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Doing effects over non-overlapping windows is possible. Doing such things as this or this or this are not.

XGL, also known as X they way it should have been (and will be)

I submitted this story to Slashdot last week, but for some reason it seems to be stuck in "Pending" status, so go here: http://nat.org/2005/february/#9-February-2005

It's an OpenGL-based X11 server, complete with some screenshots. Apparently, window dragging is very smooth (no repaint events are even given to the apps), and with Cairo and GTK, this really could be the future backend for Linux desktops.

That guy is a riot. On this page he complains about MS "biting" his idea, but on the Xgl page, he dismisses the pioneering work done by Apple as "cute hacks" and says it is now "our space to explore", despite the fact that it's already been explored. Who is "biting" now, eh?

How about Xgl, the port of X to OpenGL HW/SW?

Dashboard

Seeing as how the submitter neglected to link to the actual announcement, here it is: http://nat.org/2005/january/#17-January-2005

The whole point of datamining is that I don't know what I'll need later, when I first store it. I've got a pretty sharp association engine in my wetware, so I remember relevant keywords. What is really needed is an association graph search tool that finds structure in message metadata as well as patterns in unstructured content. People are working on it. Meanwhile, how am I drowning in a short stack of CDs and a couple of DLTs?

That's all because we don't have good search tools for the email archive. I actually mine my email a bit: maybe a half dozen times a year targeting the past 1-2 years, maybe a couple-few times every couple of years targeting the past 5-10 years, probably a dozen times over the past 5-10 years going back to the mid-1980s. I wish I had my early 1980s email, BBS posts and "talk" sessions. The value from a single search that clears my wetware cobwebs is worth the effort schlepping the whole hoard through time and space. What I'd like would be a background reference/filter like Dashboard that would keep me mindful of relevant references, regardless of age (depending on my preferences). But then, I also have a library of the thousands of books I've read, which weighs tons, occupies many cubic meters, and is flammable, though it looks a lot better than a short stack of CD-ROMs.

Nat (the Ximian dude) recently hurt himself and has been reduced to being a one-handed typist. In order to stay connected, he's hired someone to take dictation for him. In today's blog entry he talks about the experience, what it's like for a very competent typist to use a dictation system, and thinks aloud about future intelligent speech-to-text applications.

Nat Friedman wrote about speech recognition in his blog today. Some interesting thoughts there.

Net Friedman (of Ximian) fame, just blogged about his experiences with an alternative voice recognition application.

Check it out here

Maybe that's because I'm replying to the Slashdot blurb itself, not TFA. I like the addition of clicking to make them explain why they're greyed out. But I also want something better. So I asked. I'm not as interested in tweaking the menu items, as in thinking of new ways to use the screen to interactivate info. That "greyed out" stuff last got an upgrade when I worked at Apple 10 years ago, when they introduced the "help balloons" that everyone hated. 10 years before that was the original Mac, with the original grey. It's time for something really new, that takes into account our past 10, 20 years living with (and against) the "Desktop". Personally I like GNOME Dashboard, especially because I think it's better suited to "phones", and other limited UI mobile devices. Sorry to disappoint you, but I've got my own reasons, and my own strange rhythms.

What about Dashboard? It's like a global search thing, except you don't have to tell it what to search for. You just do stuff on your computer, and it shows you things related to what you're doing.

dashboard . ms is going to be the last to the party. A good overview description can be found here.

dashboard . ms is going to be the last to the party. A good overview description can be found here.

Linux has Dashboard for background-search metadata relations among apps - data autointegration.

Your cry is somewhat answered. Obligatory screeny.

There is a project: http://www.nat.org/dashboard/

Linux users can try out Nat Friedman's Beagle, which does something like what Google's desktop does. The Dashboard project uses it to find information pertinent to your current desktop task and displays it in a sidebar. Pretty neat. It's one of the C#/Mono projects that's available for Linux.

How can search as a concept become better integrated into the desktop? Are projects like dashboard the next killer app?

Maybe until recently I would have agreed. However, recently I have started noticing projects relating to desktop search: Dashboard, Beagle, DBFS, etc. This is the hot new area of desktop innovation, and at the moment it seems Gnome has an early lead, with KDE looking to start up some related projects too. Off the desktop, Namesys is moving towards related technologies on the filesystem level. To the extent that MacOS-X can be said to be OSS, they have their Spotlight technology. On the other side, well, it looks like we won't be seeing WinFS in Longhorn afterall.....

For example...?

Let's see.... the internet, the web, email, chat, network-aware windowing systems, DNS, NTP, security systems (like kerberos), and a slew of other network stuff that we take for granted these days.

More recently:

CODA, GNOME Storage (RDBMS-based filesystem), Dashboard (which Microsoft bit off of and calls "implicit query"), Wiki, . . .

A *lot* of true software innovation starts in the free software world. Often it's taken, usurped, and out-marketted by commercial vendors (like the case of MS Internet Explorer). That doesn't mean it didn't start as free software.

There are quite a few examples of commercial innovation, too, especially in the case of business software like the various office suites, database query tools, etc. Innovation is not exclusively a free software activity. But I think the GP post was correct: the free software community has demonstrably provided more innovation than Microsoft.

Beagle will probably meet at least some of these goals. Beagle also aims to index things like your gaim-logs, browsing history, and email as well as your files. This is closely related to the dashboard project. Both projects can be retrieved from Gnome CVS.

http://www.nat.org/beagle/
http://www.nat.org/dashboard/

Beagle will probably meet at least some of these goals. Beagle also aims to index things like your gaim-logs, browsing history, and email as well as your files. This is closely related to the dashboard project. Both projects can be retrieved from Gnome CVS.

http://www.nat.org/beagle/
http://www.nat.org/dashboard/

So that you all can avoid those google searches here are the links:

Storage Beagle
Dashboard

Well, you can use the magic file to determine file type. The Nueros MP3 player can identify songs based on a 30-second clip, using an on-line service. There are systems that can automatically identify a person in a photograph, though these are not yet generally available to the public, nor are they 100% accurate. (But, they would be more accurate for organizing photographs, as people tend to take pictures of a small subset of the population.)

Cameras often encode date and time.

Then, there are remembrance agents like Dashboard that can help, as well.

There are already a lot of relationships embedded in our email and other documents. There's no reason these relationships can't be automatically extracted and formalized by the filesystem for rapid access.

In general, there is a *lot* of metadata that *can* be automatically populated. A lot of it is only of general use. However, that is still a step in the right direction.

I probably shouldn't respond to a troll, but I'll bite on this one.

We have a sidebar that has significant more functionality than what MS intends to have two years from now. And our sidebar isn't vaporware: Dashboard

Lonhorn is going to have multiple desktops, tell MS not to copy Linux.

.Net is Java reincarnated, tell MS to give it back to Sun.

BeOS had BeFS in 1996, its everything that WinFS was going to be and then some, tell MS to not use WinFS.

While we are at it, The new windows versions are a bit like VMS, make sure you tell MS to scrap it all and start from scratch. Oh and this time also make sure you tell them not to include any BSD code again. I'll stop now, I wouldn't want to embarass you anymore.
Regards,
Steve

"Windows group chief James Allchin accuses Linux of being a cheap knockoff: "There's no innovation. Linux is still in the business of cloning existing technology." ... Searches will extend across all data like e-mail, photos, Word. "We're creating things," he says."

Sounds eerily like a "cheap knockoff" of Dashboard to me.....

Sounds just like the Remembrance Agent for emacs which has been around since about 1996. It's also similar to the Dashboard program that Nat Friedman made for Gnome. There's enough prior art that I have no doubt that blinkx will get a patent.

Isn't this just a clone of Dashboard?

Would Apple kindly stop stepping on names already used by the open source community? Calling Macintosh OS 10 "OS X" was bad enough ("are you running X on your Mac"?).

Dashboard is Nat Friedman's implicit query system for Gnome. That's been around for a while.

Where are the free software projects investigating next generation UI concepts?

You just aren't looking.

Here's one: dashboard

No, not Apple's Dashboard, Nat's dashboard. It's a pretty cool concept, and I can guarrantee you that Apple will steal it and put it in OS X 10.5.

Hope this isn't redundant, but what about Gnome's Dashboard?

It had the name first.

there was some commercial app being developed similiar to dashboard but how useful it would be use debatable.

dashboard relies on having data input from the currently focused form/app of an application (for front-ends). So if you have say Evolution (email client) open or gaim information is sent to dashboard which tries to match this information with existing information and graphically summarise it in dashboard.

All this requires some code changes in client apps so this could work.

So the applications you interact with have to be able to interact with dashboard. Assuming you go MS the whole hog (only use MS apps) ...maybe you could get MSOffice to do something via COM but what Outlook Express (or Outlook) or other commercial apps?

there was some commercial app being developed similiar to dashboard but how useful it would be use debatable.

dashboard relies on having data input from the currently focused form/app of an application (for front-ends). So if you have say Evolution (email client) open or gaim information is sent to dashboard which tries to match this information with existing information and graphically summarise it in dashboard.

All this requires some code changes in client apps so this could work.

So the applications you interact with have to be able to interact with dashboard. Assuming you go MS the whole hog (only use MS apps) ...maybe you could get MSOffice to do something via COM but what Outlook Express (or Outlook) or other commercial apps?

there was some commercial app being developed similiar to dashboard but how useful it would be use debatable.

dashboard relies on having data input from the currently focused form/app of an application (for front-ends). So if you have say Evolution (email client) open or gaim information is sent to dashboard which tries to match this information with existing information and graphically summarise it in dashboard.

All this requires some code changes in client apps so this could work.

So the applications you interact with have to be able to interact with dashboard. Assuming you go MS the whole hog (only use MS apps) ...maybe you could get MSOffice to do something via COM but what Outlook Express (or Outlook) or other commercial apps?

Nat Friedman's dashboard is absolutely nothing like Konfabulator. Doesn't even remotely do the same thing. The OS X Dashboard is basically a rip-off of Konfabulator, yes. But Nat's Dashboard and Beagle address the problem of searching/indexing metadata on the entire system and not throwing away data that can be useful later for searching.

Given that my main OS is Windows (sorry), is there anything like this for it?

Here's my reason

Muine, a media player

Woodpusher, an ICS chess client (seems to have stagnated recently though).

Dashboard, an exciting new user interfact paradigm.

I'm sure there are others, these are the ones I remember off the top of my head.

Dashboard, which not too long ago got a reference on sweetcode.

Ever see dashboard? It takes information gathered during IRC, IM, web browsing, e-mail, and more, does a lot of backend cluepacket mojo, and returns a lot of useful information while you work. If "bug 1565" comes up during your work, it'll fetch information in dashboard about the bug without needing you to click on a bug link. Microsoft is working on the same thing, called "implicit query" or some such. Look at the Windows Longhorn screenshots so far... It looks like they are taking the classic IE information sidebar and altering it to work in this way.

The desktop itself is a dead metaphor. Sure, in 1984 the Mac looked great, with a whole virtual desktop on a 10" screen. But 20 years later, the screen is only 20". What happened to my 3'x5' physical desktop? It's covered with other computing devices that want to talk to my virtual desktop. That's confusing.

And an obsolete metaphor. In 1984, that desktop made computers more user-friendly (coining that now-trite phrase, too) than the mainframes anyone knew, or the disembodied HAL voice everyone was "promised" (threatened). Now that the virtual desktop has gotten 80% of the way there, it's no longer necessary to oversimplify info management into the straitjacket of its 20th Century analog form factors. It's still too complicated for most humans to intuit - not to mention the billions who have never used a real desk, but could get jacked into the Internet at least intermittently, changing their lives and the world much more cheaply than chaining them to a desk out in the bush. And for the rest of us, we already get it, and the desktop metaphor just keeps us in the second grade.

Linux, with its excellent support of the OSI multitier model, and true cross-platform distributions (from modems to mainframes), is not chained to a desktop metaphor for presentation and organization. All its competitors are. As we leave our desks behind, we'll also leave behind Windows, Macintosh, and all the rest stuck behind theirs. Let's get the job done better in the 21st Century with interfaces like GNOME Dashboard. Or some other interface that supports us with transparent multimedia, like some kind of quiet voice interface through our earbuds. Webs of the World, unite, you have nothing to lose but your desks!

Presumably part of Microsoft's desktop DashBoard-style system that they're hoping will kick Google's ass is an image search engine with image recognition. That's pretty much the only way this toy could be useful. Of course, I'll believe it when I see it working.

How about just scripting bitchx to interoperate with Bonobo, and wrapping GnomeMeeting components into GStreamer components? And have it all behind GNOME Dashboard, instead of that clunky 20th Century "desktop"?

Well, Nat certainly has cooled off his work on the project, though I don't think "abandoned" is completely accurate. Check out Nat's dashboard blog, and you'll notice a few updates since this summer (when development was really cruising). Also, it seems as though some outside parties have begun picking up where Nat left off (e.g. here). My guess is that Nat just got overwhelmed by the whole Novell acquisition.

The GNOME people have always been bold in trying out new strategies. After the gnome2 drive to simplify the UI and move away from featuritis it has come a long way. There are some exciting developments like dashboard, gstreamer and desktop integration bounty hunt. Watch out for 2.6!

utilising your own system is a start. on the desktop there's nat *Ximian* friedmans Dashboard

utilising your own system is a start. on the desktop there's nat *Ximian* friedmans Dashboard