macOS Monterey
It is frustrating to see how stagnant desktop OS's have become. Both macOS and Windows 11 have added incremental features that are surely nice to have, but no one dares to improve on the human-computer-interaction which has remained the same for decades now.<p>With the advances in AI and the ridiculous compute power of modern CPUs, we should be able to have OSs that are Digital Assistants.<p>Just one example:<p>- file management: Why even? Why expose most <i>regular</i> users to this metaphor in the first place. Mobile OSs have been rather successful in getting rid of this implementation detail. If I write a lot of documents and need to come up with names for them, I expect that to be sufficient. My Assistant will sort/group/maintain them for me and if I want to open the "status report to vendor X from last week", then that should be enough. Make sure my documents are safely stored, encrypted and all that jazz. Don't make me pick between "iCloud" or "OneDrive" or "C:\" or "Document" or "Desktop". Index all the content I'm producing semantically. Just DoWhatIMean? (tm)
Have this be consistent throughout the applications I'm using - including web apps. (And why even make <i>that</i> distinction. Who here doesn't have relatives who have trouble understanding the differences between locally installed applications, apps on their phone and web apps in the browser?)<p>Regular users are consistently struggling with low-level concepts like 'files' and similar remnants of trying to emulate desktop metaphors from the workplaces of the 80ies.<p>"Do you want to change the extension to .doc or change it to .txt"? What?!?
"Do you want to overwrite file "xyz.xls"? Overwriting sounds bad, what happens if I say no though?<p>That is just the tip of the iceberg where we are somehow tied to ideas of HCI that are rooted in the 70s/80s.<p>I do appreciate being able to tell my phone "Set a timer for 10 minutes", but where is
"Plan a trip to Dallas for next week Friday" - and the Digital Assistant knowing exactly what to do (since that ain't its first rodeo)?