Don Park's Daily Habit - Running Longhorn inside Quake

An interesting blog post about the idea of a 3D workspace beyond what Longhorn/Avalon is promising.

"Longhorn desktop itself should swivel down to reveal a 3D world within which we can work 'directly' with persistent objects instead of limiting ourselves to windows."

Interesting idea, but it's not thinking broadly enough, and reinforces a "desktop" metaphor that some of us talk about, but none of us really consider as such. I know I don't consider it a "real" desktop, and I think few others do ... so why spend any energy reinforcing that metaphor?

Here was my response, but do read the blog post to see some of the comments that I referenced:

As others here have mentioned, the idea of having to "travel" in a 3D space to do any work (remember, a computer is a TOOL) would grow tiresome after the initial novelty wore off. Even the idea of "beaming" from one virtual location to another is wasteful ... bring the information into YOUR space. SPEED is the key, computers are about information, and getting that information needs to be as instantaneous as possible.

This isn't to say that 3D on the desktop can't be useful. Being able to shove a document in the background (by say, right-clicking the titlebar of a window and scrolling the mouse wheel forward) can get non-immediate information out of your way while you work on something else, all while keeping it visible. Don't allow the 3D space to be too deep, that will solve the idea of "losing" documents in the 3D space.

(I originally thought that Microsoft's new "Tilt mouse" was the trojan horse to give people the perfect device for manipulating 3D, with the tilt-wheel being used to move windows in the Z-axis. I'm not so sure now, but it would be nice.)

Icons with some real depth would be nice eye candy that shouldn't be too obtrusive. Make them a bit larger, then give them real functionality, like a mailbox icon that populates with your mail. Drag the envelope into the 3D space, and it becomes your mail app, showing your mail. The trick is to keep these new metaphors as simple as possible, because it would be tempting to make them very "rich", and that would add time lag, which is unnecessary. Get people interacting with their information as quickly as possible, but make them interact with it so that it "feels" important.

Apps would need to be rethought for this new UI, but not by much. Just as an example ... Spreadsheets could have an optional 3D view of the tables so you can see instantly what cells are linked where, even in multiple worksheets. Photo editing apps where the UI buttons are static, but the image can be scaled fully at any time, rotated, so you can see whatever detail you need. Word processors that you can really flip the pages in with the flick of a mouse (Myst IV: Revelation does this, and it works FAST). Again, the trick is to remember to keep it simple and get the data in front of the user as fast as possible. Don't put lipstick on it if they don't plan to be kissing it ... don't gloss up something that they'll only use once, and don't make it take time.

Longhorn has some interesting ideas, but it's either not enough in one direction, or too much in another. But perhaps some other industrious folks (like Stardock, perhaps) will fill in the blanks. WindowsFX already does some of the same 3D tricks that Longhorn is touting.

I think if we can get some folks out there that can keep focused on not making everything on the desktop look like an MTV Music Video (you know, back when they still showed videos), we might be able to use our $500 video cards to get some real work done.