The Desktop

February 6, 2008

Steven Johnson’s “The Desktop” spurred a bombardment of thoughts on things I have read about, seen, and used recently. His history of the desktop paradigm is pretty standard, and I think we all know the essentials of it by now. I think immediately of the emergence of 3d desktops over the past 5 or 10 years starting with Sun’s Looking Glass (?). They were the first to introduce the idea of making objects on the desktop three dimensional. More recently this idea has been pursued by the Compiz project. I was also reminded of something called Bumptop which takes the 3d desktop very literally. I am a little saddened, being the person I am that he didn’t talk about open source at all, but I think based on the things he was talking about, that the OSS desktop hadn’t yet been realized. I really think that today the most exciting innovations in desktop interface are happening with Compiz and KDE 4. Apple seems to be pretending with its newest OSX iterations, although they do great work for their market.

Otherwise, Johnson doesn’t seem to have considered that each interface has its purpose, and that is probably why there is such a profundity of text based communication services on the web. I suppose he actually does, but in a very round about manner. Text based applications have very powerful capabilities in their own right, Johnson should not have cast aspersions on the command line in the way that he did. I guess he never got to use BASH