Mercury OS Study
Jason Yuan presents Mercury OS: “A speculative vision of the operating system, driven by humane design principles.” There’s also an accompanying blog post.
I’m what you would could call an operating-system traditionalist1, but I love seeing these imaginings. I think this kind of approach (“there are no Apps or Folders […] content and actions are fluidly assembled based on your intentions”) can work great on satellite devices2.
The main question I’d have for Jason, is can you build an OS with this? And if you can’t, then how and where do you build this OS? It’s the same question I have for people who think iOS will replace macOS.
-
As I grow older I’ve become increasingly weary of “clean slate” software, re-writes of existing applications but “done right”. Over time I’ve found that this usually means a dramatic loss in power. When an existing application is dragged, sometimes kicking and screaming, into the future, it brings with it older methods of working that give it a depth of features missing from newer applications. A couple of examples of this are Ex commands in Vim, which is how it implements find and replace to this day, and the command line itself in macOS, which has facilitated forward progress in programming for the last couple of decades. ↩︎
-
iOS devices are satellite devices to macOS devices: “It’s the heaviness of the Mac that allows iOS to remain light.” ↩︎