book rec, sort of

Amazon emailed me to recommend “Beyond the Desktop Metaphor: Designing Integrated Digital Work Environments.” It looks like a deep, serious study of options for moving beyond a desktop metaphor. Obviously I haven’t read it, nor do I plan to (Property Law calls) but it looks like it should be interesting to anyone who wants to seriously rethink the desktop.

(I shared Kathy’s palpable disappointment at GUADEC when so few people had read the books she cited in her talk; I think it behooves lots of GNOMErs to read something on usability and design other than websites and blogs before GNOME launches into the Next Great Rethink. Research like this that is actually targeted at The Desktop and not just individual applications is icing on the cake.)

8 thoughts on “book rec, sort of”

  1. I don’t read books about user interfaces. I don’t read mails or blog posts about it either. I don’t even really listen to people talking about them.
    However, I’m very interested in looking at working examples.

    All talk, no action.

  2. How can we move beyond the desktop metaphor when we haven’t even properly implemented that? I’d like to see the metaphor taken a lot further than it is in the current GNOME (and KDE and Windows and MacOS-X…) desktop

  3. I agree that we could do a more polished job of implementing the desktop metaphor, but more complete? ‘further’? Examples?

    More generally, I think GNOME needs to think about how to leapfrog Apple/Windows. I don’t think a better implementation of the desktop metaphor does that, but maybe I’m overlooking things we could do within that metaphor that radically improve things.

  4. Thanks so much for this. Nothing like good reading. I know you’re wrapped up in property law and most of this list will be irrelevant or already familiar but all the same these seem to be some texts that address open source in a valuable way.
    the success of open source by steven weber
    code by lawrence lessig
    the hacker ethic by pekka himanen
    the cathedral and the bazaar by eric raymond
    the future of ideas by lawrence lessig
    free culture by lawrence lessig
    the wealth of networks by yochai benkler
    coase’s penguin by yochai benkler
    infotopia by cass sunstein
    wikinomics by don tapscott
    we think by charles leadbeater
    everything is miscellaneous by david weinberger
    the laws of cool by alan liu
    digital phoenix by bruce abramson
    global brain by howard bloom
    nonzero by robert wright
    the hacker manifesto by mackenzie wark
    the economics of information technology by hal varian
    the economics of network industries by oz shy
    information rules by carl shapiro
    I haven’t read all of them yet myself but you’ve got to have something to live up to right?

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