Here is a japanese tool called Madotate that performs similar to the prosposed Microsoft Task Gallery to be included in longhorn. More info and screenshot at NooFace.
Madotate 3D Graphical Task Gallery
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Sun’s 3D desktop offers much more than this and why does anybody need a 3d task manager?!
The Task Gallery thing was only ever a Research Project. It is not planned to be included in Longhorn, though you will be able to easily achieve similar effects in 3rd party code under the Desktop Compositing Engine.
Of course, this is more an eye-candy application than anything useful, but it has been done before. What’s the news here?
Project Looking Glass, anyone?
“Sun’s 3D desktop offers much more than this and why does anybody need a 3d task manager?!”
I don’t think anyone _needs_ it, and it would reduce productivity on a work computer, but this could be fun as an option on a home/games computer. There’s no reason why a computer should have only one program launcher available.
How about using a Quake or similar engine as a starting point? You could also include game elements to make launching the programs difficult – for example, you have to kill 23 aliens before you can use the spreadsheet.
The Start menu is really too easy, most users have cracked it long ago.
It is actually quite useful for my cluttered desktop.
really funny Don Cox
loved the kill 23 aliens to use spreadsheet part
I’ve always fancied a quake 3 file manager! Laying down plasma fire in the temp dirrectory, strafe to the d drive and rail gun some redundant directories. Quad damafe could be interesting;-)
quake3-ish file manager:
http://www.forchheimer.se/bfm/
The programs works kinda neat. It needs some resources to ‘rotate’ an application but the result is nice. Unfortunately 90% of the application is unreadable for me.
http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/
Why is it that people want to explore all these new ideas before finishing high-quality implementations of the current ideas?
On any platform, there is still no excellent 2D interface. The use of a computer is a struggle for many not because of lack of graphics dimension, but lack of quality implementation.
Is the exploration of 3D/game interfaces compensating behaviour for being locked out of having any influence in the Windows and Mac worlds? Hmmmm.
if is open source, could be included in Linux?
I think i’m going to use it, and if im not to lazy improve on its source.
this actually works quite nice. the english config file is better than nothing. maybe a japanese speaking person would be able to translate all of the strings to english?
i think i’m going to try and use it. it works pretty well.
congrats.