“The purpose of this series of documents is to introduce, and explain how to build a functioning rewindable desktop. Later, in Part III, we’ll get into why you’d want to build one in the first place. For now, its all theory, lacking even a single scrap of code to demonstrate a proof-of-concept model. However, that’s not to say it can’t be done. Below, you will find (as best as I’m able to describe) the blueprints of how a rewindable desktop can be made. Its surely not the only way, but its the best way I know how to do it after much thought.” Read the article at LinuxAndMain.
Contexts, Timeframes and Tesseractors: Rewindable Desktops, Part II
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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other than inventing a bunch of terms and a new concept, how useful is being able to see your past desktop? I mean, do I really need to rewind 2s before to see where my cursor was? where my xmms window was?
I don’t see much practical sense in implementing such a system. Could be interesting for research purposes, but practicallity has yet to be proven to me.
I think very few applications could benefit from that, and the amount of information to be stored (as well as the cpu time required to store those information continously) will be huge.
isnt this more-or-less the same thing? at least, i think, it would accomplish the same goals: if you made a mistake, deleted a document or whatever, then it can be easily recovered.
it provides a rather interesting problem: if you revisited a past time for 15 minutes, then an hour later come back 65 minutes what do you see? the time past, or you looking at time past? it all gets wonderfully self-referential.
PS: what better way to spy on someone than to steal their context history? you get 437 hours (or whatever) of their computing habits…
(1) which jef raskin proposed way back when the macintosh was being designed in ’83-’84.
.. for flaming anyone who can’t see the value of his suggestions. He also famous for coming up with ideas that throws away everything people know and everything that has been created without any evidence that his new ideas are an improvement. He backs up his ideas by flaming anyone that questions the value of his ideas.
You should probably keep this in mind before getting all excited about what he writes.
To make a DE, one would need GOOD idea’s. Not stupid ones like a rewindable desktop. I love using gnome and thank the developers who put time into it. But I think some people need to sit down and actually take more then 10 seconds to develop an original interface that will attract people and give them the usability they need. Not rewinding desktops…which sounds ridiculous almost like a dirty hack to say “well if our software fucks up, lets just rewind that.
” What is needed is a nice solid interface, which does not allow room for mistakes, and doesnt create disasters itself.
i don’t see any reason to ha ve “rewindable” desktop, but the context model and the timeframe concept could be useful to develop a desktop that using his memory can try to understand what the user wants to do to an higher degree, say, if my desktop know i always read osnews it can give me the news of today without having to open the browser and go to osnews.com.
The ability to “forget” is critical because it only has to remember “important” things (the ones more often performed), i don’t want my desktop to give me info on that p0rn site i once visited
Figure out a way for me to fast forward my desktop
oh yeah… and make me a new background tile, beyotch!
There is an Amiga program called Scripit which can record all your
mouse moves, which windows are opened, etc. It is used for making
tutorials.
I think there are similar programs for other platforms.
With not much work, the script could be made to rewind, if you really
want to.
Now if I could go back to age 19 and this time do everything right
….
you could be able to rewind your desktop 20 days and get all your stuff you’ve been working on at that time. then take time frames, for example when you started working on a project up to the day you finished it and save that time frame under project “foo” and share it via groove.
if you combine that with personal brain you might get some input for a next generation desktop. i guess its all about how you are using a computer for your work.
actually very interesting, i guess i will look into that a bit further….
flo
it could be done but it would require LOT on thinking. Let say you are on a network …bang 1000 problem happen. Shared folder would be hell.
The only way to solve this would be to have something extern to the undo power, like the task killer. That control-alt-“choose other than del” would bring a time line representation that allow you to go back to certain “time”.
It’s really more than just an undo when the whole OS use it. It’s like time travel and casual Joe is not ready for this until he resolve how to program is VCR.
Reminds me of Windows ME experiment resetting your desktop
Anyways you can implement a CVS like structure
where every modification of the filesystem get
versioned. That way you dont have to save every mouse click
or window opened.
See very simple.
You can save multiple sessions, at least in gnome. Whenever you want, you can make and save a snapshot of your desktop. Unfortunately not all the apps support the session management protocols.
Bowie raised this article on the gnome lists a while ago. It didn’t go anywhere. Here’s some background on him:
http://www.xach.com/bjp/
Why do Really Stupid <tm> ideas get given the time of day?
How do you rewind network traffic? (Since most desktop activities center around some sort of external connectivity). You don’t. So all this is really good for is saving a snapshot of item properties and locations on the desktop, not necessarily content thereof. And you wouldnt want to save any content anyway, because some application’s data and/or dependencies on/from other application properties and/or status may be derived from a network source which would no longer be available. Hence you end up with “one big mess”.
If we drill this down to saving only desktop prefs, this too is useless. Well, unless you’re one of those people who likes to change his desktop and take screenshots of it to post on themes.org (a useless pastime).
However, this could be useful for automation systems with touch-screens, where the OSD never changes and windows must be placed in a set position for Joe Blow worker to use his machinery. But unfortunately, 99.999% of these systems do not use a WM.
Bowie should stick to making desktop background tiles.
he should whoop us up some illustrations. *Tesseractor*? Come on, you’ve got to graph that one for me.
I have often wanted to ‘tivo rewind’ my desktop to see what the hell I was doing n months ago at ?? o’clock. The only problem here is you have to add another axis to your data storage: change over time. what’s 256MB squared again? more $ than I have …
florian – your timeline plus virtual brain is more exciting than Plain Old Desktop. “The brain” links words together, right? I would link little screenshots together. So, you could look at related desktops and zoom into one. or something 8]
-chris.L
Because he uses words like “polychronic” and “tesseractor” to make him look smart. This idea would take SO many resources only to fix the wrong problem and create an exponentially large mess. I won’t review the excellent counterarguments already said above. If Bowie wants to flame me, fine.