Task-centric UI (was: Calligra Active's main screen)

[Marco Martin]

On Monday 08 October 2012, Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:

> I've already thought about application integration as a future topic a bit.
> What came to my mind was Björn Balasz' presentation at the KDE UX sprint
> April 2011 about task-centered interfaces. The general idea current
> application-centric desktop shells are not really compatible with users'
> mental models. A user doesn't think "I want to start Kmail touch", but
> instead "I want to write an email to Grandma". However currently she first
> has to think "Okay, what application do I have to start to write an
> email?".

this is not a new idea at all, i think it was kindof tried in the past with 
various degrees of success, at least in the old old days with document 
oriented uis (kindof a subset of task oriented, not enough anymore) as back in 
the days as apple lisa, early next, beos.

one thing that always killed it is a "branding" issue, is very difficult to 
make this work well with 3rd party developers.

The iphone-esque "apps" approach presents really the path of minimum 
resistance for 3rd parties, little difficulties and a lot of freedom for 
developers (weird to hear about freedom on the iphone, but being an app a 
little universe on its own, in this case applies)
But is the best way for users? not so sure


we should learn from the past mistakes, and *maybe* we can pull it off, since 
we are in a considerably legacy free environment. We are also free to try this 
because since we really can't win the "Apps" game, we can try to just play a 
different game ;)

(i would love the desktop going in this direction as well, but this is 
another, long, complex story :p)

Cheers,
Marco Martin