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Peter Cochrane's Hard Drive 1999 Light at the end of the Windows ONE recent Sunday morning my youngest son looked over my shoulder at my laptop screen and exclaimed: "Good grief, what are you doing?" He was right - what a mess - icons everywhere, in some places three or more deep - complete chaos. My only excuse was that I had been travelling and had not had time for a clean-up session. For years I have used between two and four screens simultaneously on my desktop machines to overcome the dual limitations imposed by the Windows environment and limited visual real estate of the CRT and LCD. To some extent I have succeeded in partitioning my work areas into diary, email, browser, work area and icon space (a huge icon junkyard of chaos that I really will clean up one day). And as a delightful combination of order and chaos it has worked reasonably well. But I have to admit that recently, the sheer number of simultaneously open applications and jobs has surpassed my limits to manage visually on even four screens. I need either more space or something beyond Windows - a new way of screen working. It is interesting to see the recent rapid rise of network computing, and not through the much celebrated Java, but by the common browser. Free email, diary, photo album, home page and much more are now available at the cost of a phone call and an ISP subscription. Numerous suppliers across the planet are moving into this new space supported by advertising and network-linked services. Not long ago, such free services were widely considered as far too flaky and insecure for any serious or professional use. But increasingly, individuals, small businesses and giant corporations are looking to this approach as a viable alternative to the daily combat with their own internal, or contracted, IT departments and support. What is missing from these services is the full desktop combination of graphics, spreadsheet, word processing and the rest. But it is gradually being realised that security is not a real issue if the systems are well-engineered. In my estimation a slavish replication of today's desktop facilities on some remote server, browser-based or no, would be a bad mistake. With the present state of network access it would be far too slow and cumbersome, and as prone to crashing as today. A better approach would be to address the fundamental problem of moving on from Windows, which has been in use for 20 years, and around as a concept for over 30. We need something fundamentally new and more adaptive. It seems to me that organising our information and activities on an event-timeline rather than as a facsimile of a paper-based desktop is the way to go. In general, we associate everything in our lives on a time trajectory, so it would be a natural step to organise our workspace in a similar manner. Moreover, our navigation and search abilities would be naturally enhanced and the clutter would be drastically reduced. Perhaps the greatest benefit to us all from such a move would be the availability of everything we require on any machine anywhere with a browser and Net access. Instead of lugging laptops across the planet, we could just use any available terminal at will. No operating system and application version limitations - just do it. Peter Cochrane holds the Collier Chair for the Public Understanding of Science & Technology at the University of Bristol. His home page is: |
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