Nick's Profile

I think OS 11.0 (codename hammerhead (a new way of looking at things)) will support the current keyboard/mouse/display paradigm, but add the following "environment": Put on a pair of gloves and a pair of glasses (or headset). What you'll see is yourself in the center of your data. Touch the ipod to play/browse your media and start playing Pink Floyd's "Is There Anybody In There". shove it out of the way, say at 3 o'clock high. Now, reach up to 10 o'clock to grab your inbox and start reading mail, voice mail, appointments, text messages... wadding them up and tossing them in the trash can or shredder. Half way through that, you notice your (obviously virtual) picture frame slide show displays your wife's picture with a pink border and that reminds you that you'd better get something nice for your anniversary. So, you reach out to the store (which is a subset of the internet consisting of local merchants) and start looking for stuff. Since you're still faster at typing, you grab the keyboard (dvorak layout of course) and order a dozen roses and a really nice card that has your favorite picture of the two of you that you pulled from your picture frame and scheduled it for a pick up on your way home. Back to the mssages. Your kids are looking for information on the effect of a certain illegal substance on driving performance for a school paper. You wander over to the schoolhouse to verify the assignment, then strolling over to the bookshelf (aka a subset of the internet like .edu) and unlock articles containing references to the substance and its street names. After your messages, you reach behind you to grab the globe, and start to zoom in on towns that you'd like to visit and start walking down the streets of Sydney. I think you kinda get the idea, Sort of Tron like, but it would blow the desktop away, and let people interact the way that they would in the real world. You could even step up onto a device that lets you physically walk over to the store and library (think treadmill) and at the same time providing power to run the processors. This would be a huge change for the majority of us, but it could open up entire worlds for many including people who are physically incapable of using a mouse, keyboard or display. Of course, speech recognition will be released in OS 11.1 :-)