What happens if you put work into the second dimension?(norbertkozsir.com) |
What happens if you put work into the second dimension?(norbertkozsir.com) |
We could not for the life of us figure out how to make this a meaningful productivity tool. Yes, we had meetings here, and yes, drawing all over someone else's screenshare was actually useful - And building islands of data was an interesting mental model. It descended into messy chaos no matter what you did, and anything you would do to try and combat that undid some of the benefits of the canvas to begin with.
It was a lot of fun to hang out in as a multiplayer live video room, though, so we leaned into that with (relatively) more success.
I think this is where AI could be put to work. Before, what would be a toilsome digital clean up process (eg git commits) is now an instruction to an LLM to clean it up. If the chaos was clean-up-able, would your product have worked?
They mostly do not gain a lot of users. Good luck!
It never really caught on, completed got clobbered by free text search, now AI chat interfaces I guess.
Am glad to see it bubble up again, because have good memories working on this stuff.
If I recall correctly, it became popular because of the Lawnmower Man movie in '92.
After having used such things since the 80s (starting with DESQview) I find myself simply minimizing or leaving secondary applications in the background of a single workspace. When I do use other spaces it is for full screen view. I don't usually need to see multiple windows at the same time, but that would be a task for a tiling manager...
The 3d demos are similar to what you experience when using a VR headset with desktop emulation software. I ran experiments with that for several months and while the concepts were interesting, context switching in a simulated physical space was actually a lot slower than alt+tabbing between things.
Answer: you get a mess.
That's why browsers weren't built like that, and also why I think this will not work.
But happy to be proven wrong of course.
> Answer: you get a mess.
> That's why browsers weren't built like that
But people frequently go out of their way to put their tabs into two dimensions.
There are tab trees: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/tabtree/afejdkkhibi...
There are tab groups: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups
There are tab containers: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
It seems pretty clear that people want their tabs to be organized in multiple dimensions.
I use virtual desktops, where each desktop contains a single thing that I am working on, and everything related to it. Then any good window manager can switch between them quickly and even give you a spatial sense of where you are. I organize them as a priority stack, so the topmost priority is in top position and then it goes downward from there
There's a lot that this "campus" product does that isn't present in such a set up (multi user, zooming, etc...) but virtual desktops give you a lot of the benefit and come built in to most of our operating systems