Neo is a conceptual desktop operating system interface that is built for todays people, needs and technologies. Visualized below are ideas that were designed to inspire and provoke discussions about the future of productive computing. I have no intention of taking this beyond the concept stage. However, I am putting my work out there hoping that people build upon it .

The desktop computer hasn’t changed much in the last 30 years. It’s still built on windows, folders and mouse input. But we have changed. We now use smartphones and tablets most of the time, since they are much easier to use. The traditional desktop computer is struggling to adapt the simple interfaces of mobile devices while also keeping its focus on productivity. With people switching to mobile devices for mundane tasks, we have the opportunity to rethink the desktop computer with a focus on getting professional work done.

Get an overview of relevant information from your apps, and from services like Google Now. Cards allow you to interact with what is important right now without ever opening an app.

The desktop metaphor as the basis of computer interfaces is inefficient and outdated. Today, most of our data exists outsides of files and folders. The desktop worked great to get us started 40 years ago, but it was never built for the complexity and amount of work today.

The first thing you will see when starting Neo is a Finder panel. You can also click and drag up with three fingers on the touchpad to open one at anytime. Finder gives you powerful and easy access to your content.

Open an apps menu with a three-finger click on the touchpad, or press the menu button at the top left of each app. The app menu contains all relevant options for your app and its content, including naming and tagging your document. Contextual content options are not shown in the app menu. The list is easily scannable and you can search for options just by typing.

The average menu bar consists of dozens of items in arbitrary categories without regard for importance, redundancy and context. Neo makes it easy to find and access these options.

Get an overview of your open panels and resize, move or close them from here.

Launch, search and organize your apps. You can even drag an app icon to a specific panel position below to open it there.

Overlapping windows as an interface metaphor were invented over 40 years ago with the Xerox Star. Since then, the amount and complexity of how we use computers has increased dramatically. Windows are now inefficient and incompatible with modern productivity interfaces.

Neo shows your apps as panels. They fill the full height of your screen and are placed next to each other without overlap. You can have dozens of panels open and easily scroll through them to switch between apps. Or resize and move them to work with multiple apps side-by-side. Panels use screen space more efficiently and are a more elegant way to multitask than normal windows.

Gaze See and click. Neo tracks your eye gaze, so you don’t have to point with a mouse cursor before clicking. Gaze tracking hardware has become a lot better, smaller and cheaper over the last few years. It can be built in alongside a webcam. However, gaze tracking is obviously still not as precise as traditional mouse input. We can work around that by using a touchpad as a secondary input.



Whenever you put a finger on the touchpad, your current gaze selection is highlighted. If necessary, you can easily adjust the selection by moving your finger. Then just press down to click. This is comparable to the hover effect on the web. It’s much faster and easier than using a mouse, while still being precise enough for most tasks. What’s wrong with the mouse? We have been using a mouse as the main input for desktop computers for over 30 years. But during the last decade, smartphones and tablets have established new input methods. However, the transition of touch, gesture and voice input to the desktop has often been clunky and unintuitive. We need to use these new technologies to rethink the desktop interface and remove layers between users and tasks. We need interfaces that work well across devices and provide an easy transition from using smartphones. How does gaze tracking work? Eye trackers are small cameras combined with infrared lights. They create reflection patterns on your eye that the cameras capture. The image is then analyzed to track your gaze. You can learn more about eye tracking on tobiipro.com.

1 Select Touch to select what you are looking at. 2 Adjust Swipe to adjust your selection. 3 Click Click to confirm your selection.

Focus Mode When your eyes are focused on a single panel for more than a minute, other panels slowly fade into the background. They instantly pop back if you look at them. Just Type Just type while looking at an email to reply to it. Or type while looking at a search field to search. Neo knows the context of what you want to do without unnecessary interactions. Preloading Before you decide to click on something, your gaze usually focuses on it for a short moment. That’s often enough to start preloading content in the background and substantially improve load times. Identify Users Every person has a unique eye movement pattern. Combined with other sensors, this can be used for identifying users and security. Notifications Neo automatically dismisses incoming notifications after you look at them. You don’t have to swipe them away.

Touch A large touchpad is the perfect partner for gaze input. You can use it to select, scroll, zoom and more wherever you are looking. And for really precise input, you could use devices like Apple Pencil on the touchpad.



Use one finger to interact with whatever you are directly looking at. With two fingers, you can scroll or zoom inside a panel. And three fingers let you modify and switch between panels. Text Selection Place one finger on the touchpad to adjust a cursor at the gaze position. Use a second finger to set the end of the selection. Lift and Drop Click harder (through Apples Force Touch) on an element to lift it up. Then click on its destination to drop it there.

Context Menu Just a swipe away. Click and hold on the touchpad with one finger to open the context menu wherever you are looking. Then swipe to select an action. This gives you quick access to common shortcuts with one smooth motion. After a while, your muscle memory will learn to just click and swipe up on any element to copy it — without even looking at the menu. And if you ever need something that is not in the context menu, just swipe down to get a list of all available actions. This focus makes the context menu much easier and faster than the traditional right click menu. But it also lets you customize and master it over time to improve your efficiency. Further Reading User learning and performance with marking menus.

by Gordon Kurtenbach and William Buxton in 1994 Your browser does not support the video tag.