I'm no computer genius so perhaps this is an impossible or silly idea but...
Instead of having desktops be flat, why not make it some sort of polygonial shape? Analagy: instead of looking at a bulletin board you're looking at all the pictures and stuff mounted on a wall. Imagine this: Instead of moving the mouse around a flat plane with all your folders and files in site, you pilot around a 3D cursor or a plane or a space ship or a fish or something and maneuver that piloted object into whatever you want to open! Almost like a game only simpler.
Open windows could either move around with your monitor or stay in one place as a flat plane.
Things like moving files/folders around, viewing folder options, and the task bar up top would stay. Hotkeys could be made for changing your view a certain way
Not only could you have a wallpaper, but say... 6 wallpapers? One for each side of your desktop cube? or you could have a movie playing on one wall while you arrange stuff in a folder?
Sure this would make managing everything more difficult but it would be worth the extra features and overall coolness of it all. I know i didn't cover everything but this thing is getting too long - please ask questions before giving me the thumbs down.-- CombatChuck, Apr 12 2005 SphereXP http://www.hamar.sk/sphere/Baked. Sorry. [5th Earth, Apr 12 2005] Compiz Fusion http://www.compiz-fusion.org/Easy and fun-to-use windowed environment, allowing use of the graphics hardware to render each individual window and the entire screen, to provide some impressive effects, speed and usefulness. Check it out on Youtube. [Ayelis, Feb 21 2008] Oh... ya thats.. what i had in mind...-- CombatChuck, May 09 2005 wow. This is actually a freaking fantastic idea. If i have multiple windows organized, I can just move what I see (like a camera) and find the window I'm looking for, while freezing certain windows etc.
Mac has expose which allows me to see all windows or move them out of the way which sort of does the same thing but not as effectively as this. I want this for my mac now!-- SpocksEyebrow, May 11 2005 Oooo... one of my older ideas. Nice. :P Only mine was to have the desktop be a 3D world with each program being an actual 3D model of a house in a town. You walk around to the 'house' and enter it. Thus starting the program, or opening a folder. Folders are warehouses.-- EvilPickels, May 11 2005 The 3d desktop would just be a skeletal framework, providing the essential operations as the 2d desktop does now, e.g. icons, windows, etc. The symbology such as fish or planets or whatever would be like skins that you overlay on the skeleton, and people would do up whole sets, as simple or as intricate as anyone cared to have.-- Soterios, May 11 2005 Remember Jurasic Park:
"Oh, this is unix! I know this!" - and then the 12 year old girl procedes to hack some sort of weird 3D looking operating system.-- SpocksEyebrow, May 11 2005 ...With a Quicktime progress bar.-- bristolz, May 11 2005 She was just following the script. Not like Trinity, who was REALLY hacking into a power plant's operating system. I had no idea that Carrie Anne Moss had Mad 5k177z.-- Soterios, May 11 2005 Re: the "weird 3D looking operating system" used in Jurassic park: That wasn't actually the OS, but just a file browser, and was available at the time. I remember using it on an SGI machine (indy, I think). Every file was represented at once, in a straight branching tree layout, with filesize represented by the height of the "building".
It was cool once it loaded, but since it had to read in the entire directory structure, it was laggy on opening. It was also slow when viewing from shallow levels (near root), since it had to draw so many polygons. Granted, a few thousand simple shaded polys are nothing now, but back in '93, it was a major feat to render a scene like that in real-time on a desktop-sized box.-- Freefall, May 11 2005 wouldn't this in effect ruin the simplicity of operating systems such as OS-X? Viewing 3D on a screen would only be an illusion. It would only be a more interesting way to try to navigate around a computer. and by more interesting i would think more complicated as well.
you wouldn't be moving around on real planes. you would only be viewing folders and such all at once, which would significantly slow down a computer.
when i saw the name i thought something different, maybe hologram type stuff.-- lolzcakes, May 23 2006 Lolz; There's more usefulness to this idea than some people think.
Making a 3d desktop is less about viewing all your files at once (like the prototype *nix file browser mentioned above), and more about having a useful and familiar way to organize and visualize digital information, whether that means files, contact lists, data transfers, or any other real-world information. IMHO...
So yeah, hologram type stuff. ;)-- Ayelis, Feb 21 2008 Yet keeping such a processor intensive application from eating 98% of your cycle time. You should see my mothers desktop literal and digital. You would never want to use any kind of immersing search as you would drown (in both). I like to keep it simple. It's already to damn easy to leave files and applications open and lying around. One app at a time , one file at a time. (damn you CS3, integrated my ass.)-- WcW, Feb 21 2008 [WcW] - how do you manage to have only one application open at a time? When I'm working, I typically have 6 or 7 open at once (and frequently many more).-- neutrinos_shadow, Feb 22 2008 Macbook. If I run an adobe product at the same time I am running a Microsoft product my memory and processor speed plummet. Also most of my work is very memory intensive photo prep work for advertising. Working with one program at a time and other habits were pounded into me when I was in school by a great mentor and, even with faster computers, i still can work faster with less frustration by keeping these habits.-- WcW, Feb 22 2008 random, halfbakery