Opencroquet 380
zymano writes "OSnews has some information about Opencroquet, a 3d operating system worked on by Alan Kay, who also is one of the inventors of Smalltalk, one of the fathers of object oriented programming, conceiver of the laptop computer, inventor of much of the modern windowing GUI. The OS is a 3D environment running through the Squeak environment on top of another operating system. It requires a supported 3D accelerator. Squeak is an interpreted language similar to Smalltalk. Could be ssslooooww. Way cool screenshot."
How can an OS be 3D? (Score:2, Insightful)
Flash? (Score:0, Insightful)
The extra bandwidth required probably isn't helping it survive a slashdotting right now, either.
Way Cool Screenshot (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm, the main link was slashdotted, so I tried the OS's website http://www.opencroquet.org [opencroquet.org]. Maybe they should change their main graphic to the "Way Cool screenshot" rather than the Monet looking Croquet game they have going on right now. They might garner a bit more interest.
Licensing? (Score:2, Insightful)
I could well be missing something here - read the site and the article though, so at least I made an effort :)
What license is this code being developed under? It's called OPENCroquet, so presumably it's some kind of Open Source, but what flavour? Is it, in fact, Open at all?
I ask cos it looks interesting and I wanna play :)
P
it's a stretch (Score:3, Insightful)
OK, I didn't RTFA, but...if it runs on top of another OS, it can't really be called an OS itself, can it? I mean, win95 jokes aside, isn't it just a fancy GUI then?
3D OS (Score:2, Insightful)
Couldn't we be spending our time trying to figure out how to make an easier to use, less complex OS? Something that isn't scary to people who have no idea how to use computers. Perhaps then we would see what a computer revolution would be all about.
Or maybe we could spend the time figuring out how to make computers more secure, so people wouldn't be afraid to put private info on it. Thus making it so that people are more likely to use them for everyday purposes.
But, no we decide we want to go 3D.
Makes you think, does the geek community really want computers to be used by everyone? Or do that want something only they themselves can understand?
Don't mod me down because you dissagree, if you disagree make a good argument about it.
Just my humble opinion,
SirLantos
Does anyone else get the feeling (Score:4, Insightful)
Like smalltalk. Early 70s, IIRC. The problem of managing increasing software complexity, which object orientation (partly) solved, became significant only much later.
I don't think 3d enviromnents are an idea whose time has come. Slowness is only part of the problem. We really don't have the software infrastructure to scale UI complexity to those levels. Maybe for special applications, but not as a general UI design paradigm.
Certainly futuristic.Re:Flash? (Score:3, Insightful)
<table>
spacer row...
content...
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Flash is not crap. Just most people using it relegate it to stupid intro movies. It allows the developer to create a completely self contained application, free of the shackles of the HTML dinosaur.
psxndc
Re:Flash? (Score:3, Insightful)
why are people so opposed to Flash on the net? Are they equally resentful that images have "invaded" their text-only HTML world? My website uses tables ... how evil am *I*?
I mean, if you have a legitimate complaint (crashes your browser) or something, then that's fine, but I'm getting a little sick of people who consistently respond with knee-jerk negativity against anything remotely commercial, regardless of how useful and innovative it may be.
It's 2003. You don't still drive 30 mph in a '55 Chevy, why would you be so resistent to modern browser plugins?
Anyway, personally I'm glad that OS research is finally turning to the 3D realm. It only seems like the next natural progression in computer environments.
Re:Flash? (Score:3, Insightful)
Flash as navigation? It allows you to completely destroy the usability of the site. Middle click to open in a new window? Gone. Right click to select "open in new tab"? Gone. Tab through links? Gone (or possibly there if somebody using flash has a clue, unlikely). Typeahead finding a link? Gone.
The reason people like flash for things like navigation is because they want to reimplement the interface. This is almost certainly a terrible idea from the perspective of most websites, and for most users.
It is also not supported by any search engines, so good luck having your site indexed (unless you provide a fallback, most flash developers don't even know how to do this).
Control is a four-letter word in the mouth of a web author. I don't want you to control my interface. I want to view your site how I wish. All the w3c technologies allow this, why can't flash?
I think you mean <link rel="stylesheet" ...>
Great. But basic navigation through a normal website isn't an application. Even if it was, I'd expect it to work like all my other applications.
Re:3D OS (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Flash? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't have flash, I cant'navigate.
The fact is you can travel NOW with a Ford T in any street.
Re:Flash? (Score:3, Insightful)
allows for absolute positioning and control
People that tries to have absolute positioning and control on websites will be among the first against the wall when I take over the world.
The whole point about html is that the layout is dynamic, adapting to what is's viewed on. The "this page best viewed at 800x600 with a huge border on 1600x1200 or scoll at the bottom at 640x480" pages are made by amateurs. Possibly former members of the printing industry that can't grasp the consept that they have no control over the size of the screen the site will be presented on
These days it seems that everybody is more interested in making stuff that looks good than in providing content with any value. And they can't understand that what looks good on their monitor might look crap in another resolution. And when they discover it they're too lazy to fix the mistakes and just say "But you're supposed to use foo x bar when you visit the site".
I've finished ranting now, thank's for listening
Re:How can an OS be 3D? (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, for right now all "3d" operating systems, plugins, demos, etc are being displayed on a 2d screen. So they are merely pretending to be 3d. When we get true 3 dimensional displays/holocubes/whatever, then we'll really have a 3d operating system displayed in 3d.
All of which makes me wonder: did the graphical mac's ever have anything other than a 2d gui interface? Could you put them into a cli mode, sort of what we might think of as a one dimensional os? I remember the old Apple ]['s, I think, that had a cli. I remember playing Oregon Trail on them when I was in elementary school. But I mean the macs that booted right into a gui.
Re:Does anyone else get the feeling (Score:4, Insightful)
There are a lot of folks who will arm-wave at the idea of 3D UIs. I've yet to see a 3D UI that a) renders on current 2D screens and b) provides any significant advantage over the 2D concepts of window-stacking, iconification, virtual screens and alpha-channel blending.
Some of these concepts are still in the "time to market" stage (e.g. alpha-channel blending), but given their application, the idea of tracking UI objects in three dimensions (which increases memory usage) isn't really going to buy you much.
Take a look at the screen-shots. Squint. Try to convince yourself that you're looking at a rendered background with several overlapping windows. Now ask yourself: do the addition of perspective and a z-axis for window movement improve the situation, or just add complexity?
Re:Flash? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ask the blind.
Re:not slow (Score:5, Insightful)
Better in what way? I'm not trying to be argumentative. For all I know, the Squeak VM allows a 486 DX2 at 66 MHz to pump out 3 teraflops on .2 watts and has been shown to cure cancer in lab rats.
"Better" really doesn't say much. You might as well have made up a word or posted in Linear B.
Are you talking about inherent superiority of the VM spec? Is the design simpler? Is the set of opcodes smaller or more orthogonal without sacrificing speed or functionality? Has it supported non-blocking I/O, continuances, higher order functions, and generics/templates from day 1? (Can you tell I'm a Java programmer that hated not getting java.nio.* until Java 1.4? Now for generics and continuances...) Did Dijkstra, Turing, Ken Thompson, Xavier Leroy, Ross Andersen and Linus spend a year in seclusion atop Mount Araraat inside Noah's Ark designing a VM spec that was pretty-printed by the hand of God Almighty on the one remaining wall of Solomon's temple? Is the set of opcodes inherently faster or does it result in more compact binaries? Is the set of opcodes well chosen to be easily implemented on most architectures? Is the size of an int clearly defined in the spec (as I remember, both Perl and Python say "at least 32 bits", which is a horrible spec if you want your code to run the same across architectures)? Does the set of opcodes lend itself to rapid compilation of efficient bytecode from many source language families? Are the bytecode operations and file formats well suited to JITs? Does the VM design not force a single object model on the code? Does the opcode format offer security benefits such as efficient real-time security checks on untrusted code? Are there other ways in which the design is "cleaner", "leaner", or "more efficient".
Are you refering to the design of the curent VM implementation rather than the spec itself? Is the current VM better documented in both English and Tamil? How about clean interfaces or easy extensibility of the VM?
Are you talking about the implementation of the current bytecode engine? Is the source code for the VM well commented in Englsih and Thai? Is the entire VM and libraary set implememted in 5,000 lines of Objective C? Is the current VM available in C, Java, Scheme, Haskel, and Intercal implementations?
I suspect you mostly meant "the current canonical implementation is very fast". The speed of the current VM is much less important than inherent design limitations. If the current VM is 50% as fast as the fastest Perl VM, but is expected to be 25% faster than the fastest JVM in a year, that's much preferable to a 10% speed lead on Perl right now. If you change your VM spec too much or too often, people start jumping ship, but you could completely gut your VM every 2 years and very few people would take notice. You're stuck with your design.
I'd love to hear an analysis of the Squeak VM. I hear about so many well designed VMs that get little mind share while the unwashed masses rave about CLR/Mono without giving good details about why the CLR is inherently cross-language and high performance.
Re:How can an OS be 3D? (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, the command line is a shell. The shell is not the OS, it is a user interface. You know, the "UI" in "GUI."
An operating system has no concept of 2d, 3d, whatever. There is no direct interaction between human and OS. The human interacts with the UI, the UI interacts with the OS, the OS interacts with the hardware. The OS is not a visual thing.
Designing a 3d interface (Score:2, Insightful)
What you say!
The biggest question you have to ask yourself is "How does the 3rd dimension help, and how can it be used to enrich the interface experience, and save time" the problem is we could not answer that question satisfactorily!
Take a look at what Croquet here shows us. We have system with 3d images in 2d space. We already have that, its called a computer monitor, it is in 3d space, this is already done. Making the monitor its own 3d space does not help the issue of interface, and making a BETTER interface.
When you take a look at the croquet PDF file, you see basically a 3d translated world, translated to 2d. You have depth, the difference is you can "rotate" around objects, but they are still basically 2d functions, you dont actually gain any kind of usability by rotating around the picture, except to possibly confuse the user when he tries to retrieve the picture.
Also, they do fall back to the nav bar concept, where there is a 2d navigation bar at the bottom, now this isnt bad in of itself, but it accomplishes NOTHING from the usability standpoint. Again the question is "How does the 3rd dimension help, and how can it be used to enrich the interface experience, and save time" this interface does not enrich the graphical user space in any REAL fasion, it moves a 2d plain into a 3d plain, without taking any real benefit from the fact that there is a 3d plain existing.
The usability benefits of the group function, where mutliple users can get into each others space and "look" around into others space, and meet with each other, is really in of itself not a value adding attribute of the program. This can be done, and done effectively, with video confrencing, each user does not have to "look" at another user, they can represent all users on a 2d space just as easily, or incoporate some psuedo 3d elements such as bring forward or push back (IE just scaling the size) and this can be easily done in the 2d arena, its a simple matter of scaling a picture and overlaying another over or placing it behind the picture.
I think it is a great endeavor, but it still hasnt answered the question of what the 3rd dimention can be used for that isnt already adequately done.
3d is good for games, because in games you want to "move around" in the environment, and by moving around you learn things about how the environment is shaped.
The other 3d interfaces that use file folders as "rooms" and each room as a size based on its file size, doesnt actually "help" in the sense of a user interface perspective, since it just re-represents size, you dont gain any real perspective into any NEW information that could not be gleaned from a sorting algorithim. IE if I wanted to locate on my machine what parts of the disk were "larger" than another part of the disk, I would not need to represent it in a 3d space, just instead sort by the size in whatever byte measuremenat im using, and easily determine which is holding more space by where it sits in the sorted list, and can even use 2d visual cues such as bars, and colors to make distinctions.
So the real question, is can you find a good use for the extra dimention when it comes to user interface with the computer? one that would make it worth persueing? Or can you explain to me why croquet is using the 3rd dimention i a way that cannot be adequeately, and more easily done in a 2d space already?
Re:Flash? (Score:3, Insightful)
Couple of comments,
When I have a client that tells me they want a specific font, and sound effects
Clients ask for these kinds of things all the time. I say:
* You can suggest a specific font, but if it's an unusual font, most people will see one of the more common fonts. Some people will override your font completely because they find another font easier to read. Which "normal" font do you want to use as a fallback? Not to mention the discussion of serif vs sans-serif and so on...
* Sound can be highly irritating for many end-users, especially if they aren't expecting it. Virtually no high-profile business websites use sound, so unless there is a domain-specific reason for having sound, I would recommend against it. If there is a good reason for having sound, I would recommend that it not be activated automatically.
All true. I think we agree that bad sound design and bad font choices are just, well, bad. Flash (unfortunately) enables both good and bad media. The thing I think a lot of engineers decry (not you) about Flash is just that... as in, it can do it, and you can't make annoying sound effects with plain HTML, so Flash is bad, which is odd to me. Like blaming C++ for the fact that it can totally lock up a machine, and BASIC can't.
Also, I do think its a shame more sites don't use sound, it can really enhance any experience. You've always got the option to turn it off (at the speaker if nothing else). As far as fonts, in my experience, those applying their own stylesheets and font settings are pretty rare. They maybe set the point size to 14pt instead of 12, but that's it. Which brings me to another point...
I do have a problem with applying your own stylesheets to other's work. Basically it goes like this: I designed it a specific way, I want it shown that specific way. I've likely fought tooth and nail with the client over certain very specific things, and we have reached a solution visually for these things. To take away those decisions and apply your own arbitrary, un-trained stlyes, while liberating, is a bit wrong. It undermines the work that potentially went into a 'good' design. The only situation I've seen custom user-defined stylesheets work for is blogs; mostly because the bloggers have more or less settled on a unified layout.
I agree, I never said otherwise. But website navigation with flash is usually an abuse of flash - I've certainly never seen an appropriate use of flash in this way.
Okay, well I'll put my money where my mouth is: here is my Flash site. [thoughtbubble.cx] (you'll need the Flash MX plug-in.) It uses its own navigation. You can't use the browser controls, just as you've said. Take a look; maybe it IS an abomination of usability. However, I've never had one complaint about how to use it. It is what I consider a perfectly acceptable sub-navigation for the site. Of course, like I (we both) said earlier, I wouldn't use this for a database of term papers.
Oh by the way, indexing is not a problem.
No, if you provide alternate navigation that isn't flash-based. Most people clueless enough to use flash for navigation are clueless enough to not realise they need to do this. I know of no search engine that parses, or even retrieves, swf files.
Hmm. Not sure to what you're referring; Flash MX can basically mark up (boy does it ever mark up) every last bit of text in your Flash site, in the HTML frame file. And there's robots.txt as well. MX made great strides for usability, which had the side-effect of including a lot more metadata, and therefore exposing a lot more raw functionality, in Flash SWFs. Also note that its a lot harder to program proper navigation in Flash than it is in HTML, not easier; the idea that the 'clueless' are seizing upon Flash for easy website programming is not true. It's like programming everything in JavaScript (ActionScript is almost identical syntactically).
And stylesheets, as cool as they are, cannot compete with absolute sub-pixel vector positioning.
You are merely picking one attribute of flash and claiming that stylesheets cannot compete because of it? Please explain what "absolute sub-pixel vector positioning" means, and why it is useful. Then explain how I can override it in my browser to get the look that I want.
Oooh I could pick on a lot more than that. :)
Flash is all vector-based. The sizes and positions of things in Flash can be specified to a single decimal place of a pixel (i.e. 10.3, 14.9, etc.). This offers advantages for both resolution-independance as well as animation quality. Adobe After Effects, a raster-based animation program, also offers this feature. Think of it as a Nyquist Theorem kind of thing; higher resoltions from the source result in better looking images and motion. Not to mention superior antialiasing of text and vector edges. (Now, if you want to disable it, right-click on a Flash movie and choose anything but 'highest quality', then try and read some text. *shudder*)
Flash graphics are better than the usual hodgepodge of GIFs and JPEGs. They make more sense for the web, and they are much smaller. I can say this because Flash can also incorporate the best raster-based web graphics formats (JPEG, PNG) with its own vectors.
Not to mention, as a web designer, I have far less problems debugging a Flash site between browsers, as the plug-in is more consistent than the HTML engine.
Which plug-in? You know there's more than one, right?
The Flash plug-in. I think there is also a combination Shockwave (Director)/Flash plug-in. They both behave identically on Windows and Mac browsers. That's what I mean. I don't have to debug things in Flash because they 'look right' on one browser and not the other.
Now, don't get me wrong, I basically agree with everything you're saying. It just bugs me when people (not you) blame Flash for being flexible and powerful. They should blame people who suck instead.
Re:Flash? (Score:2, Insightful)
LOL your sig says it all--"artsy". Flash is all about the glossies, the marketing, the slick design. It's about style over substance.
As JimDabell mentioned, when I use my browser, I like to interact with the web pages in the efficient manner afforded by the browser interface (i.e. mouse gestures, ctrl-f, ctrl-c etc.). Flash robs me of this, and I am relegated to the position of a child watching mtv. I resent this.
Flash is the panacea for obssessive designers who agonize over the fact that their web page design does't render consistently over different browsers. They cannot tolerate the fact that the pixel-perfect design which they toiled over is secondary to the content.
I wish those designers would pursue writing standards-compliant, valid html in its current form rather than authoring in flash. I would rather that the World Wide Web Consortium, not Macromedia, dictate web standards.Also, I find it ironic that some people deride others' disdain for flash as being archaic, while they themselves cite deprecated html.