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."
prototype? (Score:2, Interesting)
Since the article is slashdotted, this comment might come out as a RTFA comment, but anyway:
Is the 3D desktop meant to be a proof-of-concepts or a real product? If the system i slow due to this Squeak, perhaps it could be translated into somthing that compiles?
Squeak / Small Talk Truly Awesome! (Score:2, Interesting)
This stuff is kind of addicting once you get into it, it is very radically different and just a strange concept when thinking about what we're used to.
Squeak is like a living organism of an application. It just sort of evolves as you use it, giving it tons of capabilities and flexibility.
The whole thing is wrapped around really little messages being sent around and everything being just in time / real time.
Definately look up squeak and give it a try.
Bob
(all this praise from a Perl nut even)
A quote from the summary: (Score:2, Interesting)
Does anyone else here read this as 'expanding the software to fill the available space (CPU-cycles & memory bandwidth)'?
Instead of focusing on enabling 'a richer experience' let us focus first on what is wrong with the current 'solutions' we're using and realize that 'doing more with less' is more than just common sense.
Don't tell me you really think that an OS like Win2k/XP or *NIX/*BSD is the 'be all, end all' of running software on a computersystem. Heck, over 10 years we'll simply laugh at those archaic things we're using (including countless hardware devices), much like we look back at using punch cards.
In other words, nothing to see here. Wait until we realize the mistakes we've been making and start from scratch again.
Re:mirror of screenshot (Score:2, Interesting)
Real Estate (Score:5, Interesting)
Until this problem is overcome, either with giant screens, head-mounted displays, or some bizarre gesture-controlled scrolling (like head tilts), I can't see 3D GUIs becoming more than a curiosity because they consume too much 2D screen space without giving enough virtual space back.
Re:Flash? (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally, I just find it annoying and distracting, so, even though I've heard it's now possible to get a plugin for linux/mozilla, I haven't bothered. I have java turned off for the same reason, even though I make a living coding it.
The reason I complain is that (as I mentioned) they make it a requirement, in order to access the site's navigation panel. Even with 77% penetration, that means 23% of visitors will be unable to do anything except stare at the index page (which contains only a meaningless image).
Even when you're using a relatively reliable technology like images in an integral area of the site, it's standard practice to provide an alterative for those who can't or won't see them (hence the "alt" attribute).
What we have here ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmmm - I made a new emoticon
Anyways, if I had to vote (and no, they didn't call me to ask my opinion) I would vote to have my actual processes run faster and my UI be uglier, than to have a virtual C.Zeta Jones walking around on the other side of the glass bringing me the files I requested, drop one halfway back from the 'library' and bend over at the waist to pick it up, then lean over when handing them to me to give a good look down her blouse.
Hmmm. Scratch that. How about we get to pick at boot time : CUI interface when we need raw computational power, and the Metaverse / Library UI when we are doing regular work. Maybe be able to start the GUI processing by typing StartX at the command line
Pretty cool idea, combines most of the important things that have been the driving forces behind generations of advancements in software / hardware
Re:mirror of screenshot (Score:5, Interesting)
They even implement the same bad dialogs as in Windows. Notice in the Connect-form, the http:// link is neither wrapped, nor does it elongate the dialog box.
I find it amazing that nobody fixes such stupid GUI things and makes a truly generic GUI.
Alternative 3D "platform" + screenshots (Score:2, Interesting)
OSX? (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder if we could see usability improvements by using 3d toolbars stacked on top of each other using alpha blending which could be moved by mouse gestures... very cool... Unfortunately, most of the 3d GUIs to date have only decreased usability, and been overly cumbersome.
Re:How can an OS be 3D? (Score:2, Interesting)
The shell (or command line) isn't part of the OS either.
Re:mirror of screenshot (Score:4, Interesting)
bring in some real artists to work on this and you can do some really nice stuff. think the UI's you saw in the final fantasy movie or minority report.
-Mani
Re:Flash? (Score:3, Interesting)
There are some bright sides to Flash. For example, a tremendous portion of all web-related traffic is simply sending text in bitmap form so a site can look "pretty". Then count in all of the very similar redundant images (in javascript rollovers), and then add in "graphically simple" images... that's a lot of traffic. All of this can, and should be replaced by much smaller and more efficient vector art.
So many people see Flash as, if nothing else, an up and coming replacement for GIF/JPG/PNG for many applications. I wish browsers allowed you to treat it more like an image and less like an "object," so it would integrate better in that role and address your right-click woes. Obviously in this role search engines are not affected.
Flash has grown quite a bit over the years; I've had the misfortune to have to do some absurdly large projects with it. It's very attractive if you want to deliver a self-contained web application (like a game) because the penetration is simply second-to-none (+95% for older versions of Flash, and +75% for the newest version, I believe - i.e., it's included in Windows!), it runs on Linux, and if you have to download it, it's ~300k (hence the former point, I think). Now, it's offering a lot of features while staying quite small... I still think its scripting system and API are abyssmal, but if you're up for abuse you can make it do amazing things.
I think it's important to use it in the right places. If you rip out an entire HTML site and replace it with flash just to make it look nicer, you probably didn't consider the tradeoffs. But on the flipside, I sure am glad it's there for times when you want to do something unconventional or impossible using traditional techniques.
Something like Flash could replace HTML eventually. If Flash evolves in the right direction, and we're willing to reconceive its integration with the browser, and really, reconsider aspects of the web altogether (and most of all, if we forget it's proprietary, which is really a deal-killer on its own). This is a funny dream some Flash proponents have. It's not realistic, but I can see why they think it, and I won't be surprised to see some Flash-like things gain importance in the web's evolution.
BUNK: Smalltalk not OO, didn't invent GUI (Score:2, Interesting)
Simula 67 [erols.com] was the first object-oriented language, and all practical/successful OO languages follow from it: C++, Java, C#, Eiffel, etc. But even Smalltalk experts mistakenly believe [google.com] that Smalltalk invented OO. Smalltalk isn't even OO as we know it.
Similarly, the mouse was invented by Doug Englebart [virginia.edu] (movie evidence [stanford.edu] - ) along with the idea of the word processor and many other things we take for granted now. And the GUI was invented by Ivan Sutherland in Sketchpad [sun.com]: pop-up menus, drag and drop, etc (used a light pen).