In addition to rethinking the cost of hardware and distribution of computing resources around the globe, the One Laptop Per Child project has made some major changes in GUI assumptions as well.

Mike Hearn writes a review of the OLPC graphical user interface:

“This UI is quite simply one of the deepest and most interesting redesigns of the desktop user interface ever produced.”

Mike has a list of at least 20 innovative ideas included in the OLPC, but to me one of the most interesting is, as he writes, “Network and presence is fully integrated into the core of the design.” This is a major departure from existing OS GUIs, which mostly derive their design from pre-network blueprints.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 21st, 2006 at 9:33 pm and is filed under Free Culture, Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.