Dare to Innovate

Last night I brought the office PowerBook home to play with. This was spurred by my desire to play with something that has intrigued my attention, as well as by the visit from my friend who is a Mac (or rather an OSX) fan. I finally dug through a link or two to try out some software for OSX that offered something I could not get on the PC, and I will admit I do like it, so far. We played around and he showed be an example of how much developer customization can be accomplished (we changed the “theme” for Safari to aqua from graphite), and I will admit it does seem to be a developer’s dream. Since I have not done any programming in it, I cannot say it really is a dream come true, but the tools I glanced at looked promising. However, when it is all said and done I discovered something about my attitude toward computers I had previously ignored.

The thing that attracted me to computers in the first place was the innovation. The idea that new things could be done that had not been done before. The idea that old things could be done better. The idea that dusty, musty, old things could be refreshed. The thing that took me into Linux was this very notion of innovation. I found Linux to be a system full of innovation, new ideas, rehashing of old ideas, and people willing to experiment and try to do new things, even if they turned out to be bad ideas. For a time it was a system with great user/developer support where people were by-and-large understanding about the nature of development software, but now it has gained too much of a following and the innovation is dying out for more stable development, more reliable code, and more uniform interfaces.

It almost sounds like I am ready to leave the operating system that gave me so much hope, but that is an overstatement. What I am really looking for are some new and fresh ideas regarding the way we organize our data, the way we interact with our computers, and the way we get things done in an increasingly online society. What I have always appreciated about Linux is the strong support of Open Source software. That particular movement has always had the hope for new and experimental paradigms. I attribute this to two factors, one being the free access to the code that makes it work thereby allowing others to expand the idea or adjust it to make it work better, and two the minimal cost of adopting the technology, you only need to spend your time, no money, to see if something will work out for you. It is hard to move to a new system of doing things if you have to invest hard earned money on it as well as a large portion of time to get it to work right.

Something I would love to see in the computer industry, or rather in the desktop market, is a system whereby everything is alterable by the user. Allow me to explain. I have long been a huge fan of command line interface (CLI) when it comes to computing, and I still am a fan. There are many tasks that are best suited to a CLI rather than a graphical user interface (GUI). However, I have been acknowledging that GUIs have a place in the way we interface with our computers. There are some things that need a graphical representation to best communicate the information at hand. There are some things that are easier if you have access to drawing libraries, rather than just fixed width text. Thus a battle ensues within me to find a happy balance. Here enters OSX with a BSD back-end and a slick interface.

A note on interfaces. I daresay the majority of human kind prefers to look at beauty rather than an eyesore. Thus stated we would prefer to work with an interface that was pretty, yet beauty is in the eye of the beholder, thus the attractive qualities of any given aesthetic portion of an interface may or may not win a fan. However, we also need good function in our interfaces, probably more so than we need good form (I for one argue for function over form, but that is not surprising given my affinity for the CLI). Now when form and function can combine a masterpiece is born, and that is what I am looking for.

I would love to see a desktop environment where everything that interact with, or rather, the form elements of my interface, are customizable. I am getting tired of the standard desktop interface. I want a new meme. I want something different. I want something fresh. I want something that I can change and modify and make it something unique. Something that is truly mine that would make others scratch their head in wonder at how to use my computer. That is what I liked about Linux, the intrigue of, “What do I do now?” and “How do I do … ?” keeping people at bay and giving me something different. I would love to have a system whose function is so well defined that the form can be altered in any way, and the function will remain present and intact. I would love to have the option to alter the way I find menus in programs, change how minimize, maximize, organize, and in all other means find and use the "windows" on my desktop. I would love to decide if I want icons or not, and what they would do, if they would be animated, where they would reside, how I would find them, if they could hide themselves so I could see the wallpaper. I would love to have a wallpaper that was animated, love to have a desktop with elements of 3D (maybe a 3D sphere that I can map my minimized programs onto), even a globe idea to interact with my data (this really excites me now that I think about it!).

I am dreaming. Most of this stuff would kill computer resources, and might even burn out a few brain cells of some programmers. Some of it is silly, I am sure. Some of it will not even appeal to the masses: only crazy old coots like myself would like it. Some of it is more form than function. Nonetheless, I would love to have a desktop environment where I had complete (and easy) control over the form, leaving the function to the real developers. I think I will continue to dream this dream for a long time.