An Explanation of our Main Goal (Part 2)

I should clarify what I said in the last post... We aren't getting rid of the desktop paradigm. I think a well polished desktop is important. However, the goal is not to make a perfect copy of a "real" desktop. It's actually to take the desktop paradigm, and adapt it for the web. I'll also elaborate on what I mean by the "good parts of the web".

The web is a great platform for applications. It's central nature allows for ease of communication. It also makes it easy to share things because it is publicly accessible. Lastly, the web is great because it's accessible from everywhere, including mobile phones. That said, current desktops such as gnome, windows, etc. lack the ability to do incorporate this in their design. What I want to do in Lucid is incorporate these aspects of the web into the desktop.

An example would be the phone interface that we will be working on in 1.1. It will provide an alternate interface that allows javascript-enabled devices with limited screen real estate to run the full-blown desktop applications. Because the web is accessible from phones, we can actually pull this off. The current solutions, however, can't because of their decentralized nature.

Another example is the public frontend that we wanted. Each user of the desktop would have a public website. Applications would be able to publish things to the personal website. For example, I could have a photos application that would allow me to publish a photo album that I could send to my friends. Current desktops can't do this; you need to upload them to something like Flickr. Because Lucid is on the web though, we can. That said, I'm not against syncing with Flickr, it's just that I feel a seamless integration with the web leads to a more usable interface.

So, hopefully that cleared up the last post. I do think that having things like an office suite are important, but I'm not going to limit us to making a carbon-copy of a desktop environment. I want to expand upon that, and make it a desktop for the web, and not just a web-based desktop.