Taskdriven desktop
Michiel Sikkes mentioned a taskdriven actions menu in his blog. I’ve had the idea of a taskdriven interface for a while, but I’m probably more radical: use the entire desktop for it.
If you were to add an actions menu, you’d be replacing everything. Pretty much everything you do on your computer can be described in it anyways.
So that was my idea, ditch menus, ditch launchers, ditch the desktop directory. You don’t want files on your desktop anyways! They’re not organised. It’s a temporary folder of some sort to most people, and thus it gets cluttered fast. Real fast. People can still do that with their home directory if they really want to. Looking in your home directory is an action too, by the way.
Display actions based on applications, ‘active’ devices and media, etc. on the desktop. You can still use icons for that if it looks more familiar to users. Or sort it according to the amount of use, or importance (media was just inserted, display it somewhere in front, where it’s noticable for example). Lots of ways you can tweak an idea like that.
It’s a bit more radical, I just felt like blogging about it. 
Your description sounds rather similar to the Symphony OS[1], and their mezzo environment.
[1] http://www.symphonyos.com/
I’ve heard of it, yes. I’ve never really tried it, but from the screenshots it doesn’t look like it’s all that taskdriven to me.
They have a livecd, maybe I should try it out sometime.
Hello,
I tried to launch an idea of “task oriented” knowledge database earlier this year. I even made a web site and a demo. The idea is collect information like evolution can send mail, xine can play movies… Those information are not subject to change often so maintenance should not be a big deal.
By the way my programming skills are not enough to go further, where is the right place to talk about that???
Task-driven desktop seems to become a buzz word in the Linux World… More and more people are starting to talk about it and it’s a pretty cool idea.
Mezzo isn’t taskdriven at all though… It’s just a Gecko (i think) rendered desktop with some slightly innovative ideas about desktop use. The implemented ideas are totally unusable by power users though. It works pretty slow too…