::scr Desktop Dipsy

[simon wistow]

Froma  conversation spawned of my feverish brain and then lately over cuzzas
and beers last night.

Dipsy has become surprisingly useful .. we use it on channel for all sorts of
things and people have really pushed some of the features quite hard or by
doing neat hacks (i.e the 'be $foo' is effective yet simple).

So ... what about a desktop dipsy. A small avatar/bot (or even just a dialogue
box with a input box under it) that sat somewhere on your desktop. You ask it
stuff and it would reply - all the little things that you forget like your
mobile phone number. You could write plugins such as hooks into your address
book (dipsy, what's simon wistow's email address and phone number?), it could
do google queries, tell you the time and maybe even do more complicated stuff
tied into apps - "Dipsy, fire up my tax return" would maybe start up Excel
with the correct document, maybe even pulling stuff from your copy of Quicken
and inserting it in the right place. "Dipsy, play Radiohead's The Bends would
start playing all the tracks in your c:\music\radiohead\the_bends\ in file
order or something.

This is sort of what Microsoft tried to do with Bob and later Bob's bastard,
backstairs spawn child Clippy. Only Clippy was too intrusive and not helpful
enough. This would be another way of interacting with your computer - it would
learn and take on a personality (in much the same way that Dipsy has sort of
developed) but it would also be a way of having shortcuts. An infinite (in the
same way that a Turing machine is infinite) number of shortcuts which don't
clutter up your screen territory.

The quick witted of you out there will say "so this an interfacebased on a
line that you give commands to? Sort of a command line interface?" Which is
true to a certain extent but you could hardly call dipsy a command line
interface. Well you could. In fact it is. But not in the classical shell way.

Gah! Too much strong coffee. I seemed to exlain it better in the pub.

Stupid idea? Has merit? Could try harder?



-- 
: nature notes for the apocalypse