There are lots of indie/hobbyist OSes, but they rarely contain striking interface ideas. One theory: it's a money-hole, so authors are mostly solo; a solo eng can ship an OS but usually can't design good novel UIs; a solo designer can't ship an OS; a collab will be ^2 rare. But:
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What about indie film directors? There are lots of super-low-budget projects which have striking and artistic ideas as well as impressive technical know-how.
And: what about indie video games? Lots of great games have art, design, eng—even music!—done by 1 person.
Why the diff?
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When I think of novel OSes expressing unusual UI ideas, designed and actually built by the same person, the contemporary projects that come to mind are Dynamicland and 's Playbit. Please name others if you know them!
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On the other hand, I think UI design is significantly constrained by the limitations of the programming APIs we've inherited, so a novel OS would be the perfect environment to experiment with. But, this would require reimigining those APIs; tricky.
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The same for personal websites. Many people who create them are even proud of having very spartan designs, when intuitively you'd expect them to be full of fantastic indie expression.
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Reposting a recent tweet: twitter.com/_chenglou/stat
Canvas the way you use it works very well, but then it doesn't generalize to most textual stuff. Ironically Flipboard's react-canvas stuff was supposed to solve that: engineering.flipboard.com/2015/02/mobile
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Replying to @andy_matuschak
Used to exist on the web, disappeared due to mostly bad technicalities (e.g. CSS). You might like this article: web.archive.org/web/2011103109
and you probably knew about this gem: techcrunch.com/2014/03/23/lay
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It’s especially jarring because there are hacker communities dedicated to customizing Linux WMs (/r/unixporn). The best thing I’ve seen recently via is PaperWM which is a simple but powerful idea github.com/paperwm/PaperWM
Some notes of mine a9.io/inquiry/notes/
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Replying to @rsnous @maxkriegers and @jasonyuandesign
the barriers are such that by the time you can write a window manager, you most likely already think in a certain way and do certain kinds of work day-to-day and have certain cultural influences
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Your observation seems right to me, but I wouldn't credit much to ^2 rareness since (you'd think) such people would be able to find each other. (I have no replacement explanation though!)
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