Almost every desktop computer these days uses a desktop interface. If it doesn't, it probably uses a command line interface.
The desktop interface makes sense, as it is the most intuitive to understand. Files are placed on a desktop, and can be organized in folders. Between this and a command line interface, its hard to imagine using a computer any other way.
This is where lifestreams come in, a new imagined way to use a computer, developed at Yale University in 1995. The project and concepts seem to have been long abandoned, with most links in the project being dead. However, you can still check it out at the Internet Archive, although most pages use PostScript, so it's hard to open them.
When looking at the problems with the regular desktop interface, 3 main issues came up:
- Finding things is hard
- Reminders are hard
- It's hard to archive things, and old things aren't useful
A lifestream is basically a really long list of files, with the newest ones being at the start of the list, and the oldest being at the back. This is essentially the Windows application Everything, except it was made to work with more than just files. For example, emails would also be represented in the stream too.
The reason this was said to be better is because everything you likely need is already at the front of the stream, and older information is at the back. This is what the interface looked like:
This clearly isn't that efficient. You can see a lot, but it's hard to recognize objects. However, that's not to say that this wasn't a good idea. There are a lot of good concepts here. You might remember the timeline from Windows 10. This is basically that, but in a different way. Platforms such as Google Docs also work in this way. You can choose to work using a traditional file structure using Drive, or you can go to docs.google.com and see a list of all your recent files.
I really wish that the lifestream concept took off more, because I think it looks really interesting. I think especially on mobile devices it could end up being really useful.