The future of GUIs, or, why the Linux desktop no longer matters
Following on from my earlier tweet...
Why Linux desktop UIs don't matter anymore: the best interface may be no interface at all
It's not the clearest piece but I think his insight is keen.
His point is that all this messing around with KDE 4 and GNOME 3 and so on is a distraction - that instead of imitating 1990s interfaces, we need ones for the kids of the 2nd decade of the 21st century, who are used to iOS and Android.
I think this is what Win8 might get right. Something that combines the simplicity of the iPad with actual real multitasking OS power with a local filesystem and all that. Dead simple full-screen apps, no window management or task switchers or anything, gesturally controlled, either via a touchscreen or a trackpad-plus-keyboard or perhaps a reborn Fingerworks-style combined trackpad-which-is-a-keyboard.
(Basically, think a really big trackpad that you can just type on.)
I think the killer feature might be a smart tiling window manager, so that on bigger screens, you can actually see 2 or 3 or more things at once - but without needing to ever learn how to move, split, resize and rearrange windows, which was the 1980s way to do things.
Win8 sort of has this - there is one fixed ~70:30 split, as I understand it. But the Linux tiling WMs have gone long beyond this years ago. The idea of tiling WMs is that they automatically rearrange your windows for you in an optimal, space-filling arrangement, so nothing is ever hidden behind anything else and all the available screen space is used. Goodbye, desktop wallpaper -- if you can see it, that space is being wasted.
I suspect that notions such as menus, app switchers (taskbar, dock, whatever) are possibly actually antiquated hang-ons. Users should not have to care about stuff like that -- if you don't need it, take it away.
It's just a guess -- I could be totally wrong, of course. But I suspect that the tablet/touchscreen-smartphone transition is going to look like the CLI-to-GUI one. All the techies and the geeks will howl in protest, then be quietly won over, move across and love it and only a few hold-outs will stay with the old way.
The obstacles in the way?
#1 -- a good smart window manager so you can still watch multiple apps at one time without doing your own window management. iOS totally fails at this, it's being bolted clumsily and badly onto Android, Win8 makes a very half-hearted stab, but someone is going to do it properly at some point.
#2 -- a rich OS behind it, with the ability to move files/docs/data/whatever between apps, in the way that again iOS fails at and Android isn't great at, but which desktop Windows and OS X excel at but make far too complex for non-techies.
#3 -- some kind of desktop input device that makes this pleasant, accessible and convenient for desk-bound computer users who aren't on tablets and don't want a little screen in their lap. Something that works well and fluidly with big monitors, including multiple ones, and with proper hardware keyboards.