This 3D Desktop prototype sure looks cool, the animations are very fluent, and the interaction possibilities are numerous.

But: Would you actually use it?

To me, this would only make sense if you'd abolish folders.

It seems to be much slower than traditional sorting into folders. And when I have the files in folders I can work much better with them. It's not as if I'm moving icons around on my desktop all day! Actually, I've disabled icons on my desktop, because I'm keeping windows full-screen all the time anyway. Just about everyone I've seen so far had a huge mess on his desktop, so that was an easy choice - why engage in something so pointless?

Usually I keep files in a well defined context; so I never would have to "push" them around, shuffle them, whatever. They're just where they belong. And in folders I can apply my shell magic to them, and mass process them.

In the shell, I can access my "pdf" files much easier than with any UI.

With all that fancy bells and whistles (XGL etc.) - where is the productivity gain? To me, it's just a waste of CPU power, decreasing battery performance and slowing me in getting the actual work done.

... thats what you get for not using proper XML.

I've been planning for a long time to switch to a blogging tool which has proper XML handling. That will at least make sure it's not my fault when planet breaks again. ;-) - a few times I've broken planet before, however, it was actually a bug in the planet software.

If I'd do a planet rewrite, I wouldn't bother to make a tolerant feed parser, but I'd just skip any blog posts that aren't valid. Then people will hopefully switch to software that actually uses XML writers and not print()...

(Yes, this post was also written to make planet realize I've fixed my feed ;-)