It's an interesting combination of incredible ideas with unusable ones.
First, there's an interesting disconnect between app panes and what I actually do in practice. This concept seems to organise windows as a stack. In practice, I use them more tree-like. I already notice an annoyance with Android's stack-like app switching, which basically seems to implement what is proposed here, and I expect it to be worse on desktop.
Furthermore, it seems like a poor fit for larger monitors. On my 32" 4K monitor, I rarely want full-height windows: having half-height is more than enough, which enables me to easily have 4 or 6 windows open at the same time. With full-height panes, this is not possible.
Second, app control, app menu, and context menu: great ideas, and have been tried by various window managers.
But the real trouble is in the other ideas.
The finder is nice at first glance - it would be a great addition to file managers, and a large portion of it already exists. But it proposes replacing them, which seems like a really bad idea to me. 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. Additionally, it seems lacking in discoverability. It might work to discover a project folder, or a file within a project, but I'm doubtful that full-filesystem would work. It does solve a real problem, though: I often try to put files in a logical directory structure, but there's often more than one possibility. I'd like pictures to be stored by date, but also accessible by subject and context. The same goes for a lot of other documents. Being able to tag a single file or a directory would be great, but it doesn't replace folders. The same applies to email, bookmarks, contacts, books, and all the other stuff mentioned.
Eye tracking is a bit similar. It might feel magical the few times it actually works, but seems quite useless when we still need a mouse for precision stuff. Furthermore, as I'm typing this, I'm reading text in another window as a reference. Eye tracking would completely break that. Focus Mode sounds incredibly distracting to me, Just Type is actually harmful, dismissing notifications after a single look sounds great at first, but is actually harmful for those notifications which require action at a point in the near future. It's a fun concept, but it sounds more like a solution looking for a problem. A mouse is always going to be vastly superior.
And voice control? Seriously? In my experience, every single voice interface is absolutely horrible and incredibly distracting. Unless someone manages to get Artificial General Intelligence working, it's probably going to remain nothing more than a very nice gimmick, not a core concept of a productive UI. Furthermore, how's this going to work in office spaces or libraries? Calls are already bad enough, forcing everyone to talk non-stop to their computer is going to make it impossible to actually do anything productive.
To conclude: it seems like all the good stuff has already been (mostly) implemented!
> 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.
First, there's an interesting disconnect between app panes and what I actually do in practice. This concept seems to organise windows as a stack. In practice, I use them more tree-like. I already notice an annoyance with Android's stack-like app switching, which basically seems to implement what is proposed here, and I expect it to be worse on desktop. Furthermore, it seems like a poor fit for larger monitors. On my 32" 4K monitor, I rarely want full-height windows: having half-height is more than enough, which enables me to easily have 4 or 6 windows open at the same time. With full-height panes, this is not possible.
Second, app control, app menu, and context menu: great ideas, and have been tried by various window managers.
But the real trouble is in the other ideas. The finder is nice at first glance - it would be a great addition to file managers, and a large portion of it already exists. But it proposes replacing them, which seems like a really bad idea to me. 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. Additionally, it seems lacking in discoverability. It might work to discover a project folder, or a file within a project, but I'm doubtful that full-filesystem would work. It does solve a real problem, though: I often try to put files in a logical directory structure, but there's often more than one possibility. I'd like pictures to be stored by date, but also accessible by subject and context. The same goes for a lot of other documents. Being able to tag a single file or a directory would be great, but it doesn't replace folders. The same applies to email, bookmarks, contacts, books, and all the other stuff mentioned.
Eye tracking is a bit similar. It might feel magical the few times it actually works, but seems quite useless when we still need a mouse for precision stuff. Furthermore, as I'm typing this, I'm reading text in another window as a reference. Eye tracking would completely break that. Focus Mode sounds incredibly distracting to me, Just Type is actually harmful, dismissing notifications after a single look sounds great at first, but is actually harmful for those notifications which require action at a point in the near future. It's a fun concept, but it sounds more like a solution looking for a problem. A mouse is always going to be vastly superior.
And voice control? Seriously? In my experience, every single voice interface is absolutely horrible and incredibly distracting. Unless someone manages to get Artificial General Intelligence working, it's probably going to remain nothing more than a very nice gimmick, not a core concept of a productive UI. Furthermore, how's this going to work in office spaces or libraries? Calls are already bad enough, forcing everyone to talk non-stop to their computer is going to make it impossible to actually do anything productive.
To conclude: it seems like all the good stuff has already been (mostly) implemented!