In the end, using any device is all about doing actions (the simplest being reading/viewing, but also editing etc.) on data. Now the biggest difference between desktop and mobile is that the first one is (was?) file oriented while the second one is software (application) oriented.
Edit a document, listen to a music, on desktop you would historically navigate to where the file is, then open it with the program of your choice. On mobile, you would almost never do that, you would first open the app and from it select the file you want to interact with.
This is changing a lot how you are organizing the way you work. On desktop, it is easy to put related files of different types in the same folder, for example you organize your birthday, you can have the list of the invited people in a excel file with their number, a subfolder with the songs you want to play, some pictures of the venue, a text files with notes and etc. It is not natural at all to organize things like that on mobile. Android and iOS are hiding the files as much as they can. (This is not the case on Ubuntu Touch for example). And it becomes the responsibility of the app to organize the files it can open. This has a big impact on what you expect your desktop manager to done or not. I would personally be very happy if I could organize applications how we can organize files, and simply reopen a work session where I left it (some PDF open, some terminals open, my IDE, my browser...) even weeks after.
To complexify the topic even more, the same thinking can be done in the browser, which is basically an OS now...
> I would personally be very happy if I could organize applications how we can organize files, and simply reopen a work session where I left it
This statement reminds me of Sugar, the desktop originally developed by One Laptop Per Child. Sugar is basically the exact inverse of where mobile is going, so it's kinda interesting to look back on.
Sugar tries to blur the line between files and applications. Instead, you deal in "activities" which are a file, bundled with certain context (ex: what program opens it), all in a pretty flat hierarchy.
The way Sugar does things, w
there isn't a "File -> Open" in sight. All file opening happens from that Activities menu.
To be clear: Do I think we should just take what Sugar does and put it in GNOME? Hell no! Sugar is very simplistic by design, it's not suitable for adult productivity. But, it's an immediately intuitive concept. Imagine if the app drawer was a chronological list not of every app, but of every thing you've worked on in all apps.
I think that's an idea worth exploring, maybe for tiling WMs specifically where maintenance of the desktop itself (arranging it, organizing it, etc) is such a dominant part of the experience.
Kind of how windows's old document-first paradigm worked. Of course we didn't have a name for it at the time since it was just how computers worked. You could open Word and select open, but 95% of the time you double clicked on a word file. You can't do this on phones for some reason.
The term "activities" icks me out though, it's totally not obvious what that means. Maybe it is obvious in context but it feels a bit like having every explorer window start with a heading "files and folders" or your desktop says "desktop". If it's really good UI you shouldn't need a label for the whole collection like that.
flaburgan · · focus · HN ↗
ryukoposting · · focus · HN ↗
This statement reminds me of Sugar, the desktop originally developed by One Laptop Per Child. Sugar is basically the exact inverse of where mobile is going, so it's kinda interesting to look back on.
Sugar tries to blur the line between files and applications. Instead, you deal in "activities" which are a file, bundled with certain context (ex: what program opens it), all in a pretty flat hierarchy.
The way Sugar does things, w there isn't a "File -> Open" in sight. All file opening happens from that Activities menu.
To be clear: Do I think we should just take what Sugar does and put it in GNOME? Hell no! Sugar is very simplistic by design, it's not suitable for adult productivity. But, it's an immediately intuitive concept. Imagine if the app drawer was a chronological list not of every app, but of every thing you've worked on in all apps.
I think that's an idea worth exploring, maybe for tiling WMs specifically where maintenance of the desktop itself (arranging it, organizing it, etc) is such a dominant part of the experience.
someonebaggy · · focus · HN ↗
The term "activities" icks me out though, it's totally not obvious what that means. Maybe it is obvious in context but it feels a bit like having every explorer window start with a heading "files and folders" or your desktop says "desktop". If it's really good UI you shouldn't need a label for the whole collection like that.
ryukoposting · · focus · HN ↗
And Sugar, being a single-tasking UI first and foremost, with this activities motif, is a proof of concept that mobile could work this way.
The name "activity" indeed makes a bit more sense in context.