International Law

Zenware

In a piece for Slate, Jeffrey MacIntyre seeks a distraction free desktop:

If your computer desktop is anything like mine?and, brother, it is?you've paved over every spare pixel in an iconistan of clutter. Desktop design originated in a wistful visual metaphor, the clean, still work surface, encouraging users to productive ends. Leaps forward in computing horsepower and the rise of constant Internet use has transformed the tabletop terra firma into a cockpit, an antic terminal for the networked self. Our desktops are now a thick impasto of tabbed windows, pull-down menus, dashboard widgets, and application alerts. No possible distraction gets left behind, no link, feed, IM, twitter, or poke unheeded.

It's blindingly obvious to note that disarray is one of the defining aspects of the frequent Web user. (I could cite some pertinent statistics, but I don't trust myself to get back to this word processor window.) Ask any designer: Without white space, humans have difficulty focusing. Chances are, you're reading this alongside a flurry of other twinkling points of attention splayed across your monitor. But it doesn't have to be that way. There's an emerging market for programs that introduce much-needed traffic calming to our massively expanding desktops. The name for this genre of clutter-management software: zenware.

Read more here.

Full post as published by Freedom to Differ on January 25, 2008 (boomark / email).