A Challenge for the GUI gifted

I sad down the other night and thought of GUI design ideas I had seen and liked - and I started drawing on a peice of paper at least some of the features I would like to see in the desktop of the near future.

And I came to thinking, what would you people like to happen to our beloved Linux desktops now that xserver, HAL, D-BUS and other nice freedesktop.org projects are about to change the way we use the desktop.

Oh and once I figure out how to work GIMP Ill post a primitive mockup of my basic idea.

[Ashcrow]

I've always wanted to have a constant shell open in the background. All one would have to do is type the app name and it would start instead of finding it in the menu or opening a terminal starting the app and then closing the terminal. It would show what you are typing in an overly on the screen top right corner or something as you typed it and fade out if you stopped typing fore more than X seconds.

The only other thing I've been itching for is more movie like GUI's. It's just eyecandy, but it makes things so much more fun and exciting to have slick looking apps/WM/DE. IMHO only Enlightenment has really done that in terms of a WM.

[Tyr_7BE]

LC have you followed Seth Nickell's vision of what he one day hopes the free desktop will be? You may be interested to check in at http://www.designfu.org now and again to read his blog. He's quite interested in next-gen desktop stuff, as am I.

I'd be quite interested to see your ideas.

Seth is my god d00d... aside RML of course.

[Tyr_7BE]

Do you mean RMS? I'm hoping not cause that guy is just over the top :

But yeah I also follow Seth's work closely. The man is pretty damn brilliant.

[quote author=Tyr_7BE link=board=6;threadid=8379;start=0#msg76151 date=1073002202]
Do you mean RMS? I'm hoping not cause that guy is just over the top :

But yeah I also follow Seth's work closely. The man is pretty damn brilliant.
[/quote]

Robert M. Love - Kernel hacker, did the Preemptive kernel patch and is now working for Ximian doing very important work on GNOME and desktop kernel improvements.

In a few days he solved the age old problem of mounting stuff statelessly without polling - using HAL, udev and a kernel notification layer he just happened to be writting.

Future work from his hand will include Storage (the WinFS like stuff Seth is working on), and of course the worlds most kicking desktop kernel tree with all sorts of latency work and cool stuff.

I did an interview with him for TinyMinds.org about.. a year ago I think, and hes been a real trooper answering my requests ever since, a real gentleman.

Here is his blog so you can follow his work:
http://primates.ximian.com/~rml/blog/

Of couse one could look at DashBoard aswell and see the great potential Ximian is building up for a truely exellent desktop.