Slashdot Mirror
3D Sphere Interface for XP
Brian Brian writes "I found this super cool 3D, inside a sphere, desktop interface. The videos really demonstrate it. I would love this built into OS X but it is just for Windows right now. And if nothing else, the paradigm is the coolest way to handle multiple screens." Here are a
collection of screenshots & videos. I'm skeptical that it wouldn't be very practical, but it sure looks fun.
http://li3-33.members.linode.com/~sunny/slashdot-m irror/www.hamar.sk/sphere/screenshots.htm
if the bandwidth gets out of hand, I'll shut this mirror down
Sunny Dubey
and the screen shots page won't last much longer either But here's the Mirrot Dot Link in case you missed it
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Tried it last night, actually, while I was playing with my desktop.
It's a fun theory tool and shows you exactly what SUN was going for in Project Looking Glass. However, when it comes down to it, it has no current practical application. Windows are stored in the sphere, not used in it, which means that everytime you want to recover an open window, you need to go into sphere mode, look arounnd for the window, find it, and then bring it back to flat mode. It adds a whole extra step to the process, and definitely a lot more time.
I think the best improvement may be interaction with windows inside the sphere, but as the website proclaims, this project is still in Beta.
Best,
- Brandon
Looking Glass
Just
Sorry, I only grab one page deap on stories but you can see the thumbnails:
e enshots.htm
e x.html
http://slashdot.fluky.org/www.hamar.sk/sphere/scr
Also their main page:
http://slashdot.fluky.org/www.hamar.sk/sphere/ind
You mean ``Doom as a tool for system administration''?
It's been done (as a research project!) on Linux though.
http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I've used it a bit - It's really nice - Or rather promising! ;)
;)
;)
I didn't use SphereXP for very long, as it wasn't very mature when I used it, but I found Spaces, which was pretty good - It's not exactly the same, but they both make use of our spacial memory - With spaces I could have 30+ windows open and have no problems at all navigating them
The only problem is that they are "images" of the window, and hence does not update once they are out of focus.
Plus, none of them support multiple screens, as far as I can remember - I use a dual screen setup right now, but I would still *love* to have it
I got interested in it after viewing demonstrations of Sun's Looking Glass (I think it's called) - now they updated in real time, but that was "built in"... Plus it was linux
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
The GUI on XP loads fast - if you've ever wondered why it takes another minute for it to become useable, it's because it's still loading all the services and crud in the background - the difference with linux is that it loads the crud up front in the open. When it's ready to go, it's ready so to speak.