Could screensavers be part of the solution, not part of the problem?

[Paul A Houle]

         Yesterday I came to work to discover John Williams music blaring 
from the cubicle next door.  I pushed the door open and saw a Superman 
screensaver running on a Windows machine with spinning "S"es from the 
various incarnations of the Kryptonian hero.  Turned out my officemate had 
left his headphones unplugged,  so the rest of us got a free concert.

         Last night I had a number of long running jobs on my mac 
mini,  and I got to thinking of what a pain it was to understand the status 
of the machine.  I was processing mail,  washing dishes and doing other 
domestic tasks while checking in on the status of the process of copying 
files from a DVD-ROM to an NAS storage unit over the wireless internet 
connection,  a process that takes about an hour.

         It was annoying as hell that the progress indicator was this tiny 
little box that easily got lost in all the other windows that were open.

         It got me thinking...  We're starting to see that the WIMP 
interface was a step backwards in many ways,  and we're moving towards more 
task-oriented interfaces.

         Why can't we make a screensaver that's useful?  The idea is to 
make a screensaver that works like the dashboard in Mac OS X...  Something 
task-oriented that lets you get an immediate sense of what your machine is 
up to.  (Just walk up to the computer and you can see at a glance)

         The big thing you'd need for this is some kind of hook into the 
progress bar mechanisms that would let the screensaver display progress 
bars for running applications:  this could be a big selling point for Gnome 
and KDE apps if they had their progress bars implemented into this.  (Doing 
this in general would be tough...  How would you get  progress information 
out of Azureus?  Such a scheme would need to be supplemented with a 
"top"-like display,  network traffic monitoring,  maybe even something like 
lsof,  to be able to say something about applications that aren't smart 
about reporting status...



Paul A. Houle
Digital Library Programmer/Analyst
Library Systems
Olin Library 503
(607) 539-7490