The other day I was trying to figure out what was making my desktop computer run so slow. This was pretty unusual on Linux. Way back when I used to use Windows, I'd encounter such things due to running too many programs, so of course I looked at what was running.
But these days I don't really run that many intensive applications. I hardly ever use spreadsheets, presentation tools, word processors, or so on like I used to. Really the only things visible in my task bar were Firefox and Terminal. Killing off Firefox made no difference. And even more oddly, rebooting had no effect - within minutes my load average was up in the 20-30's.
Of course, the culprit was that I had a bunch of automatic cron jobs scheduled to occur at the same time. Reordering the timings got the system back on track.
But this led to an epiphany moment.
This was my *desktop* machine. The last time I'd seen this cron job I/O blocking madness was on servers. What was I doing with so many cron jobs on a *desktop*??
I looked at the individual cron jobs, and found that each and every one of them had something to do with my job. Disabling any one of them would reduce my work productivity. I could no longer do without one of these silly cron jobs than I could have done without Microsoft Excel a decade ago.
And then, as I looked around my desktop at the other things running on it - internet radio, IRC chat, mutt - that I noticed that I hardly ever use traditional "document-centric" applications. Everything running had something to do with dealing with _streams_ of information.
The realization sank in at that point, that our computer UI paradigm really stinks for what we actually use our computers for.
The prevailing UI paradigm today is built around the notion of document authoring. It expects that the main thing you do is create spreadsheets, word documents, presentations, and so on. There is a task bar to remind you of what documents you're editing, there is cross-application cut and paste so you can put pieces of one document into another. You can place documents on your desktop surface itself, so you can organize your work. You can define which applications to use for which types of docs. You can set up a default printer to put your documents to hard copy. You can set up system-wide fonts to use in documents. You can put icons to apps and even documents onto your panel. And on and on.
Occasionally, some of that is actually useful to me. But most of the time, for most of the work I do, it's all irrelevant. To pick one example, I used absolutely none of that in order to write this blog post.
Really, what I mostly do today is stream management. And I suspect this is true for the vast majority of people. I don't deal with writing documents, but with changes to documents. I put comments onto things. I slap patches onto things. I tweak the states of things. Once in a rare while I may author a completely new thingee, but even there I usually end up working with it as a stream of changes that I build up over time (and usually in collaboration with a few other people who stream changes to me).
Thinking about user interfaces this way, it occurs to me that there are a LOT of different kinds of streams. Streams of emails. Streams of spam to take *out* of my email stream. Streaming radio broadcasts. Streams of bug reports. Streams of software updates to apply. Streams of chatter on IRC. Streams of youtube video URL's from friends and family to check out. Streams of updates to my weather applet. Even my todo list is more like a stream of things coming in and going out, than like a static document I can print and save and be done with.
Each one of those silly cron jobs bogging down my computer were critically important for me, because THEY were the tools I used for helping me stay atop all these streams. They summarized my bug streams in various ways. They filtered my email streams into more organized sub-streams. They flagged tasks (and took care of certain tasks for me). They took care of updating the tools I used day to day.
It's weird that for all the document tools at my fingertips, it's a stodgy old *server* tool that is helps my productivity the most. I wonder how non-technical people not knowledgeable about crontab and scripting deal with such things?
This all got me to a key question... Since the purpose of our desktop UI is to make our work easier and more efficient, then if today's knowledge workers are, like me, more stream-oriented than document-oriented, then doesn't it stand to reason that we ought to re-think our UI design to optimize it for making stream management easier and more efficient? How would such optimization be done? How would such a UI look and feel? What kinds of toolkits would be needed?
I did have the luck to play with an OLPC at a Ubuntu conference last year and I was pretty blown away by its interface. The idea that it could do away with 'save'/'load' was quite an eye opener, although it was a concept I'd run across a few other times before then. But it was the first time I'd seen an entire UI designed without 'load/save' as part of its core metaphor. Playing with that OLPC made me wonder if there's more of today's existing UI metaphors we can question.