::scr Desktop Dipsy

[David Cantrell]

On Wed, Oct 10, 2001 at 04:34:13PM +0100, simon wistow wrote:

> 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?), ...

This reminds me somewhat of Autonomy's "Active Knowledge" product.  I tried
it briefly a couple of years ago.  It's a Windows application which sits in
the background watching what you type, what words and phrases you highlight
with the mouse etc, and suggests related resources in a small unobtrusive
window.  Those resources could be URLs, or they could be links to relevant
emails in your Outlook folders, or related documents on your hard disk or
on the network, or all sorts of other stuff.

I didn't use it for very long, and as I did most of my real work in *nix I
didn't get the full benefit of it, but it looked very good indeed.  It
worked much better than their search engine despite using the same tech.  I
guess their technology was more suited to that style of work than to a
google-a-like search.

> 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.

Thing is, lots of these tasks - like "fire up my tax return" or "play mp3
playlist $foo" would be fairly time-consuming to implement, but can either
be done so much more quickly by just clicking an icon, or they are done so
rarely that it's not worth the trouble.

> 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.

Bob wasn't really like this from what I gather, it was simply a different
spin on the desktop metaphor, you had to do stupid things like drag the
flowers to the bookshelf to launch an app.

> 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.

An interesting shell.  One which doesn't behave deterministically* but
instead tries to Do The Right Thing.

> Stupid idea? Has merit? Could try harder?

Has merit.  JFDI!  I could be persuaded to collaborate on something like
this.  It's far more interesting than Yet Another Collection of CGIs.

* - yes, I know it is deterministic underneath, but the user experience
wouldn't be deterministic.  That's the beauty of dipsy, she comes up with
bizarre but cool stuff when you least expect it.  Dipsy, however, has
benefited from having lots of teachers where a Desktop Dipsy would have
just one.  Dipsy also has the advantage of being just a bit of fun instead
of a serious tool - we don't mind if she says stupid things, as we're not
relying on her.  If, however, I ask Desktop Dipsy "what's Simon's mobile
number" and it instead tells me the home number for completely the wrong
Simon, I'll be mildly pissed off. Hmm, most of this footnote has nothing
to do with what it's meant to be expanding on.  Oops.

-- 
David Cantrell | david@cantrell.org.uk | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

  This is nice.  Any idea what body-part it is?