Ideal OS: Rebooting the Desktop Operating System Experience

From this base we should be able to build everything we need. However, this also means we have to rebuild everything from scratch. Higher level constructs built on top of the database would make many applications a lot easier to rebuild. Let's look at some examples.

Email. If we separate the standard email client into GUI and networking modules, which communicate solely through messages, then building a client becomes a lot easier. The GUI doesn't have to know anything about GMail vs Yahoo mail or how to process SMTP error messages. It simply looks for documents with type 'email' in them. When the GUI wants to send a message it marks an email with the property outgoing=true. A headless module will listing for outgoing emails and do the actual STMP processing.

Splitting the email app into component makes replacing one part far easier. You could build a new email frontend in an afternoon without having to rebuild the networking parts. You could build a spam detector that has no UI at all, it just listens for incoming messages, processes them, and marks the bad ones with a spam tag. It doesn't know or care how spam is visualized. It just does one thing well.

Email filters could do other interesting things. Perhaps you send an email to your bot with the command 'play beatles'. A tiny module looks for this incoming email, sends another message to the mp3 module for playing the music, then marks the email as deleted.

Once everything becomes a database query the entire system becomes more flexible and hackable.