user interfaces (was Re: GoBSD.com)

[Martin P. Hellwig]

Jonas Sundström wrote:
<cut>
Gnome/KDE it seems are trying to mimic Windows for the most part, with 
a little transparency thrown in. It's sad really. Not that CDE or NeXT 
was any better. The only really good GUI I've used was that of MacOS 8/
9. Windows is OK but boring. (designed to run each app in fullscreen)

I think it's time for some other kind of GUI paradigm, but I'm not sure 
what. (Some kind of tiling?) I just hope the "web thing" Microsoft has 
going doesn't catch on.

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Would you like to:
1) Read E-mail & browse the Internet
2) Use productivity programs
3) Use that special just written for this sector program
4) Go to lunch, brake, toilet, home (logoff) or insane (quit)
I just as or even more userfriendly then
placing a bunch off icons on the desktop.


There once was a big-button GUI shell for the MacOS, with exactly this 
purpose.. I hated it. :)) But then again, kiosk computers are there to 
annoy us.

Seriously though, your task-oriented supershell idea is a good one. 
Start coding!
I already have it for my non-unix cow-orker administrator, when she logs 
on to a box (ssh) she gets a menu like the above which asks her to , add 
a user, delete a user, change a password, modify a group , go into bash 
or log off.

The idea is not mine, this is something often done in novell and dos by 
administrators, writing scripts for the users to prevent them being lost 
in the shell and by this disallowing them to start other "unauthorized" 
programs.

The future of the desktop? I don't know, but one thing I do know that 
the shell is something I feel comfortable in (I started as a 
desktop-drooler).

Perhaps I would like to have a clean desktop whats more built like the 
"unix" idea ,small programs that a very good in one thing but can work 
together easily to "create" a bigger more complicated function, with the 
interaction between programs in a UML diagram like way.
I describe it poorly because I still haven't figured out why this would 
be any better then the already present choices for a gui.
But let me think a couple of years about it maybe something useful will 
come out of it :-)

--
mph