Desktop advancements
Even today, there are some are some nice ideas from older windowing systems such as Sun's Open Look and OS2's Presentation Manager that have not been incorporated into modern window managers, such as selecting a dragging multiple windows and icons being 'live' objects, not just filesystem shortcuts. The past is the biggest inspiration for the future.
posted by Mike Austin at
5:37 PM
2 Comments:
BeOS also had live desktop objects, called replicants. If a global preference "show replicants" was on, then any window which defined itself as a replicant would show a little icon in the lower right corner, and a copy of it could be dragged onto the desktop. Not many programs implemented this API, but the three that I know of which did -- NetPositive (the browser), SoundTracker (the MP3 player), and Clock -- between the three of them added more functionality than Windows' ActiveDesktop did, with a simpler metaphor.
Oh -- and nobody ever used them. :D
By
Daniel Lyons, at 11:05 PM
Ah yes, how can I forget BeOS! I ran 3.0, 4.0 and 4.5 alongside Linux for a while. Why do all the cool technologies die? Arrrrg.
By
Mike Austin, at 12:11 PM
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