Yes, you can export all your content as a .muse bundle — which you can rename to a .zip and unzip to get all the source data.
Also, even after your subscription ends, you will still have access to your content (and to the export feature) indefinitely. You just can’t create new cards (as long as you have more than 100).
It’s really important to us that your data isn’t locked into Muse, not by the data format and not by a subscription requirement.
You are right. I left that out of the video to focus on the more interesting features. There is a small note on the website about how text selection could work with gaze and touch:
---
Text Selection
Place one finger on the touchpad to adjust a cursor at the gaze position. Use a second finger to set the end of the selection.
Yeah, the two 6 finger gestures are certainly not ideal. I imagined a much larger touchpad, between the size of the Apple Keyboard and Apple Trackpad, so that might make it a little easier.
It's also important to note that these two gestures perform features (fullscreen / minimize) that can also be done by just resizing the panel (either with 3 fingers, or by going to App Control).
Sadly, technology isn't good enough for eye tracking to completely replace the mouse. Your eye will always flutter a little and wander around, so you can't rely on eye tracking exclusively.
It's also not really practical to perform gestures with your eyes. So you'll still want a touchpad to have quick access to common features through these gestures.
I have actually researched this topic quite a lot, and have also been prototyping with a Tobii EyeX tracker.
I didn't mean to insinuate that technology is at a point where eye tracking excellent, I meant to play along with the video where it was a requirement of the new desktop that eye tracking be excellent.
Thus in this theoretical world where eye tracking is excellent, why is hand gesturing not as advanced as eye tracking?
Yes, panels follow similar ideas and have similar advantages to tiling windows. However, I don’t think that the benefit of being able to work with windows that aren't full-height outweighs their added complexity compared to using only full-height panels.
With todays technology and established interface patterns from mobile, I believe it's feasible to use the ideas of tiling window managers beyond a niche market.
First: full-height maximisation is sufficiently useful to me that I gravitate strongly toward environments which allow me to hotkey this. WindowMaker's remained my go-to largely for this reason, along with a handful of others.
Second: less-than-full-height windows can be quite useful. Being able to specify a "stack" into which, say, I place a video (or video-chat) app, various A/V controls, and possibly some monitors or other smaller windows, perhaps a shorter terminal window or three, is easily something I'd like to do.
With WindowMaker I can _arrange_ windows in a pseudo-tiled state. Unfortunately it's too easy to accidentally drag one off somewhere. Generally, though, this can be quite handy.
What I'd really like to be able to do is to specify roles for certain window locations. Say, a browser, image editor, and audio editor all occupying the same larger window space, which I can tab between.
And I think you're quite right about applicability of tiling metaphors.
I agree! Desktop Neo isn't about using touchscreen or tablets to replace the desktop. The opposite, actually. It tries to move the desktop even further away from phones by rethinking it for professional users.
And yep, the first part about using panels was very much inspired by 10/GUI. I am linking to that concept on the website, and also talked to Clayton Miller before publishing Desktop Neo.
I can see that most comments here didn't read your entire article. I work at my two-monitor desktop 90% of the time. I really like your ideas. Most of the time I only need to see two application windows at a time.
Maybe the your article needs to immediately clarify who you are and the intent of the design, and maybe differentiate between your design intended for producers vs. consumers.
This is exactly the idea of Desktop Neo. If tablets and phones are used for consumption, the desktop can be focused on productivity.
I don't want to replace the complexity of the desktop with interfaces that are easier. I want them to be better, to be more efficient for professionals.
Concepts like panels, tags and touch input are probably way harder to understand than windows, folders and mouse input. But it doesn’t matter, because professionals spend so much time on desktop computers that it's worth the effort to master the interface.
> I want them to be better, to be more efficient for professionals.
This is a good goal. But gestures and multitouch will not lead you on the path to that goal. Consider tiling window managers like awesome or i3, that already today help programmers (myself included) be more efficient. They achieve this by reducing time-consuming dragging, dropping, resizing and clicking actions either by replacing them with keyboard shortcuts or simply by automating them away. A UI where you have to move your hands even further (distance keyboard-screen > distance keyboard-mouse) will actually decrease productivity (and likely cause RSI problems as well).
I realise this is a mockup/concept design. But if you want to pursue the idea further, I very much recommend using a tiling window manager for an extended period of time, to learn from that paradigm.
Back when I went to Gmail from a folder type email representation, it was hard at first. But search proved superior. Basically, a lot of organizational time investment had no return. Getting better at search always has a return, and you save all the laborious folder management.
I've taken to one or two big directories filled with reference material, docs, pictures, etc... search generally pays off.
Smarter tagging is likely to work in similar ways.
My beef with search-based, tag-based UIs are they are not great at browsing content. Sometimes I want to just review and look at older content, not search for one particular thing.
As a developer, I unfortunately have to live in a fundamentally different paradigm where file systems are inescapable (unless OSes change dramatically under the hood), keyboards are essential, etc. etc.
But when I'm not trying to write code I can see this working.
This is a long response, but I think it might be useful to read.
There are a lot of attempts to redesign the desktop or do some clever thing to increase productivity but all of them tend to forget the fundamentals of interacting with the computer. The forget why what we have is successful and seem unclear as to what they are trying to move towards as an improvement.
That probably seems like a bold statement so lets look at a few things.
Lets look at why something like paper is still around. Do we care that one piece of paper might hide behind another in a stack of papers on a desk, is that a terminal failure of the medium? I'd say no. Just like windows hiding others, it's not a fundamental issue that needs solving.
Why else might paper be successful? I'd suggest it's not the paper itself, it the way we interact with paper. We don't use our hands to mark the paper, we use tools, we use pens, brushes, pencils, chalks and all manor of things. Paper is a tool that allows us to get the best from a range of our 'marking' tools.
Like wise, if we are to interact via touch with the desktop, it stands to reason that to get the best from the experience we need to have a range of tactile tools to do so. We need our keyboard, our mice, our touch pads, touch screens and stylus'. Concomitantly, we need our desktops to allow us to get the most out of these interaction tools.
To my mind, the problem with the desktop isn't that it needs a fundamentally more restrictive use pattern, it needs a better use of the available control mechanisms.
Let's think about why Vim is so enduring and successful. Vim only does one thing, manipulates text and it's got a mode of operation totally alien to many who've used a text editor. Yet for decades now it's what many gravitate towards as the pinnacle of interacting with text on a computer (shout out to Emacs folks, this is just an example!).
Vims's method of operation seeks to ruthlessly release the power of the keyboard to offer huge benefits in terms of productivity and manipulation.
What is your design seeking to ruthlessly release from the power of our interactive devices? Why are our existing tools better for interacting with your design than a traditional desktop? what power are you releasing from them?
All of this is to say that whilst you may redesign the desktop and have clever (and useful) schemes to increase productivity, these designs don't pay enough attention to the things we use to interact with the computer, and so don't offer true lasting benefit and therefore don't catch on or endure.
If you redesign the way the desktop works, you need to either re-imagine the tools we use to interact with it or take measures, without pity or care for convention, to release the power of the existing ones.
Apple's done an interesting job in this area in it's move to bring touch gestures into the control of the desktop, but I'd don't think it's hardly been a fully realised opportunity.
