[openbeos] Re: Data or App Centric?

>
> The concept should be neither data nor app-centric but _TASK_
> centric. On GE we've discussed the "tool-chain" approach for
> quite some time. The entire user experience IMO should be
> centered around tasks that the user wants to complete. The
> applications should make their "tools" available for this in a
> "chained" manner. The tasks would be initially predefined for the
> user, but in good BeOS fashion customizable for anyone who wants
> more out of the system.
>
> [snip example]
>
That's an extremely good idea, almost directly from The Humane Interface
by Raskin.  If any of you haven't read it, it's really worth a look, and
while some of it is really up in the blue, there are some things worth
noting; especially the task-based system.  He proposes a system where you
only have data and no applications at all. Doing a spell check on text in
an image would go something like selecting the part of the image with the
text on it, invoke the command list and choose the "spell check" command. 
As the SC command expects text, it goes through the system asking for
anything willing to convert image to text (i.e., an OCR module), which
would then give the SC command some text that can be processed.

This would require a global command list, as well, which isn't really a
bad idea if you think about it -- all applications share a pretty large
selection of standard commands they need to explicitly add, whereas it'd
be a much better idea to have them as standard operations.  If they don't
support a specific command, maybe there could be some kind of translators
between commands as well?

We've already got some commands hardcoded into the BeOS API, like B_COPY,
or B_TRASH -- we just need to lift out this functionality and generalize
it.

Either way; any task-based system requires a data-based underlying world.
Which we've got pretty much covered.  I've been thinking a lot about
task-based systems, and I really agree that it'd totally revolutionize the
way we interact with computers.  The example with sending a picture to
someone is definitely the way to go, and ultimately, you shouldn't even
have to bother with _how_ to send the e-mail -- just select the picture
and drag it to a Person file, and it'd be sent through whatever protocol
best suited for the task.

Sorry for the long reply and off-topicness: this probably belongs to
GE-talk, I just got carried away.

-- tic

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