[Usability] New Paradigm of Computing for GNOME 3.0

[Allan Caeg <allancaeg gmail com>]

Hello Usability People,

I stumbled upon Matt Asay's article named The application is the new 
operating system http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10448883-16.html . I 
love the fact that a guy who think this way Canonical's new COO. This is 
what open source needs.

His points could be too radical for many Linux people, but we're 
fortunate to have people who specialize in Usability and User 
Experience. I encourage you to read the whole article. He preaches 
focusing on the user and not just the development community. To do that, 
he suggests treating the application as the new operating system.

I read this idea on the iPad HIG. It doesn't show the filesystem and 
it's implied that a person can access selected files by opening a 
certain application. This way, the user flow on the computer would be 
more similar to the real world. You go to your office suite to open your 
work-related documents. It's like going to your bedroom to sleep. The 
user flow of opening a file explorer to locate a file and open it with a 
certain application isn't as close to people's mental model.

I'm suggesting that we explore ways of implementing this idea to GNOME 
3.0. Let's discuss this.