angleofrepose

I'm not sure what you're referring to but I'd be interested if you shared more. I don't know the references you make, though I do know the Alan Kay nano-Dijkstra quote.

I contest your second point, by definition my pensil and paper are not executable environments. My brain is, but this gets us into the game of "how much computer can you simulate with your brain."

Why do we play the game of simulate-the-computer? We've had computer environments for at least 40 years now that do that thinking for us, that answer our questions about control flow or definitions or alternate scenarios. We have them, they were thought up, written up and delivered. Yet as a field we value this stupid idea of working alone without help and don't teach these workflows using the computer as a partner. No, in 2019 if you can't do it on paper you don't know it. That's bullshit, yet here I am and I can do it on paper. I'm just sad for those who come after me and have to go through the same wasteful hazing.

The more I think about it and reflect on my (computer science) education I think more and more the lectures are awful. It is only the ease/ubiquity of creating them that has kept them around.

Fancy graphics is by no means an indicator of good information, but neither are lectures.

It blows my mind that I can be taught programming concepts, say data structures, on a PDF. That is insanity, it is a total divorce from the idea of computer science to begin with, to hide data and information in a non-executable environment. Someone has the quote that "pdfs are where data goes to die". Give me the data structure, let me ask questions of it, hold it in my hands and inspect it at the pace of my own thoughts. This is not what material provided in "lecture" through "slide decks" provide.

The information density of lectures is also low, why are we anchored to the low bandwidth channel of voice (I could say the same about text writing or a textbook)? Give me the information, let me have it, then let's talk about it in organized discussion.

> Transportation within a city features many "natural" monopolies (i.e. train tracks), and the promise of an emergent overarching monopoly: providing one-App entry into multi-modal transportation.

I don't understand what you are saying here, can you elaborate? What are you saying about Uber / monopolistic rideshare companies?

Related, I don't understand why cities/governments allow Uber to exist considering the reality that, as you point out, "Uber lacks a sustainable business model". Is it not transparent to all relevant parties that Uber could not and cannot maintain the price it has set to gain market share, and that down the line it had a clear goal of building monopolistic market share in order to effectively price fix against the interest of the consumers? I don't know enough to reflect on public transport and taxi companies of old, but how did we get to present day without consumer protection regulations sorting things out?

I see parallels with Amazon, and I have the same questions. Why are they entertained in this destruction of local economies by the entities which should protect those economies (in the US, local and state gov)?

I wonder if Barnes and Nobel's effect destruction of local book stores had a period of growth with lower prices then settled down and raised prices? If so, is this not against the interest of the consumer? If not, well I'm not sure. Maybe Barnes and Nobel is not comparable to these internet based companies.

If that were the case:

> enthralled with giving real time location data to the government

Then I would completely agree with you, but as I point out in the first except of my original comment, this IS NOT the case. Maybe the reporting is wrong, and therefore I'm wrong, but I'm frustrated by the general consensus in this thread being what you just wrote. That is not the situation. And similarly, I'm frustrated by the implicit defense of ride share companies here. As I end my original comment, I distrust both municipalities and these ride share companies. I'm not enthralled by anything here.

haha! This is exactly what my EDIT addresses, I found your comment after updating. I completely agree.

From the article: > Companies are required to transmit real-time data on all trips made within the city, including the start point, end point and travel time.

From your comment: > real time data on customer behavior

If the article is to be trusted (I have no other sources) then this analogy is inaccurate. The city, by this reporting is not asking for customer behavior, its asking for scooter location, and for that matter, not even the route of the ride.

It's worth noting that each of your examples are of industries or professions that have large bureaucracies and are heavily regulated. I'm sure pharmacies share data about what's being bought and sold with regulatory agencies, and I don't think any of us would want that to not be the case. Otherwise how and why would you trust any drug to be what the label says it is.

How could the CDC identify causes of outbreaks if doctors didn't share health information with them? Of course privacy is a huge issue which is pervasive in all of this, but to consider a regulation of shady rideshare companies preposterous is missing a lot of the reality of government.

I'm not for any side in this story, but I am especially uncomfortable with the fierce defense of the rideshare companies in this thread.

The general conversation of the comments here is confusing.

> Companies are required to transmit real-time data on all trips made within the city, including the start point, end point and travel time.

This is not "real-time rider information" as mentioned by many comments, this is 'real-time scooter information'.

> Uber has resisted the rule for months, arguing, with the backing of several data privacy organizations, that the city’s policy constitutes government surveillance. With minimal analysis, they say, the information could easily reveal where people live, work, socialize or worship.

I don't understand. The city should know where you live, you pay taxes and utilities and I'm sure there is a whole mess of bureaucracy that knows where individual names live for different reasons. Are we worried about specific elements within the bureaucracy knowing certain information? Is this information only accessible by monitoring scooters and not available to said entity by getting it through other means (school district zoning and so on)?

> Los Angeles officials have said the data are necessary to figure out which companies are flouting the permit program’s rules, including caps on the number of vehicles and bans on riding in certain areas. They have also argued that the companies cannot be trusted to regulate themselves.

This makes sense, no one would expect a regulation with no ability for the enforcing agent to monitor to be followed.

> Companies such as Uber “generate and collect massive amounts of personal and financial data,” while the city “does not collect information specific to individual riders beyond trip information,” said Marcel Porras, the Transportation Department’s chief sustainability officer, in a letter to Uber last week.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I expect from this situation, the whole dog and pony show that these rideshare companies put on seems like a farce.

I'm not happy with municipalities for a whole load of reasons, LA especially has an awful history in many domains. But there is no world in which I trust these rideshare companies MORE than I trust municipalities.

EDIT: I should add I'm sad that Uber(Jump) get to redefine the data privacy debate via their spokesperson and this journalist. I don't blame the writer, but it is absurd to validate claims like my second except above. I think this is gaslighting? If not, then related. Some PR moves to seed public expectation in this matter. They are implicitly defining this issue as something that is fundamentally different when the data is stored and collected by a corporation (them) to be sold and used however they desire vs utilization by entities in the public sector. I am happy to point people to a fantastic conversation on the "two" definitions of data privacy here:

https://idlewords.com/talks/senate_testimony.2019.5.htm#two_...

I'm hooked on the idea of gloves which offer resistance as a method of bringing the virtual world to touch. (Example: grab a knob, you can't close the gloves past where the knob would be if it were real). Or heck, how about the dream making girl from Bladerunner and that huge dial.

> A big problem with gestures is that there is no clear affordance as to what kinds of gestures you can do, or any clear feedback > ...learnability

Do you have any examples of well structured learnable systems? I have struggled to find much of anything in this space, yet every technology release I see wants for it.

Here are my two examples, I have no others off the top of my mind. I am more impressed with the vim example.

1. `vim-pandoc-syntax` has a set of documents exampling the feature-set of markdown. These documents are the system they document. Here is one file in a directory of 10 such documents.

https://github.com/vim-pandoc/vim-pandoc-syntax/blob/master/...

2. The KDE shortcuts manager, which lets you see what's bound and bind new things:

https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/applications/fundamentals/sho...

I have yet to hear a good response to this question.

I have a Pixel 3 and I want a manual for the device, it appears one does not exist. Nor does documentation. My headphones which came in the box don't resume the most recent media player when I tap the middle button, I called support and over the course of an hour they found they have the same issue. Before my call the people I spoke to said I was wrong and didn't know this issue existed, aftewards they had no advice for me other than to give up. My issue persists.

A step in the right direction maybe, but it's missing half of the equation. And this seems a space where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts: we aren't half way there. You may be using your hands to gesture, but you aren't feeling or manipulating anything. Every single picture in that post has a physical thing in the hand. This product never has a physical thing in the hand.

I think you make an interesting argument. How do you feel about the limitations of Twitter affecting someone's ability to speak? The character limit or the layout or any other reality of the platform design.

I haven't really ever used Twitter. I sometimes end up on a developer or product page in doing some web surfing, but I can't think of any information I was able to retrieve through another medium that I would rather have received on Twitter.

For example, some top search results for a developer was a tweet of benchmarks. I read the tweet and then made my way to his site and to a conference video on the subject. I wish his site had been my top search result.

Maybe Twitter is a good forum for "subscribing to notifications" and using it to broadcast external links along with word-bites is a good use of the platform?

I'm interested in how you or anyone think about this, especially about the idea of "translation" and "protection" that various media stamp on issues.

I'm further interested in "live news" and I hold the opinion that live news isn't necessary to me or to be even available to anyone. I'd rather have a transparent recording and processing pipeline that delivers to me newsworthy stories(I can't read everything), but that I could also inspect to see how editorial decisions could have omitted or changed meaning (looking at compiled source material through a search medium designed for that task).

> Better would be a standardized, secure public service to store and retrieve data on top of which any protocol could be built.

Sounds like a good idea. Do you know if any public entity has made an attempt at this space? I don't even know how to begin a search for this kind of work let alone if it exists.

I'm interested in this idea. How could something like this exist and be structurally independent from the USG to avoid all of the good points in the comments below this post? And while I think they are good and obvious concerns, they don't exclude future thought on the subject.

But what would this take? If there were municipality-owned servers that allowed for basic email how could abuse be prevented? Make it an open source project with public inspection allowed to prevent abusive manipulation of data? E2E throughout the system? What would this take? Someone has to have thought about it before.

Do you have a source for that? I'd be interested in reading the studies.

I think the most interesting future work will be around communication. Communication encapsulates all the places I want tech to have a positive benefit in society and my life: education, thinking, invention, people.

(I don't mean connecting people, I am thoroughly unimpressed with that directive)

In this space you have the onset of design systems/languages. Information design and interface design. Education reform and restructuring. Programming education reform.

Look at Bret Victor and other researchers through CDG, VPRI, Dynamicland. Rune Madsen and other artist developers at NYU. John Maeda formerly at the MIT Media Lab with Design by Numbers and Casey Reas and Ben Fry with Processing and Lauren McCarthy with p5js. Mike Bostock with d3. Chris Granger with Eve.

Ink and Switch is a research lab with a number of interesting developers involved working on the future of power user design workflows.

If you want to find the interesting people you have to follow connections around. Start with the one most interesting to you and go backwards through their work, lookup every group they worked with and their members. Look at GitHub stars and find small blogs to follow, read their history and the one strange project they did which can lead you to the maintainer of some other interesting project. Build a picture, learn the space.

Xerox parc is responsible for the GUI plus a ridiculous number of other personal computing workflow essentials. There is no place with the breadth of Xerox parc today, but there are labs with incredible focus. University of Washington IDX. Stanford's HCI lab. CMU, UCSB, MIT. Transportation labs and BOOM at Berkeley. Delft, Aarhus, University of Paris Sud.

The next big thing will be giving power to users through protocols, not platforms. Through live environments and powerful conversation tools rather than consumption tools.

Excuse the mobile formatting, thanks for the question.

> 3. The documentation is the compiler. So... no documentation.

I don't understand this one. Shouldn't small compilers for small languages be excellent documentation? I can't really ground the point or my response, but it seems that clever tooling should be able to analyze the compiler to create good documentation. Information could include type annotation, a timeline of the creation of features of the DSL or any other number of things that could be kept during the creation of the compiler.

> Sounds like you took the long way to implementing a library

DSLs aren't Libraries. When would you want one over the other? The Racket languages I've seen have impressed me with their simplicity and focused scope, I would never think the same of C with includes or js with requires. The point is to be writing a file which is perfectly scoped to the issue, right? I imagine it would suck to "write" html if it were a library in C, rather than a file format with all the benefits that comes from being its own thing.

> I do it all the time. When you’re deep in flow, it’s easy to miss the mode indicator and accidentally trigger an unexpected result.

Good point, I suppose I do as well. But I feel that my mode errors in vim have to do with anti-patterns (such as failing to hit esc after every insertion to make it easy, I should always be in Normal mode).

That's interesting to read about Raskin, I have forgotten some of his history, thank you for sharing. I wonder how many better usability ideas were lost in search of performance or the politics of appearance, it seems the list is endless.

Wow, what a fantastic article jam-packed with history!

Here is a collection of my notes and responses.

Line breaks indicate separate ideas.

---

- Ted Nelson would point out that word processor copy and paste misses the analogy to the real world cutting and pasting for posters that Tesler cites in this article in that the copy buffer can only contain one item and whenever another selection is made it silently loses the previous content. (The physical world cut and paste has the cut items still existing).

This is addressed in the box: "Objections to Modeless Editing and Cut/Copy-Paste" but the response is not satisfying.

> Objection 1. User mistakes. After performing a cut, the user might forget that important text was in what we now call the clipboard. She could lose it by cutting or copying something else without an intervening paste or undo.

> Response: The ability to do other things between cut and paste entails more benefits than risks.

> Response: A suitable undoing or versioning facility will allow recovery of accidentally deleted data.

The first response is too general, certainly there is a way to design separate cut/copy and paste functionality without this risk.

I have yet to use a word processor that has a "suitable undoing or versioning facility". This problem plagues each word processor I have ever seen used. It looks like Tesler overestimated the developers behind word processor applications that came after his on modern PCs. We have more still yet to learn from Gypsy than is represented in Microsoft Word (or google docs or apple word).

---

- Early text editors seemed to be a mess of keyboard playing, likely a result of the lack of screens when most were designed and so it makes sense that there needed to be a first invention of the cursor and interactive word processing that we now have thanks to Tesler and others. The cause doesn't matter, but it seems there is room for another transition as they have obsoleted their greatest pain points.

In the box "How Modes Degrade Usability" bullet 2:

> If unmodified letter keys are typed in command mode but the user things the system is in text mode, unintended and sometimes disastrous results ensue.

It seems that these mode errors should and have been obsoleted by interactive displays as your editor or application can maintain a visual indicator of the mode a user is in. It also seems that this issue would only effect novice users of a software and so shouldn't encourage us to avoid the use of modes when they might overall simplify the user experience.

Once taught about vim's command and insert mode, do users with a visual mode indicator make mode errors? That seems hard to believe.

I also see some other holes in the "NOMODES" philosophy in the dialog box as presented in this article:

> The typical dialog prevented the user from continuing work while it was open. That made it modal. But the widgets within the dialog could be operated in any order, making it locally modeless. And the mode escape was performed in a consistent way...

---

- It's fascinating to read the anecdote that:

> Jef Raskin, who was beginning work on a concept he called Macintosh, was skeptical about the mouse but generously offered suggestions and support.

because Jef Raskin went on to develop the Cannon Cat, and mouseless office and personal secretary computer which was unique for its "Leap" key functionality which allowed the user a press of a button to enable file wide text search to move its cursor.

---

- Doug Engelbart would contest the value of the idea that NLS was "hard". That powerful software should be full of features and becoming situated with them shouldn't "need" to be a simple task. Tesler gets into the fine points of number of key presses and the mental models behind having a copy paste buffer, but I don't think that Tesler's advances in this area should indicate a failure of NLS as a whole. It seems the two could have been reconciled, simplifying Engelbart's NLS control system by adopting Tesler's improvements and the methodology of his user studies.

---

A last mention: Tesler developed the Smalltalk Browser, and I cannot find the source now but there does exist some record of conversations within PARC about that development that are not what we might expect if we just think of this Browser as a code editor. The browser was (as stated in the article) a precursor to modern IDEs and was intended and used to edit code and text within Smalltalk, but it's origin story is more than that, including thought as to how non-programmers would access information in a computer system. The Smalltalk browser was designed as the browser for all text, not just code, within the personal computer.

There is so much more to go into here, this history is so very rich and still full of insights for us to learn from today.

Somewhat related, my introductory classes involved a lot of games around pre- and post- increments and short circuiting. While I get that understanding these operations is fundamentally important, is understanding ridiculous combinations of them important? I mean, these were the basis of large portions of some quizzes and midterms. I get playing with them from a theoretical perspective, as this can literally be done in many languages, but why force freshmen to play this deep mental gymnastics? Maybe a play at making the classes weeder classes and no other reason.

Dang, I like your perspective. Thanks for sharing.

I want to explain digital displays in a name that exposes the idea of dynamic use. Of reading/writing/drawing while simultaneously affording computational ability, execution and simulation.

By "screens" over "paper" I mean dynamism, transformation and computing power. Paper cannot execute, and paper simulation on computers takes no advantage of their digital environment. "Screens" however know where they live and open up capabilities to their users that reflect the device's actual power. I have shells on my desktop, I do not have shells on my OneNote. Capstone gives me a shell again. Why would I ever give it away, and use OneNote without the power and ability I expect everywhere else on my computer?

I would like a better word to sum up this idea than "screen" vs "paper" so please drop me some recommendations.

I made my top level comment with reference to OneNote before seeing your comment. Why is it that this reminds you of OneNote? I agree, and Ink&Switch certainly show that tablet and stylus are a quick moving interaction model, what more do you want from that interaction scheme? Does OneNote do it for you or do you want more? I pointed out above that I think OneNote "is a modern take on paper" but Capstone "is a modern take on screens" and I mean that OneNote for all it's brilliance only expands the whiteboard to paper. Capstone has worked in so many more powerful abilities to it's user, it takes full advantage of the fact that it lives on a screen on the computer. They wrote a great paper on end user programming in this tablet environment. That doesn't seem to even be an experiment that could exist in OneNote.

Ink&Switch have 6 papers out on their site in the last 9 months. Each is a thorough review of an interaction style through a product they develop. Since they are an independent research lab their papers are much more approachable and fun than other, say, CHI or UIST papers I've read. These papers come off the back of 2+ years of research. Each of the individuals on the team have awesome backgrounds and Ink&Switch serves as a great starting point to do some backwards internet research if you want to see some wonderful design work. I look forward to anything else they will put out, I've skimmed each paper and thoroughly read 2.

As to Capstone itself, it seems to me a wonderfully simple tablet interface. After rolling it around my head for a while I can't believe we ever ended up with grids of icons and widgets as the "desktop" of modern touch based devices. This nestable 2D canvas scheme (don't miss the jump links, no you aren't "trapped" by this scheme) feels intuitive and affords much power to the user that they can be fine to ignore or learn at their own pace. I find that reading these papers has influenced my desire for breadcrumbs on my tiling wm laptop setup in a way I can't currently figure out but I am making small progress.

I've long been interested in OneNote. None of the other major note software systems have seemed as good. I still, however, use vim and paper. This seems like a tool that could blow OneNote out of the water. A user could build OneNote's UI in Capstone in what looks like a little bit of minor fiddling. If OneNote is a modern take on paper, Capstone is a modern take on screens.

I like the other user's response to your first line.

> At least I've never seen a highly productive developer who is into tons of touchscreens and arcane finger gestures.

I totally agree, it would be silly and I imagine entertaining to watch for only just as long as it took to become incredibly annoyed by the scene. I do think, however, that we don't know what the peak of developer productivity is (nor if we should strive for it, but that's a different conversation). We don't know how humans should interact with computers and how tasks can potentially be represented by different software and hardware paradigms.

There are all kinds of keyboards. Chorded, the Space Cadet, Cannon Cat, European vs US. I don't know anything about Asian language keying but I imagine it would lend an interesting perspective as well. Bill Buxton has a gallery of input devices that is fascinating. [1]

Today, to generalize, the most productive people use the standard system of the Desktop. But they also extensively use paper and conversation and walls of post-its or whatever their shtick; in the future I imagine that we will bring computing capabilities to these more human styles of expression. That, I believe, will look and feel nothing like the Desktop.

[1]: https://www.microsoft.com/buxtoncollection

> I do like some of the ideas here though - especially the fullscreen column mode. It feels like a more powerful and flexible version of the multitasking in macOS plus what's coming in iPad OS. I think it'd fit right in on Mac, if they could figure out an intuitive way to interact with that windowing model.

There is a very mac-like feel to this concept. I think it would fit right in. I like that the Panels tell a strong story of incentives: That vertical space is important and at the same time that excessive and persistent menu bars are explicitly not important.

I also like your example about Newtonian Physics, I'll remember that one.

ooh, I've got to push back on that one. Just because I can't figure this idea out for myself, maybe this conversation will help.

> The closer to idea a product is, the less it needs to change.

Now that I read this line again I realize yes it is true, but let me push back against the implied claim. I don't think that the Desktop 'needs to change less' because it is 'close to an ideal product.'

I'll propose that the Desktop doesn't change because it is entrenched. There are plenty of good, and more importantly, clear ideas about how personal computing can be made both more powerful and easier for the end user. What we have now is the result of capitalistic incentives. What we should have is deep knowledge work machines and fantastic end user programming capabilities.

Fun conversation starters below, not relevant to the larger discussion, but just thoughts I have in response to your post. I'd enjoy a response just to the above paragraph.

Coke may be an ideal sugar drink, but that seems like a measly category in which to be an ideal product. I can imagine Coke consumption rates dropping over time. (To counter my point, I did find that Coke stock has risen 20% in the last 5 years, compared to S&P500 rising ~15% in the same time). I can imagine them dropping due to the rising popularity and variety of other daytime casual drinks. I can imagine them dropping due to the increasing public awareness of the mal-effects of sugar. I'm sure Coke the company will do fine, but they could have used their clout over the last 100 years to spearhead a global health campaign, and they didn't. So I don't think they are an ideal product which doesn't need to change.

Excel came about pretty quickly (I don't know the specific history of MS Excel) but considering its predecessors. Visicalc was a reason on its own to buy early desktop machines. I've heard of university departments buying early workstations just to permanently run visicalc. But that still doesn't make Excel ideal. Chris Granger has done a lot of work recently to evolve spreadsheets (more focused on programming, but they are intertwined). You could look at Light Table and Eve and say they were a failure because they didn't end up as a business, but I think that kind of product is inevitable in the near future as the access interface that average people will use computers with.

I think you're right about Bicycles. They are an incredible engineering development from almost every perspective. Maybe some pointers to the views Engelbart and more have about training wheels would be interesting to this conversation though. Those are a "thing" that stuck around for quite a while, and appear to not really help the learning of riding a bike. [1]

I don't know enough about SQL. SQLite is something like the most popular database in the world right?

[1]: http://worrydream.com/refs/Vannevar%20Bush%20Symposium%20-%2... search: "training wheels" there is one occurrence.

Good point, but I think he uses the CAD example more in the context of simulation than as defending the GUI.

I spent a few years in Architectural CAD software and afterwards went to Computer Science and I was surprised in retrospect how often I was already doing commandline-like things before I knew the first thing about a shell or repl. It seems you have that experience too, I have not heard or read too many people making that observation before.

> It's an interesting combination of incredible ideas with unusable ones

haha yes, I agree.

> It is unclear to me how this is supposed to work with large amounts of content: how is this supposed to work with tens or hundreds of thousands of files? Either you end up adding dozens of tags to every file, or the tags devolve into a path-like structure, defeating the purpose.

This project, and other real tagging systems take this into account. It is not defeating the purpose if you end up with something like a hierarchy for certain things in your file system, and that is allowed for by nesting tags. The best system is not one or the other, it is both. A quick example: A lot of projects have a large number of files, but only a small number you care about or are actively editing/reading whatever. Imagine a hierarchical style system for containing the large mess of files, and a tagging system for having each of the ones you care about at hand. This is of course possible with symlinks, but this project attempts to allow for this kind of organization effortlessly.

> but seems quite useless when we still need a mouse for precision stuff.

again, why not both? I prefer to not use the mouse whenever I can, but I enjoy using it when precision with a pointer becomes required.

> The same applies to email, bookmarks, contacts, books, and all the other stuff mentioned.

he does scare you off a bit in that demo video when it says: "and everything is there!" I agree. There is work to be done with tagging systems, best practices and getting mind share, but it is a system that has been in the works for decades, and I believe will eventually become widespread standard alongside the falling of walled gardens. But that's besides the point.

There are cool ideas here, and while they may have mostly been implemented I look forward to the day where all these desktop innovations can be easily brought together or disabled on an individual level with great ease. I think there are orders of magnitude easier and more efficient solutions waiting for us to put them together on modern hardware.

> The reason why the desktop hasn't changed much in 30 years is because it works.

That's not how innovation or success is measured in any way whatsoever. We had alchemy for centuries before Science, it was not right, nor was it good enough because it "just worked". This project is exploring a number of ideas and it reads like you are dismissing it because of the poor writing and its interest in non-traditional input methods. I think you would enjoy re-looking at the project if you just ignored the text.

It is fun to think about how much more usable the desktop could be, and it will be experiments and discussions like this one where we make progress towards that goal.

> No, they're not

I totally agree with you. Mobile sucks for just about everything if someone is used to working on a computer, but it is the case that many millions more people have mobile devices than laptops or desktops. If we could work on a system that gave them more power than the trash we have for them so far, that would be incredible.

E: for what its worth, I tried getting deeper into this in my top level comment further down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20157536

Well, hn seems to have collectively shit on this project in this comment thread. I agree with some of the negatives, but I don't understand why those would be the facets that stick out in this conversation. Yes, his site text explaining motivations are pretty bad. App control is nothing new. And many gestures are similar to other systems. But criticisms based on security, or the originality of his ideas or his general use of swipe gestures are just bullshit.

It is backwards and naive to think that desktops are just fine, and computer programmers are historically the last to understand and embrace change (now here is where we could put some Alan Kay quotes, I'll start with his exasperation at our lack of a real CAD system for programming)

> "we would have something like what other engineering disciplines have in serious cad system, a serious simulation of the cad designs and a serious fab facility, to deal with the real problems of doing programming. Ivan [Sutherland] just jumped there [with sketchpad]." [1]

So lets talk about the interesting features he presented, and do ourselves the service of learning from this work.

Panels: Top to bottom for content is DIFFERENT THAN ALL MAINSTREAM OSes. He is lamenting permanent status bars, the windows ribbon, the chrome tab bar and more with this feature. And he goes on to explain alternate features to replace that functionality he moved for this goal of more vertical space. He also displayed a number of situations regarding navigation through panels which seem well designed. He factors in pinning an active window and the ability to scroll among others, and minimizing windows to reinforce spatial memory and leave breadcrumbs. He also accounts for resizing windows.

See the new c2 federated wiki for interesting uses of vertical space and breadcrumbs [2].

Tags: As another user mentioned in the comments, a lot of work has gone into the study of PIM, and tagging is quite effective. Of the three (search, hierarchy, tag) none is found to be best, but the availability of all three is important. This project does us the service of reminding us that we are generally missing that third option. This system offers all 3 options. (I'm sorry I can't find my source right now).

Search: Across all elements of personal computing (email to tabs to applications to files) is an interesting idea. Yes omniboxes have been around forever and will be, but this project pushes the idea that there are even more hooks to toss into that system.

Gaze: This is fantastic, and there are limitless opportunities. Of course its not a silver bullet, you wont be taking my tiling wm keyboard controls away from me (see that Onion video on the keyboardless apple) and obviously I don't think that way. But there are cool interactions that very few people if any have had the ability to come up with on gaze augmented PC systems.

Touch: Everyone is saying that tiling wm controls are way better. Of course they are. What percentage of PC users have tiling wms? Lets just round down to 0%. This brings that kind of efficiency to users which would otherwise never have it.

I appreciate the commentors who have looked at this project and reflected on it. I learn a lot from and really enjoy reading hn especially for the comment threads, I hope I can pay it back some with this.

[1]: https://youtu.be/fhOHn9TClXY?t=1962

[2]: http://fed.wiki.org/view/welcome-visitors

E: This thread got a LOT better since I posted and refreshed the page. Thank you all.