Tuesday, October 28, 2003

Life Immersion

Some screenshots and info about the new version of Windows is out. Codenamed Longhorn, MS wants the UI to be about "life immersion," or, as I read it, about managing everything. This is not necessarily a bad thing; people need help managing their lives.

But do I want to be immersed in my computer OS? Not really. I want to be immersed in my work, what the computer helps me do.

It's hard to tell from these screenshots how much they have moved away from the desktop metaphor. It looks like very little, although they do have one of those funky "association trees" on one of the slides. Those are cool-looking, but, as I found out a few years ago when I tried to use The Brain, it gets old fast. It's actually harder to navigate around in than the old heirachical file structures. Whatever happened to Apple's pile cabinet idea?

All in all, Longhorn doesn't seem like the great leap forward in desktop (or, better, no desktop) metaphors I keep hoping to see from somebody.

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