I’ve recently been following some Linux projects a little more closely than I had been before. There are some things that look like they might go in an interesting direction. Among them:
- Mathusalem — A "long running task manager". This is a way to unite all sorts of progress windows into a single place. Browser downloads, email downloads, server connecting/handshaking, CD burning. That sort of thing. This project is part of Google’s Summer of Code sponsorship programme, so it should be useable by the end of the summer.
- lowfat — A file manager of the ‘make your virtual desktop like your real desktop’ variety. It basically shows your photos’ and documents’ contents rather than representing them as icons, and you can sift through them and fling them around the place with all the wild abandon you use when using dead-tree documents. There’s a very well-narrated video of a prototype of it in use. Worth checking out, but this is very speculative stuff.
There’s plenty of other cool stuff being developed right now too of course, but these are the ones that have been open in tabs waiting for me to brain-dump them onto Soylent Red for the last while.
(By the way, because of some feedback I got to the last post, I should point out that "dead-tree" means made of paper. And ham email is the opposite of spam email.)