A casual trawl of the web has just drawn my attention to Sun's Project Looking Glass, which is intended to provide a 3D graphical user interface to their Java Desktop System.
A quick glance over the project pages makes me think that Sun could be onto something with this idea. At the moment, whether you use a PC with Windows, Linux or Apple Mac, the GUIs are basically the same: a taskbar of some kind and a bunch of sizable windows - little more than the equivalent of several sheets of paper laid upon a desk - strictly two-dimensional. This concept has served us well for many years, but where's the innovation?
What struck me about Looking Glass was how visually appealing the idea is. I don't think it would be too difficult to adjust to and it would certainly work well for those of us who run more than a couple of open programs at a time...
The likelihood is that I'll continue to use MS Windows in its various incarnations in the future and I should imagine that the chances of Sun producing a version of this for Windows, given the litigious history of relationships between the two companies, is remote in the extreme.
However, the next version of Windows (currently known as Longhorn and scheduled for 2006 - which probably means 2007, or later) is known to be intended to have a bunch of user-interface enhancements called Aero. Any chance of something of this nature Mr Gates? Please?