Project Looking Glass

Sun Microsystems has been developing a new 'concept' Desktop System that's called Project Looking Glass. From what they have demoed so far, the main focus seems to be an attempt to bring 3D capabilities to the desktop to make the process of using applications more intuitive. An interesting concept is the ability to rotate windows to read/write stuff behind them. To be honest though, this seems to be a project that will inspire other projects that attempt to change the paradigm of a 'Desktop', but will itself die a silent death. For one, Looking Glass (if it is ever released) will run only on Linux and Solaris machines. (About Solaris, the less said the better - it's a visual monstrosity and should probably be used only for number crunching which it is very good at.) Also, following in the Solaris tradition, Sun manages to keep the Looking Glass desktop ugly inspite of 3D windowing and translucent windows. It is pathetic when great programming is marred by lousy design on the front end. Which is also why I admire Apple so much - the technology inside is matched by the design outside. However, the project is pre-beta, so we might be pleasantly surprised by the direction it takes, especially if Sun decides to open-source it. We could do with a new concept of Windowing other than the ones we've been used to so far (read Windows and Mac OSX).