The Web Desktop (Draft)

One of the design challenges I’ve thought about recently is redesiging the interface for personal computers. For years, we’ve worked on computers using the “desktop” metaphor, invented by Douglas Englebart, refined by Xerox, and made popular by Apple and Microsoft.

The change I am pondering is moving the computer interface in the direction that web sites have been going. As blogs dominate the personal web publishing arena, many people, including myself, are seeing them as a lightweight content management system. At the same time, I and my friends are working in corporate environments and creating giant hierarchies of folders to contain all our documents. Finding a given document on our hard drive is now more complicated than finding information online is thanks to Google.

Many people have proposed “Googling” their hard drives, citing that Google seems faster at searching millions of computers than the built-in “find” functionality in Windows and OS X is at searching one. And Microsoft has done us an involuntary service through their monopolizing the browser, by making even the file browser an “Explorer” window, replete with address bar, navigation buttons, and search.

But my proposed change extends beyond the way information is found, to the way it is created. Possible traits of such a system include:

• Everything has an address, citable by any other element
• Search is ubiquitous, replacing browsing
• Commands are done one at a time, from a control-line type interface
• Applications still run stand-alone, but their relationship to files (saving, opening), is done through the web interface
• External web content is seamlessly accessed by local content

My goal is to make the process of creation mimic the way our minds work, like my Life Blogging idea. In 50 years, if we’re still using the “desktop” metaphor, we’ve missed out. I hope to help change it.