“Mylyn is a task-focused interface for Eclipse that reduces information overload and makes multi-tasking easy. It does this by making tasks a first class part of Eclipse, and integrating rich and offline editing for repositories such as Bugzilla, Trac, and JIRA. Once your tasks are integrated, Mylyn monitors your work activity to identify information relevant to the task-at-hand, and uses this task context to focus the Eclipse UI on the interesting information, hide the uninteresting, and automatically find what’s related. This puts the information you need to get work done at your fingertips and improves productivity by reducing searching, scrolling, and navigation. By making task context explicit Mylyn also facilitates multitasking, planning, reusing past efforts, and sharing expertise.”

For more info, see: http://tasktop.com/videos/mylyn/webcast-mylyn-3.0.html

If you look at the flexibility and customization options for things like kwin, the Plasma desktop, colors, and other aspects of kde and then compare that to the ability to customize hardware, the discrepancy is pretty striking in my opinion.

Striking but maybe reasonable! Or maybe not. There’s no prima facie reason why hardware should be as flexible as software.

I guess an important point here is that this flexibility is great for a lot of people, but it shouldn’t be required. I know almost nobody who goes further than changing their background. Even at KDE conferences you see most KDE developers going with something close to the default KDE settings.

KDE 4 has started to get this right: get the defaults right, make basic/important configuration simple, allow power users to screw around if they really want to.

The same goes for interaction methods. They need to be easily discoverable, and fit into the overall desktop metaphor that Plasma is aiming for. You also need to be able to work efficiently without knowing about them, because a lot of people will just miss them. They’re much less interested in computers than you or I!

KDE also need to solve pressing problems, not create more bells and whistles for KDE geeks. For example: needing to fire up 8 programs to get stuck into your work; or trying to dig through endless windows and folders to find the data you’re looking for; or wasting time firing up calculators and web browsers and mail clients to do tasks that the Plasma dashboard can do in seconds; or having to lean over to your computer to turn off the screensaver every 15 mins when watching a movie then needing to lean over again to pause it for a moment, etc.

This is, for me, the crux of a task-oriented desktop.

But for everyday work? Computers may be able to just about work out what is being said, providing they are trained enough in a particular person’s voice, but they’re a long way off being able to interpret that (except in a very deterministic way) or even being able to tell whether the voice is directed at them.

And I leave you with news that Apple are introducing yet another revolutionary new interface: http://www.theonion.com/content/video/apple_introduces_revolutionary

Not that I necessarily agree with this view on Apple’s interface design, but it’s amusing and relevant to the discussion.

I really do not agree on using voice commands for computers. Given that people use computers virtually everywhere and usually with multiple computers near each other, working with voice commands would in my opinion result in a lot of audible garbage. Multiple people talking to their computers in one room is not something i want to sit in.

A lot of people use computers in their homes where there aren’t a lot of people talking.

eople are also very used to the humble mouse, and Apple’s direction was to make it *more* simple! I’m not sure that we need to complicate our interaction, we need applications to be intelligent enough that they need less so we can get on with typing etc.

And look where that led them, they ended up being forced to replace it with their Might Mouse, which is much more like the mice their competitors were making all along. On their laptops they ended up replicating the function of a multi-button mouse with their multi-touch system. Even apple was forced to acknowledge that people need more options when interacting with a computer.

Pretty much every mouse has at least back and forward buttons, but we can’t even use those in KDE. Including some sort of modifier button for the scroll wheel (like to make it a zoom or an application switcher) and a tilt wheel seems to be becoming the new norm for mice. And there is a huge market for even more advanced mice for more advanced users, but these are totally useless with KDE. And there is a huge body of hardware out there that simply does not integrate with KDE at all. Even setting up multimedia keyboards is difficult. The list of keyboard available is extremely limited compared to the full range available even from major manufactures like Logitech and Microsoft.

If you look at the flexibility and customization options for things like kwin, the Plasma desktop, colors, and other aspects of kde and then compare that to the ability to customize hardware, the discrepancy is pretty striking in my opinion.

Computers trying to anticipate what you’re up to sounds really, really hard unless you use your computer in very formulaic ways. You get into the realms of AI research and realise just how complicated every day decisions we make are.

I realize it is extremely difficult, but I think KDE 4 provides a framework that could make it possible. I am not aware of another desktop environment that provides the underlying capabilities to even be thinking about this sort of thing while KDE 4 does.

It would be a big paradigm shift and it will take a long time to figure out how to configure desktops like that (or make them learn.)

So you better start in 4.3