lowfat - document viewing with a twist

created at February 7th, 2006 |
Contents:

The problem
A solution
Arising challenges
Potential usage
Current status
Screenshots/Videos
Near term goals
Far ahead future
Sponsoring
FAQ
The problem:

Todays file-management interfaces are more or less the same for the last 10 years. Ok we have thumbnail-previews in our icons to reflect the actual file-contents, but it is still only a stand-in or substitution for the real thing. But it’s not very real-world-like, where you have e.g. a bunch of photos or document-sheets that you just can look at to see what’s in them. It’s not really a seamless experience. On the other hand there are desktop search-tools like beagle and Spotlight, which help us find the kind of things we are currently interested in from our huge heaps of personal data. Thus we don’t see the unhandy clutter of hierarchical file-systems. Would it not be great if the computer could show us just the stuff we currently interested in, in a natural fashion where there’s only our documents and hardly any UI at all?
A solution:

Enter “lowfat”. Its goal is to bring that life-like and natural display to the desktop, alongside with a flat hierarchy of our files, when combined with todays search-engines. The aim of lowfat is to be an engine to view and handle your documents with life-alike behaviour allowing for example to seamless zoom, pan and rotate them. Furthermore it should support the user by making sorting and arrangement - according to certain criteria - of the currently viewed documents available.

Current (and even not so current) hardware is capable enough to allow these kind of things. Common graphics-hardware and CPUs are mostly idle during general desktop-usage, when you are looking through your files in your file-manager. This processing-power can be put to good use by “lowfat”.

Another potentially FOSS super-desktop.