Weathered OS

First, install a small weather station on the outside of your flat/apartment/house/cave, complete with anemometer, rain and temperature gauges, and a cheap camera to capture the general ambience of the light. Hook this up to your PC, and you’re good to go.

Call it Open Windows or something, but basically what then happens is that external conditions are mirrored by your operating system. All your icons are ray-trace rendered according to the prevailing light conditions, and cast shadows behind them depending on the season and the time of day. And if it’s raining outside: well, even if it’s only a light drizzle, your mouse pointer might skid a little and a fine mist of rain might obscure your screen slightly as it does your window. Hopefully you’ve got a touch-sensitive screen that you can wipe the virtual rain from – if not, you’ll have to drag a wee virtual cloth with your mouse about the screen until you’ve wiped a patch dry.

In the depths of winter all your desktop icons will huddle together in the center of the screen, shivering wildly, caked in snow and slowly turning blue. If it’s windy out, you’ll have to struggle with your pointer to get it to where you want it to click, fighting frantically against a strong virtual wind.

Not an OS that’s going to increase productivity in any way – but wait. Here’s the real point. Every time you send an email to someone, along with your message, your weather station data is also sent. My wee brother is about to emigrate to Australia in a few months, and we’ll probably communicate through email most of the time – I’m imagining opening an email from him in the midst of a Scottish winter and my whole OS suddenly being flooded with antipodean sunshine. Not that I know any Icelandic Eskimos, but it would certainly put their words in context if I had to chip away at the ice around their email with my mouse pointer to open it, and then battle said mouse against the resulting howling desktop gales.

USB powered heat lamps/refrigeration units are optional.