Ed,
> A handheld OS does not translate well to a desktop setting and vise-versa.
Not necessarily. If one takes the current computing paradigms (that word
again) then your statement is accurate and there are plenty of examples that
support your case. Certainly scaling something down that is already wasteful
of screen real esate and has many redundant features is always a bit if a
disaster.
However there are interfaces that are scalable both in terms of the
complexity they present and the way they adapt to the machine they run on.
The Newt is pretty good at adapting to different HW without any sense of
either being cramped or inadequate. The system of views is very flexible in
the way it responds to screen dimensions and orientations and the
fundamentals elsewhere are sound in most areas - decent targets, consistent
behaviours, unabiguous labelling, few modes etc.
I think we can assume that processing performance and memory of all sorts
will pretty soon handle most of the tasks that we might reasonably want with
low power and small dimensions. NOS could do a lot on iPaq HW.
NOS would work pretty well at Palm sizes (HWR might be below optimal) and I
can't see why it should not work at twice the size of the MP2K - a decent
screen for a PC not long ago.
PC's (I include the Mac) look as if they do more because they have more
widgets to click but really it's a failure of the interface to present so
many options and so much clutter to the user. NOS takes the approach of
hiding a lot of the complexity without losing functionality.
One can take all these concepts a lot further and arrive at a graded series
of linked devices that do all the jobs we want them to do. IMO we have to
ditch application-centric modes to data-centric models before we can really
move forward.
I'm not even convinced that we need an operating system as such anymore but
I am convinced that the greatest advances in the art of computing lie with
the interface more than with any other part of the system.
Once the interface demands that you don't bother the user with things that
are better done quietly in the background, software is impelled into being
more flexible and intelligent.
Much more visual representation of data structures to the user are vital for
better comprehension and programming tools need to move to wholly visual
structures to make coding faster and simple to debug and extend.
Joel.
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