Re:What's the next evolution of GUI OS?
by mike_hearn on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @08:07AM
(#33329404)
Does the desktop contain programs or documents? You switch from one to other other half way through your second paragraph.
This sounds a bit like a concept that was popular in the 90s, I think it was called document-centric computing. Microsoft's implementation was called OLE and Apple's/IBMs was called OpenDoc.
The idea in these systems was that you don't really work with apps anymore, just generic document canvases into which you can drop arbitrary components. There is also a generic "compound" document format which the components can share in a hierarchical manner, and controls/menus/toolbars appear and disappear on demand.
This vision was somewhat impure on Windows, in that there was no generic document app - instead you were expected to use one of the Office apps as the canvas and then embed objects into those documents. OpenDoc in contrast had a sort of blank canvas system iirc, and if you wanted to work on a word processor document then you started a generic document and dropped a rich text area into it. A bit closer to visual programming than the app-centric model.
Suffice it to say, this model didn't win out. Embedding complex objects into compound documents turned out to have a lot of practical problems, OpenDoc got de-staffed when Jobs came back to Apple and OLE was steadily de-emphasized in Windows development. It was never that popular anyway, and was seen mostly as an exotic feature you had to do if you wanted your app to be embeddable in Word or Excel. The technology lived on somewhat in the form of OCX controls, which were for a time Microsoft's solution for shared libraries that you could use in a visual form designer and across languages.
You could try again but you'd probably want to study those earlier systems to learn why they didn't take off, and bring a new spin to the idea.
This sounds a bit like a concept that was popular in the 90s, I think it was called document-centric computing. Microsoft's implementation was called OLE and Apple's/IBMs was called OpenDoc.
The idea in these systems was that you don't really work with apps anymore, just generic document canvases into which you can drop arbitrary components. There is also a generic "compound" document format which the components can share in a hierarchical manner, and controls/menus/toolbars appear and disappear on demand.
This vision was somewhat impure on Windows, in that there was no generic document app - instead you were expected to use one of the Office apps as the canvas and then embed objects into those documents. OpenDoc in contrast had a sort of blank canvas system iirc, and if you wanted to work on a word processor document then you started a generic document and dropped a rich text area into it. A bit closer to visual programming than the app-centric model.
Suffice it to say, this model didn't win out. Embedding complex objects into compound documents turned out to have a lot of practical problems, OpenDoc got de-staffed when Jobs came back to Apple and OLE was steadily de-emphasized in Windows development. It was never that popular anyway, and was seen mostly as an exotic feature you had to do if you wanted your app to be embeddable in Word or Excel. The technology lived on somewhat in the form of OCX controls, which were for a time Microsoft's solution for shared libraries that you could use in a visual form designer and across languages.
You could try again but you'd probably want to study those earlier systems to learn why they didn't take off, and bring a new spin to the idea.