Microsoft Midori? Also starring in this blog entry: Mozilla Labs Aurora
by ShahBBC News features an article entitled “Microsoft’s new operating system research project is mysteriously named “Midori”. But why?”
From what I’ve learnt - Midori is centered on the internet and does away with the dependencies that tie Windows to a single PC. I think Midori is (or will be) an OS offering full virtualisation. Sure, OS level virtualisation and paravirtualisation will be part of the package, if that holds true. Or maybe, I’m wrong. But it’s difficult to think of another means to get rid of the ties to the hardware.
So, why the name “midori”?
Well, I believe that whoever is behind the name is a fan of Midori No Hibi.
It’s an anime whereby a girl named Midori falls in love of Seiji Sawamura (a hard core guy @ school,) and finds herself miniaturised and attached to where Seiji’s right hand used to be. It’s a funny and wacko anime. She is self-aware, and can even control the entire arm of Seiji is she wants to. So, Seiji can be termed as harware. Midori can be adapted to fit onto Seiji.
Do you have any other ideas why it is named Midori?
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PC Pro has an interesting article about Mozilla Labs unvealing conceptual browser dubbed as “Aurora.”
Data gathered from the web - such as weather reports - are collated as ‘objects’ that can be dragged and dropped on to the desktop and dynamically manipulated. The video shows two people working in different offices comparing rain reports. In the demonstration Alan invites Jill to join him on a weather report page, where they each highlight important bits of the page for each other.
The video then shows Jill entering a 3D visual bookmarking system in which related pages are grouped by cells, modelled after cells in the human body. Recently opened pages appear closer to the screen, and gradually fall back the longer they’re ignored.
The author searches through sports, entertainment and weather cells, as well as those of her contacts, before pulling up the page she wants and dragging it onto the existing page, where it automatically overlaps comparing the two data sets.
Potentially the most interesting thing about the video is how integrated everything appears, with desktop tasks and an instant messaging utility all linked directly into the browser interface.The author searches through sports, entertainment and weather cells, as well as those of her contacts, before pulling up the page she wants and dragging it onto the existing page, where it automatically overlaps comparing the two data sets.
Am I the only one who finds that Aurora deserves a big WTF?!
The icons are cluttered. I hope that there will be description popping upon hovering over them. WTF is wrong with the standard contextual menu? Why is there a radial menu which doesn’t display all options, and which has an icon positioning system which most users won’t be able to memorise?
The lack of organisation sucks. What happened to indexing and tagging? Even with a search system being the centre of the mess, people will keep on relying on the search instead of tags or memorising the position of the icons. Idiocracy comes to mind.
I’m glad Aurora is at conceptual level. Come on - in the future, there is a possibility that
- touch screens will be widely available;
- touch screen technology will be deprecated in favour of voice command recognition;
- there will be miniaturisation of the screen *think mobile phones/PDAs* and the ability to collaborate according to various ways. *think next gen. CSCW*.
- …etc.
Maybe, it is best to develop each feature as an add-on for later use, according to the trend of users in the future. Still, for a vapourware, it sucks bad.
How do you find Aurora?
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Enjoy your Thursday.
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