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.)
In a comment on Luis’s latest blog entry, someone suggested having a “GNOME recommended reading list”. This seemed like a good idea, so I started one.
Maybe a GNOME recommended reading list? For those of us who didn’t attend GUADEC ;).
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.
Perhaps executive summaries for us that have ADHD and have maximum 5 seconds of attention span?
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
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.
[…] As suggested by a comment in Luis’s blog… Here are some books that various GNOMErs think other GNOMErs should read. Please add books, add […]
[…] a comment on Luis’s latest blog entry, someone suggested having a “GNOME recommended reading […]
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?