Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity
It&#x27;s an interesting combination of incredible ideas with unusable ones.<p>First, there&#x27;s an interesting disconnect between app panes and what I actually do in practice. This concept seems to organise windows as a stack. In practice, I use them more tree-like. I already notice an annoyance with Android&#x27;s stack-like app switching, which basically seems to implement what is proposed here, and I expect it to be worse on desktop.
Furthermore, it seems like a poor fit for larger monitors. On my 32&quot; 4K monitor, I rarely want full-height windows: having half-height is more than enough, which enables me to easily have 4 or 6 windows open at the same time. With full-height panes, this is not possible.<p>Second, app control, app menu, and context menu: great ideas, and have been tried by various window managers.<p>But the real trouble is in the other ideas.
The finder is nice at first glance - it would be a great addition to file managers, and a large portion of it already exists. But it proposes replacing them, which seems like a really bad idea to me. It is unclear to me how this is supposed to work with large amounts of content: how is this supposed to work with tens or hundreds of thousands of files? Either you end up adding dozens of tags to every file, or the tags devolve into a path-like structure, defeating the purpose. Additionally, it seems lacking in discoverability. It might work to discover a project folder, or a file within a project, but I&#x27;m doubtful that full-filesystem would work. It does solve a real problem, though: I often try to put files in a logical directory structure, but there&#x27;s often more than one possibility. I&#x27;d like pictures to be stored by date, but also accessible by subject and context. The same goes for a lot of other documents. Being able to tag a single file or a directory would be great, but it doesn&#x27;t replace folders. The same applies to email, bookmarks, contacts, books, and all the other stuff mentioned.<p>Eye tracking is a bit similar. It might feel magical the few times it actually works, but seems quite useless when we still need a mouse for precision stuff. Furthermore, as I&#x27;m typing this, I&#x27;m reading text in another window as a reference. Eye tracking would completely break that. Focus Mode sounds incredibly distracting to me, Just Type is actually harmful, dismissing notifications after a single look sounds great at first, but is actually harmful for those notifications which require action at a point in the near future. It&#x27;s a fun concept, but it sounds more like a solution looking for a problem. A mouse is always going to be vastly superior.<p>And voice control? Seriously? In my experience, every single voice interface is absolutely horrible and incredibly distracting. Unless someone manages to get Artificial General Intelligence working, it&#x27;s probably going to remain nothing more than a very nice gimmick, not a core concept of a productive UI. Furthermore, how&#x27;s this going to work in office spaces or libraries? Calls are already bad enough, forcing everyone to talk non-stop to their computer is going to make it impossible to actually do anything productive.<p>To conclude: it seems like all the good stuff has already been (mostly) implemented!