feels like there’s never been a better time for a new desktop OS to emerge…
there’s less platform lock-in than ever, thanks to web apps (and maybe Wine or VMs)
macOS isn’t so great anymore, windows is full of ads
what would it look like to design an OS for the web era? for the ai era?
three things i’d try:
1. rethink the interface — there’s no way that current OS designs that’ve lasted 25 years are the end state of computing (this was the thesis of arc, btw!)
2. treat web apps and native apps the same. treat web docs and native docs the same.
3. new horizontal primitives. when you stop to think about it, it’s *so cool* that copy and paste actually works across every app. what’s the next clipboard, or the next url?
@nate idk why but this topic is so incredibly interesting to me.
I wrote about how web apps should be treated as native apps (https://www.eikedrescher.com/blog-articles/getting-rid-of-the-browser) which I think you‘ve read before :)
I could also imagine an OS optimized for creation (vs consumption). Explored this here briefly: https://twitter.com/eikedrescher/status/1591170371562209286?s=46&t=5T4Nxl0M6xWs3-pCBi0yEA
The idea of rethinking an interface that feels so established to all of us might be the most interest design problem out there if you ask me
@eikedrescher yes! Huge fan of this line of thinking.
Making web apps feel like native apps is one angle. There’s also:
- making native apps feel more like web apps (tabs! Find in page! Linking!)
- making web files feel more like native files (why can’t I make a folder that contains a notion doc, photoshop file and git repo?)
So much to explore……
@nate @eikedrescher I totally feel you!
What botheres me even more is that all the data is mostly locked in proprietary apps.
Everything would be so much better with proper standards.
Why can’t we e.g.:
* create an event in our notes and see it in the calendar
* add a todo inside an event than show up in our todo app
* Write about a friend in a journal and get direct access to the info in our contacts app and maybe chats in messengers
* and so on …
@philoup @eikedrescher I wonder if the solution to this is a more capable file system, such that apps store their data as files rather than in proprietary backends or sqlite databases.
what would you need to do to make the humble filesystem a competitive way for apps to store their data?
sync? realtime collab? better indexing? new file formats to standardize storage of data that historically isn't stored as a file, like chat messages and todos?
This is why I love #Logseq : it stores data as Markdown or Org files but when running it turns them into a graph database you can query using #Datalog from inside the app itself or via CLI. It can even expose API as a local HTTP server so that other apps can create ad-hoc GUI or programmatically edit your notes/tasks. Its data model is so flexible that let you store notes, tasks and a relational database of arbitrary objects where you define keys and values.
