I am taking some computer classes at the local community college, and we have a final exam coming up in June, she told us about it now because the final is building your own Linux OS. I am thinking about making a Trek flavored Linux, but I was wondering what is important for all of you for an OS?
That sounds like a big project to take on - but pretty cool!
I've seen alot of 'skins' for LCARS style interfaces - but the problem with alot of them is that they are, to be frank, quite hideous! What they often do is try and overlay standard windowing elements - like close buttons / size buttons etc AS WELL as the LCARS - which of course looks horribly wrong. LCARS is a rather horrible thing to try and do, I know i've tried to do things myself in it, in websites etc, because it was always aboiut 'looking right' and it certainly doesn't fit any of the standard windowing conformalities - and of course piloting a Starship is hardly the same as browsing the internet!
If you actually wanted to go down that road, then perhaps you could devise a way of presenting any open programme all in one window, much like a web broweser with tabs viewing, only where the shapes of the windows and their relative proportions could be changed on the fly in respect to each other. Contemporary effects such as 'start buttons' and to a certain extent menu's would just look wrong (but hard to avoid!)
Another way to look on it could be a master systems display style of rendering the screen, so things like calanders, system information, clocks and maybe a few applications could all be docked on to the desktop as part of one display. Perhaps instead of having mutlitple 'windows' you could have a single desktop, which just slides backwards and forwards (perhaps it could be being rendered as an XML page, with active components?) - I've seen similar things done in flash desktop programmes, but I'm not sure if it's possible at the system level?
A simpler stlye for you to aim at would be the movie era display - with black backgrounds and blue and green outlines.
As for futuristic operating systems - well i always liked the core concept of 'Open Doc' - which was basically the idea of a shared document model, where istead of running multiple applications you only had one with a set of modules. I.e in a DTP sense you could create a page, open up the photoshop style tools and add a picture, then edit the text using word style tools, then add an Open GL object using 3D tools - all in the same application.. You just buy the modules you need. Well that was the idea that Steve jobs had, but it never got off the ground. Shame. it reminds me alot of the Datatype concept that Amiga's use (and I still think that's briliant!) - shame that Amiga's have been almost killed off now (and i stress almost, they aren't dead yet!)
If I could programme to save my life, that's what I think I would make - my very own Open Doc application!
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