Friday, August 19, 2005

There's been numerous ideas thrown around for GNOME Three Point Zero (ToPaZ) in the community - the Wiki, mailing lists, conferences, planet, etc. I took a bunch of them and created a mockup or "storyboard" of what I imagine 3.0 could look like.

The tagline is "A First Class Desktop". There are two key ideas:

Documents are First Class Objects - As a user, I don't want to "Run Firefox" or "Start Evolution". What I really want to do is browse the web and write mail. My applications should be ego-less - my data is the focus.

Search and Tagging as the Interface - Hierarchical folders are out - it can't handle both "wedding/photos" and "photos/wedding". Also, the current file system makes a distinction between "regular" files and my mail - I can't find the latter using nautilus. In Topaz, search (Beagle) and flat tags (if you've been living under a rock, think GMail labels, Epiphany topics, and del.icio.us) are the main interface to my data.