Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Today, a comment I left on Don Park's blog got quoted by David Berlind.

Here's what I said :
Here's the amazing thing : there are about 8 billion pages accessable through the browser. And not one of them is that difficult to get to. (Assuming you find links going there.)….How many OSs and desktop applications have 8 billion options and functions? Yet, access to these is through a bewildering variety of different methods : menus and submenus, button-bars, wizards, right-click on the icon to change configuration options, hidden XML configuration files, command line arguments.


But then David says something very right :
Given the way wikis make child's play out of Web authoring (and the emergence of applications like WikiCalc), instead of a desktop operating system, how about a Wiki Operating System. Call it WikiOS (WOS for short).


This is, of course, something I've thought for a long time. And it's one of the guiding principles behind SdiDesk, hinted at several times in the screencasts.

1 comment:

Brad Neuberg said...

By the way, I've seen your screencast of SdiDesk and they are interesting.

It's not a Wiki operating system, but I used to have a research project where we tried to bring the Wiki philosophy itself into the web browser and web infrastructure, called Paper Airplane. Check it out at http://codinginparadise.org/paperairplane.