Huddled Masses

For the last week or so, I’ve been working on my “Huddled Desktop” Zoomable User Interface launcher, which I think I will probably call “Desk Ops,” or Huddled Desk Ops, or Geo Desk Ops … I can’t really make up my mind. At any rate, I’m developing it to go along with geoShell, but I think it should work ok with any Windows™ XP shell, not just geoShell, and even with the standard Windows XP shell.

It’s probably only going to run on Windows XP and newer, although once it’s done, I’ll make an effort to support Windows 2000, at least, there’s nothing inherent that I know of that would prevent it from running in 95 and 98, I suppose …

Anyway, Desk Ops is, as I said before, a ZUI application. The basic idea is to provide you with the ability to launch all your applications from your desktop. It works like this:

• You choose which folders full of shortcuts you want to have on your desktop
• You specify what images to use to represent them
• The application creates images on your desktop for each folder (as large or small as you like)
• When you click one of these images, the view zooms in on it until it almost fills your screen

• When the image is zoomed in, you can see all the shortcuts on it.

The idea is that you can have a nearly infinite number of shortcuts accessible within two clicks on the desktop. Of course, there’s also an alternate mode, when you only specify a few folders (say, less than ten) and there is enough space on your desktop to see all the shortcuts all the time. In that mode, you essentially have your desktop divided up into sections representing the various folders, colored based on the folder’s backgrounds (either images, or custom colored frames). All your icons exist in one of these sub-sections, and are kept neatly tucked into them at all times, giving you a simple way to organize your desktop.

If you like the sounds of it, stay tuned … if not, that’s fine too, not everyone wants icons on their desktop , and some people don’t have enough “stuff” to worry about keeping their desktops organized.

I’ve actually got several ideas percolating around for extending this, including the ability to bring the desktop to the foreground via a mouse gesture or hotkey, the possibility of having hotkeys which bring a specific folder immediately to the foreground, and even the possibility of having some “system” folders (like a tasks folder where icons are automatically placed representing running tasks) or plugin folders (where a folder image would, when double clicked, yield a simple applet interface rather than a folder, so you could, for instance, hide winamp controls in there) ...

Right now, the user interface is based on Piccolo.NET but that may change if the performance of Piccolo turns out to be insufficient (although, there is a D3D implementation of Piccolo, so that’s another possibility for speeding things up).

I might release an alpha for people to play with later this week, but I’m taking two weeks off computers starting Friday, so don’t expect a real beta for at least three weeks.

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