What would the ideal user interface look like, assuming relevant technical hurdles can be overcome? (Note: Someone made it. They called it an Eye Phone, or something like that.)
There need to be at least three major components: a notification area, a link area, and a task area. The notification area should be in one of the corners; it overlays small notifications such as download progress, copy progress, extraction progress, installation progress, new mail or messages, etc. Its purpose is to tell you about things that are unrelated to your current tasks but that you probably care about, without getting in your face. I have not seen a better system for this than small overlays.
The task area is for things you have open. It should be data centric rather than program centric, so for instance viewing your home folder is a task, but using Nautilus is not. It should be tab based, because everyone likes tabs. Windows are clumsy, but maybe a grid based window system would work. I’m thinking XMonad, but with more dragging.
The link area is for things you can open. It can include files, folders, bookmarks, AIM friends, system settings, application shortcuts, etc. You should be able to drag any task into the link area to save it for later. There will be a lot of links, so the link area should be organized as a tree.
