Ideal OS: Rebooting the Desktop Operating System Experience

I know I said we would get rid of the commandline before, but I take that back. I really like the commandline as an interface sometimes, it's the pure text nature that bothers me. Instead of chaining CLI apps together with text streams we need something richer, like serialized object streams (think JSON but more efficient). Then we start getting some real power.

Consider the following tasks:

• I want to use my laptop as an amplified microphone. I speak into it and the sound comes out of a bluetooth speaker on the other side of the room.
• Whenever I tweet something with the hashtag #mom I want a copy sent, by email, to my mother.
• I want to use my iphone sitting on a stand made of legos as microscope. It streams to my laptop, which has controls to record, pause, zoom, and rebroadcast as a live stream to youtube.
• I want to make a simple bayesian filter which detects emails from my power company, adds the tag 'utility', logs into the website, fetches the current bill amount and due date, and adds an entry to my calendar.

Each of these tasks is conceptually simple but think of how much code you would have to write to actually make this work today. With a CLI built on object streams each of these examples could become a one or two line script.

We could do complex operations like 'find all photos taken in the last four years within 50 miles of Yosemite, and that have a star rating of 3 or higher, resize them to be 1000px on the longest size, then upload them to a Flickr album called "Best of Yosemite", and link to the album on Facebook'. This could be done with built in tools, no custom coding required, just by combining a few primitives.

Apple actually built such a system. It's called Automator. You can visually create powerful workflows. They never promote it, have started deprecating the Applescript bindings which make it work underneath, and recently laid off or transferred all of the members of the Automator team. Ah well.