I liked the videos linked to in Boudewijn's latest blog entry. They reminded me of something Ted Nelson often talks about - the stupid limits of our desktop software. When not doing bizarre dinosaur impressions or calling himself God (he's a really fun speaker!) he talks quite passionately about the mistakes made by Xerox, trapping us in a world where computers mimic a secretary's office. We have files, folders, a bin (trash), a desktop, handy toolboxes (panels, system trays, etc.) - all the trappings of an old fashioned office. What we don't have are tools that really innovate in the way that users would want, or so he claims.

I tend to agree when I think about how frustrating I find my computer. For example, as a philosophy student I spend quite a lot of time working on my research. With my computer on, just to get started I have to load up a bunch of PDFs, web pages, Kile, Pybliographer and KDissert. So I load all the apps, bring up the documents I want for that session, and I'm ready to work; some automation, like "restore well-being-essay session", would be nice. With the exception of Pybliographer's clever insertion trick with Kile, they're all separate so I still have to do lots of work manually adding documents into my bibliography, keeping my mind map and document in sync, finding the page in a PDF that corresponds to an item in the mind map or a page in my own document, and so on; a truly integrated desktop that helps me work by doing this boring stuff would be wonderful.

KDE is by far the most helpful and integrated desktop environment I've used to date. But it could be so much better for writers like me, if only it could surpass the limitations of the "separate applications and documents" notion that pervades KDE and the competition today.

All of this is why I'm quite excited by Plasma, because it seems to an outsider that the contributors might be able to crowbar some innovations of the kind that Ted and I pine for into KDE.

Update: A few people have left comments about the current KDE session management. Sorry, it doesn't cut the mustard. Not only does it not bring all apps up in their exact state (e.g. on the right page, KPDF bookmarks intact, etc.) but it only handles one type of session, such that KDE will start up next time in the same state. I'm talking about overlapping "sessions", so for example I've just finished going through my mail and without closing anything, I want to re-open my "working on the well-being essay" session on desktop 3 without logging out and without changing the state of any other apps.