[darrick]

just thought i'd pass this on. i saw a screenshot of someone's desktop on another site that showed a shot of the looking glass demo picture. looking glass seems to be a very osX-like desktop system.

sun calls it "Project Looking Glass by Sun Microsystems: A Revolutionary Evolution of Today's Desktop"

watch the demo, a real player movie: the coolest thing is that you can flip a window over and write on a stickie note there on the back of the window.

sun's project looking glass page

[MacGorilla]

Its actually a 3D interface. A bit different from OS X's 2D interace.

[chabig]

It's pretty cool that you can flip the window and write on a note. But how often have you ever wanted to do that?

[Moonray]

Topic: Mac OS X 10.4 - The 3D OS?

I don't see how emulating 3D on a 2D screen would make things easier. Scribbling a note on the back of something is appropriate if the something is in your hands and there's no other place. I see no need to make attaching notes to digital media that difficult.
Turning over pages is good if you read a book, using a scrollbar is good for reading a text document.

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[ambush]

Lol. That screenshot. It looks like an old mid-90es "futuristic" screenshot.

Reality hurts, but it's freaking ugly man.

[anaphora68]

In case you guys were interested, there is already emulation software out there that is called Mac on Linux that lets you run a mac os in emulation mode. I don't know if the developments support OS X or not, but it's still pretty neat.

[SomeToast]

I like the rotating carousel of CD images in the demo. A handy method of selecting a CD ... if all you have are ten CDs.

[Moonray]

And besides that I select my CDs outside of my computer. Inside I have files.

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[Ratm]

Originally posted by anaphora68:
In case you guys were interested, there is already emulation software out there that is called Mac on Linux that lets you run a mac os in emulation mode. I don't know if the developments support OS X or not, but it's still pretty neat.

From what I've read, emulation can only be achieved on PPC processors. And I think Sun's concepts are great. If they can improve and manage to surpass Apple in the UI engineering department and help advance the concepts of computing then I'm all for it. We should be more supportive of each others efforts, because we all benefit from them.

[Ratm]

Originally posted by SomeToast:
I like the rotating carousel of CD images in the demo. A handy method of selecting a CD ... if all you have are ten CDs.

I assume that if you break it down into categories and arrange it by genre, artist, albums, songs, etc. it could become far more superior to how we organise and select music out of these endless text based system that we have now. Its similar to the advantages the GUI had over the terminal.


If the cds had the actual information and weren't just static icons then I could see real possibilities in this concept. Have the CD icon display the information similar to how iTunes displays it in its window (or what ever you call it); highlighting and enlarging the title of the song or album when selected.

[Brass]

I think that what Sun are doing with looking glass is very much the same as what Apple has already done with quartz and quartz extreme.

The main difference is in the end uses they've found for it.

Once it is implemented, the difficulty is trying to figure out what it really is useful for. And the honest answer really is "not much". It just looks good, and that's about it.

It's very easy to add 3D (or even 2D) effects to an operation and make it look very glitzy, but does that really help?

Apple has taken a relatively conservative approach with its usage of such effects. In fact the only place where I can see that they've really used 3D is the cube effect in logging in and switching users. They've copped a lot of flack for other (2D) effects such as minimising.

Sun on the other hand, in order to show off the technology, have come up with a zillion useless things that you can do with it. "Hey, you can see what your window would look like from behind!". Sure, but, why would you want to?

[madmacgames]

Originally posted by anaphora68:
In case you guys were interested, there is already emulation software out there that is called Mac on Linux that lets you run a mac os in emulation mode. I don't know if the developments support OS X or not, but it's still pretty neat.

on x86 machines, Mac OS emulation only goes up to OS 8.x. Some groups are working on emulating PPC on x86 (then you can run OS9.x and up) but none have showed any results and there is nothing currently available and probably never will be until x86 gets to the point it is able to emulate PPC.

[ApeInTheShell]

The interface reminds me of the next evolution of the Launch CD which used to run on Mac OS 7.5.

I think linux and sun OS's have one problem and that is user interface design.

- overkill in customization (you know it's true)
- unable to get away from the dull gray colored windows (there are exceptions)
- ease of use (this is subjective but if you review the screenshot you could see how the user might wonder what happened to their document after it flipped to the otherside)

Give me a 2D over 3D interface and than i'll smile.

By the way, if we didn't have some textual feedback than how would we know the hippo means your system crashed? hehe

[Xerxes]

I think it looks very tacky and a complete rip-off from OSX. Looks like a desperate attempt to make another OS to me.

X

[lenox]

Just imagine, for a second, how annoying it would be to have to try to find your windows in a 3D 'space'. Unless you had a good indication of your pitch and yaw, etc...you'd be quite lost. There's a reason that an OS's 2d desktop is called a "desktop"...it works somewhat like the top of a desk, which is two-dimensional for all intents and purposes.

[darrick]

i really like the idea of attaching a stickie note to a file. having it on the back is a handy place to write it, tho i could see how it could easily be lost without a something on the front indicating there's a stickie. attaching it to the front like a real stickie would be better, of course.

so maybe it could work like this: you've got a file, say a memo draft; you flip the file over and write your stickie; you close your file; next day, when you open your file, the stickie appears, stuck on the front of the memo draft, like a real stickie; you can move it out of the way to work on the memo, but it stays with the file until you delete the stickie or the file.

you can do something like this with acrobat 5 (and i imagine acrobat 6, which i do not have), but it's really tied up in ownership and security and never seemed easy to use, but maybe that's because i use pdfs more for transfering and archiving docs than drafting them .

maybe something like this could be done generally in osX with an applescript and the Stickies we already have? like attaching a folder action? but here it would be attaching a file action?

[Toyin]

If you want to play with a 3D finder try out 3DOSX. Fun to play with but not very useful.

The same applies with looking glass.