29 August 2006

Your OS avatar

(this would have been a slashdot comment
but that thread is way too far along)

if your OS is ever going to adapt intelligently
to your ways of working
it will need a general model
of all the ways anyone works

and a specific model
of your special quirks

even to the level
of a map of your physical workspace
with an avatar reflecting your current posture

and whether you have the teevee or radio on
or when a phonecall comes in, distracting you

we should picture that animated avatar
mirroring the realworld phonecall
then readjusting posture
and resuming old tasks

so add to this OS-mini-sim
a pixellated model of the pc display
that understands
more or less
why you have different windows in front
for different tasks

and can run alternate animations
of all the different
workflow command sequences

(can you guess the 100 commands
you invoke most frequently?)

and all this avatar-modeling
can also be previewed in
seminatural language

a little novel about computer use in general
and the peculiarities of one user




(intermediate stage? an expansion pack
for The Sims
that gives a sim a simulated net connection

allowing socialising
scheduling
research
downloading
multitasking
accidental data loss
etc)