[cap-talk] top-to-bottom (cajaDesk at the top?)

[Dave Chizmadia - GMail]

Steve's comments reminded me of a stray question I had last
week after Kevin Reid announced that he is working on an
e-on-js implementation...

Is anyone working on a capdesk-like environment in Caja?

This would provide a rather powerful environment for
browsing a web-based ocap graph. It would also be a
compelling laboratory for experiments on ocap usability
and abusability.

-DMC

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Steve Witham" <sw at tiac.net>
To: <cap-talk at mail.eros-os.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2009 1:48 AM
Subject: Re: [cap-talk] top-to-bottom (What sustained interest 
incapabilities)


> >From: "Stiegler, Marc D" <marc.d.stiegler at hp.com>
>>
>>This would be a project equivalent to combining the Linux open
>>source effort, the GNOME open source effort, a bunch of the separate
>>device driver open source efforts, the Xwindows open source effort,
>>and (since the browser is now a part of the trusted computing base)
>>the Firefox open source effort.
>
> The new Palm Pre's UI is reportedly...HTML/CSS/Javascript, using the
> Webkit browser.  So, scratch GNOME and X off anyway.  Well, not 
> really--
> you do need some sort of UI discipline, but some redundancy is 
> withering away.
>
> & The Pre is from a company who everybody thought couldn't afford 
> any
> software engineers anymore.
>
> A lot of UI work is about putting a nice face on the stuff 
> everybody's
> used to.  If the idea is a groundshaking paradigm shift where a lot 
> of the
> things we're used to doing are declared dangerous nonsense, then 
> maybe that
> simplifies away a lot.  Leaving us with the problem of useable 
> security
> of course!
>
> Back around 2000, wasn't Sun going to produce diskless workstations 
> based
> on the Java Virtual Machine?  I kinda wondered at the time why 
> someone
> didn't recode Unix in Java.  Another potential shrinkage although I 
> don't
> know whether people are thoroughly happy with the JVM these days. 
> Of
> course by Java I mean E the way people say C when they mean C++.
>
> Also I keep thinking people should settle on an interactive PDF  for 
> the
> low-level screen stuff (don't know Quartz well enough to say whether
> that's a good model).
>
> In the 1980s there was a paper called "My Accordion is Full of 
> Paper,"
> saying that as a project progresses, there's a phase where you add 
> more
> and more details, until some sort of synergizing or clarification 
> sets in,
> whereupon the amount of detail starts to shrink again.  So, it's 
> like an
> accordion filling up, then emptying out.  I haven't been able to 
> find
> that paper or remember the authors.  Maybe that model applies to 
> tech
> progress overall.
>
> Not really contradicting your point about the current state of the 
> art,
> or the difficulty of squeezing that accordion, Marc.
>
>  --Steve
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