Comment by clawrencewenham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by clawrencewenham | Hacker News Reader

clawrencewenham

After using modern smartphones and tablet computers I'm starting to think that the last thing we need is more innovation in how to manage lots of little windows on a medium sized screen.

I don't want another window manager, even if it auto-tiles for me or has a really gosh-darn nifty way of hiding and revealing them. I want innovation in devices and apps that are designed to operate full-screen on all of them. It's as if I want a "tear off" function for windows that literally tears it right off the desktop monitor so I can put it in my pocket or shoulder-bag, or hang it on a wall, or prop it up next to a book. This is what the iPad and the iPhone have done to me.

Tabs, windows, task-bars, Expose, Spaces, ribbons and others are now making me feel like geeks are congratulating themselves on discovering a really nifty new way to organize their sock drawers and lunch-boxes.

The future of "the desktop" are cheap, wireless, mobile displays. Window managers should be replaced with pockets, wall hooks and stands.

That is all well and good if you are passive user but when it come time to do some work on a computer you will likely need to use more then one application at a time and some way to manage all these application easily so that you can keep task organized and easily switch between them.

That's not really true. If I'm writing a book, I don't need anything more than a word processor on that device. If I'm browsing research material on another device, there's nothing breakthrough about the idea of transferring that material to the word processor wirelessly: highlight the material in the browser and "bump" it to the device with the word-processor on it.

Having each app on a separate device would actually make it worlds easier to perform real work, because I'm no longer Alt-Tabbing or Expose-ing back-n-forth between programs. I hate doing that because it forces me to stop thinking about my work in order to think about how to manipulate boxes of pixels into the configuration I want.

Right now I'm considering spending another $1K to get a 27" Cinema Display to go next to my $2k 27" iMac. But I'm wondering if I should have spent that $3k on a stack of wireless tablet computers of various sizes and leave some Bluetooth keyboards around the house instead.

Edit: Now that I'm thinking about it more, I believe this is the trend and the reason desktop innovation has stalled. In a decade we'll all have solid state hard drives and ten times more RAM, so every app can run in its own VM. You could suspend an app's runtime state to disk, transfer it to another device and resume where you left off. "Bump" your Final Cut session to your big-screen when you need to, then "Bump" it back to a tablet when you wanna continue editing on a park bench.

I don't know why we can't do this with web apps already. It transcends the whole idea of a desktop manager.

What you are describing does not sound at all practical in the long run. The complexity of syncing up many devices is far worse then dealing with a occasionally fussy desktop manager. Running them as dumb terminals might work if it was actually possible but I'm still not sure it would be practical in most cases (I have thought that being able to send a workspace to another device would be cool though). I realize everyone has their taste but, it sounds to me like you just need a second monitor.

The second monitor still requires me to spend a large percentage of my time manipulating rectangles.

Nor is there anything impractical about process migration. I suspend and resume Windows VMs all the time, and Windows wasn't designed for that. Think of what's possible when the programming language and OS API makes it easier to write programs that can re-orient themselves.

And even if process-migration doesn't become a feature, there is still the inherent advantage of manipulating "windows" in physical space. It's more intuitive, it's more convenient, and it's direct. When people didn't "get" the iPad and dismissed it as just a big iPod Touch, it's because they didn't grasp the benefit of manipulating the UI directly instead of through a mouse.

When you manipulate windows with a desktop manager, you're two steps abstracted: you use the mouse to manipulate the widget that manipulates the windows. THAT is what's impractical.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com