Arc v' February 21, 2003

Writing about XDocs (err, InfoPath), Jon Udell says:

10. It represents a paradigm shift.

I try to avoid the "P" phrase. But there is no other way to describe InfoPath. At the dawn of the .Net era, Bill Gates introduced the notion of a "universal canvas" -- a viewing and editing surface for anything that can be represented in XML. InfoPath isn't that yet, but it's a huge step in the right direction. [Udell, Jon, "Ten things to know about XDocs", InfoWorld Feb 20 2003]

Hmm. We've heard this story before. Bento/OpenDoc was an open standard that provided the same idea long before people started putting all of their data into angle brackets and automatically assumed that everyone else could read that data fresh off the bench. Sigh. Killing OpenDoc right as it was gaining traction is, in my opinion, Apple's biggest mistake (or, at least, their biggest sin). Mac OS X has a lot of really cool little applications, which I like. There are small but very effective applications like NetNewsWire, OmniOutliner, BBEdit, etc, and in general there are good inter-application communications in OS X (ie - being able to pick up an RSS feed in NetNewsWire, command-tab to switch to Spring while still holding the RSS feed with the mouse, and dropping a news feed onto a Spring Canvas), but it could always be better - I would love to be able to natively host an OmniGraffle drawing in OmniOutliner, or even to use BBEdit from within NetNewsWire's weblog editor, and that was all possible back in 1997, but in the exciting new operating systems of today - it's not!

I did just make the argument that Apple did the right thing by not exploring any massive new operating paradigm's in Mac OS X. But at the same time, it's sad that now I look at Windows for the best in theoretical operating environment experiments. And always, Windows botches it. Cool ideas, mediocre execution (at best). I look back to 1988 to 1994 as the last good years of operating system planning. It's when Pink/Taligent, Cairo, Copland/Gershwin, OS/2 2.0+, etc, were in the works.

I hope that now that the Mac OS X transition has been made and the foundation is there that some exciting new developments can occur in this space that keep the simplicity of OS X's interface in mind while improving the way we work with our machines.

I'm checking out Spring 1.2 from User Creations. Spring is an interesting sort of personal desktop full of interactive objects all arranged logically instead of physically. In the attached screen shot, I just dragged the icon for Jon Udell's RSS feed from NetNewsWire onto a Spring canvas, and got a menu displaying all RSS headlines from his feed.

Spring is an interesting application. There are times when I really wonder what would / will happen if we move beyond the file and folder paradigm. I don't see that paradigm going away anytime soon though - looking at my real world desk and looking at my computer's desktop, it still makes a lot of sense. But then again, looking at the Spring description, it comes close to what I was talking about yesterday in regards to Taligent's People, Places, and Things metaphor. I also think of the long-overdue Object File System promised for NT "Cairo" that is expected to actually show up in one of the next Windows releases (I don't recall if it's expected to show up in Windows Server 2003, or if it's a Longhorn technology).

I wonder how well it will all actually work, and how much it will get used. There was a lot of faulting of Apple for not taking a chance with the Mac OS X transition to really change the desktop paradigm - especially given the fact that Mac OS X is based off of the great NeXTStep (which never had as good of a desktop paradigm as classic Mac OS, but NeXTStep (or at least OpenStep) was a motivator for later Taligent designs). While the Mac OS X Finder has had its problems, I myself like it. It's simple and familiar - not only because I've been using Macs for years, but because on my physical desktop there are folders and documents. And I tend to treat both desktops the same (I actually try to keep them clean - something that's placed on the desktop lives there only temporarily, usually). Thinks like Spring are fascinating, but my mind doesn't map to what Spring does in the same way I interface to my regular desktop. Spring has great promise, however, and I'll keep playing with it.

Something else I started looking at, but haven't had too much time to play with, is Konfabulator. Konfabulator runs really-really-good-looking small desktop widgets, apparently scripted using JavaScript (I've heard Applescript can be used as well). About 110 widgets have been made already, doing everything from a yellow submarine to resource monitors. It's another way of doing highly interactive desktop objects. At least there are some really creative minds looking at new ways of interacting with their Macs. I look forward to the future of all of these projects, along with whatever Apple themselves have in mind.