what do you do?

What do we do on the desktop, in this future of computing? Looking at it in a generalized and not necessarily comprehensive way (but in a way it is comprehensive), we browse the web, and take notes.

The two functions are directly related. It's no mystery that we go out onto the web, and suck stuff onto our desktop from it. Then, what do we do with it? Mostly, we just look at it.

That's partly a habit, but it's partly, hugely, also a function of the tools we're using. Either way, if we're a bit more enterprising, what do we do, after we access something from the web? It's something like adding a link to that item to a list we maintain somewhere, or creating a new web item with a comment on the first item. We might publish a note about it somewhere, like a blog, or e-mail.

How easy is that? Quite difficult. All sorts of questions need to be answered. How do I represent this item in a concise way? How do I represent it colorfully? How do I group such representations with other items that are relevant to it?

So we can start to analyze the desktop in terms of what's going on there to advance this process. The obvious thing we see on today's desktop: when we access something on the web, that item takes over the whole screen. We can get it take up less space, but we have to work really hard at it.

Let's just look at another possibility. What if, when we loaded a web page, it displayed in a very small window. It would be shrunk down ... we would see the whole page in miniature, in its own small window. Well, we wouldn't see a lot of detail, but maybe we can go from a miniature image of the page to viewing its details, which is sort of the opposite of what we're doing today. But why switch things around that way? What we're doing, here, is taking the concept of a desktop quite literally. When we load a page from the web, it's like putting a piece of paper on the desktop. It has certain dynamics that make it different from paper, but the page is like a container, and its structure, as a container, is essentially identical to a sheet of paper with stuff printed on it. Well, if our browser works this way, displaying pages in small windows, shrunk to fit the window, we can do the equivalent of stacking up sheets of paper, which is a basic real-world desktop function.

The implications of that are fairly obvious. Maybe I'll write about implementation, in the next post.