with opera mini, sometimes with opera mobile and sometimes with the built-in browser. The same goes for other tasks. E.g., if I want to view pictures I want to use one particular image viewer (one with fast loads/switches), but if I'm going to edit some pictures then I want to use another image viewer (one with good workflow).