I have to admit, I am a fan of retro-computing. I have a real-live TRS-80 Model 100s and a Canon Cat I use on a daily basis. Elsewhere in the house I have a Apple //c, Tomy Tutor and a TI CC-40 I fire up when I'm getting especially nostalgic. And lets not talk about the Commodore 64, Classic Mac, Atari and Apple ][ emulators. I still find time to fire up Stella and play PitFall! or famously does not use email. Why should he? It's a distraction. I keep thinking... If someone like Don Knuth doesn't use email, then maybe I can get away with checking my email once in the morning and once in the evening.
Sure. There are plenty of times when emergencies come up, but maybe you should be phoning or texting me when that happens.
I also LOVE the idea of a little bug on the screen giving you a 15 minute heads up before meetings or pre-scheduled phone calls. And I want to have a Skype-like digital phone system open in the background so I can have a note-taking app running in front of me.
What I'm wondering is... can we... should we go back to a "virtual cartridge" system where our user interface isn't a bunch of overlapping windows, but one big ol' app in the middle of the screen, a clock icon and an emergency alerts icon.
The user experience would be press the big CHANGE APP button on the keyboard and your whole screen shows the app picker. From there you use the keyboard to search or browse your app collection.
Anyway. Just an idea.