Suppose you want to watch a film on Windows. You find the file. You double-click it. Windows looks up which program handles that kind of file, starts the program, waits for it to draw its window, menus and toolbars, and then hands it the file, which the program loads and, finally, plays. Four steps, three of which are about the program. In Desktop Minder, you find the film and open it, and it plays. That's the whole difference, and this page is about why it matters more than it sounds.

App-Centric and Document-Centric

An app-centric computer is organized around programs. The Start menu is a list of programs. The taskbar is a row of programs. A file is a thing some program owns, and the file's icon is the program's logo. When you want to do something, you ask yourself which program does it, and go there.

A document-centric computer is organized around the things you actually care about: the photo, the letter, the album, the message from your sister. Each of those knows what can be done to it, and offers it where you are. There is no "going to" a program, because the document is already in front of you.

This isn't a new idea. It's what Apple promised with OpenDoc in the 1990s and what Microsoft half-built with OLE, and both were abandoned, mostly because they asked every software company in the world to rewrite their products. Desktop Minder doesn't ask anyone anything. It just opens the file itself, and for the files it doesn't know, it hands off to Windows exactly as Explorer would. The list of files it knows grows as I go.

Every Document Is a Collection

The idea that holds the program together is that every document is made of smaller documents, all the way down.

• A folder is a collection of documents.
• A picture is a collection of pixels, or of drawing instructions.
• A recording or a film is a collection of moments, which can be one unbroken take or a dozen clips that can be rearranged.
• A moment is a collection of frames, and a frame is a picture—so one day the picture editor will reach into a film without needing a new idea.
• Text is a collection of paragraphs, of words, of characters.

Why does that matter to you, rather than to me? Because it means that wherever you point, the program can tell you what's there and what can be done to it, and it never has to invent a category to do so. Right-click a picture you're changing, and the menu is headed by nouns you can already see on the screen—this red, the whole picture, Sunset.jpg, Photos—never by "Tools" or "Options" or "Advanced," each offering what can be done to it, under its own name. The picture editor is as far as that has got so far; the same way of pointing is meant to reach every kind of document.

Some Examples

A Folder

Open a folder and you get a listing, in place, with Up, Back and Ahead arrows like a browser's. So far, so Explorer. The difference is in the columns. Windows offers every column it has ever heard of, in a menu you have to scroll. Desktop Minder offers the handful every file has—size, dates, attributes—plus whatever the kinds of file in this folder have to say for themselves. A folder of MP3s offers Title, Artist, Length and Bit rate; a folder of photographs offers Width, Height and F-stop; a folder of neither offers neither. Columns that can be written can be edited right in the cell, the way you'd rename a file, so fixing an album's track titles doesn't mean opening a tag editor.

Each folder remembers its own columns, its own sort and its own icon, in a small text file inside it. Move the folder and all of that moves with it.

A Text File

A text file opens on its Read tab, looking just as it will when you edit it, but read-only, because editing is a deliberate act, not something you fall into by clicking a file. Click Edit to write in it. There is no Save button: it's written back when you put it down, like a sheet of paper. A web page gets a real browser to be read in, a paragraph editor to be written in, and the editor from Visual Studio Code for its source. Text in Desktop Minder says how far along each kind is.

A Picture

A picture opens on its Look tab, fitted to the window, and most pictures are only ever looked at, so nothing about the editor is allowed to slow that down. Click Change and you have the editor, which is built the other way round from the ones people know. There is no Filters menu and no wall of tools. A click means one of four things—point, box, freehand, brush—and that's the entire toolbar. What can be done is on the right-click menu of whatever you pointed at.

Right-click a red pixel and the menu is about this red: select everything like it, replace it with another color, make it transparent. Below that, under its own heading, is the whole picture, with what can be done to that; then the file Sunset.jpg; then the folder Photos, offering exactly what that folder offers anywhere else. Not a copy of the folder's menu—the same one, built by the same code, which is why the two can never drift apart.

Every change you make is kept as a step, so undo is cheap and a change made ten minutes ago can usually be taken out on its own, without disturbing the ones after it. Images in Desktop Minder has the rest.

A Film

A film opens and starts playing, because opening a film is asking to watch it. As it plays, it notes your place in the folder's settings file, so a crash loses nothing; when you close it, the place goes into the film's own tags, so it travels with the file to another machine. Open it next month and it picks up five seconds before you stopped. A folder of films offers Last watched and Resume at columns, and a switch to hide the ones you've finished.

The video editor is designed, and the first of its eight stages built, and it's the clearest example of the whole philosophy. In Premiere or OpenShot you go into the program, open a "project", work on it, and at the end export a film: a second, separate thing you then have to go and find. The film is a by-product of the program. Here the video will be the document. You'll make one from a folder's New menu, the way you'd make a text file, arrange its scenes, and close it, and the film will be brought up to date by itself, silently, the way a sheet of paper is up to date when you put it down. There'll be no Export step, because there will be nothing to export. Video in Desktop Minder has the design, and how far it has got.

Music

There is one Jukebox, because there is one pair of speakers and one listener. Any track, album or folder of music, wherever you see it, offers Play Now, Play Next and Play Last, and they all feed the same queue. A music drive that has been scanned can be opened as a library—every track at once, or by artist, album or genre—and an artist inside it opens as the folder it is, because it is a folder. Audio in Desktop Minder has the rest.

A Web Page

A shortcut to a web page is a document whose content happens to be somewhere else. Open it and the page appears in the middle of the screen, with Back, and it follows links, because a page you've gone to is a page you may go on from. It sits in the Files pane beside your other files, and the Internet desktop starts out full of them: your bookmarks, gathered from every browser on the machine, as shortcuts in the folders you'd already sorted them into.

Mail

A mailbox is a folder. Inside it are folders for Inbox, Unknown Senders, Newsletters, Spam, Sent, Drafts and Outbox, and inside those, every message is a file whose name begins with the date it was written. You sort them, drag them and delete them exactly as you would any file, because they are files. A message you haven't read is in bold. Open one and it's shown in a sealed box that runs no scripts and fetches nothing from the internet until you ask—which is to say, the tracking pixel that tells the sender the moment you opened their message never gets sent.

Mail from people in your contacts lands in the Inbox. Everyone else lands in Unknown Senders, where Add to Contacts makes them a contact and moves their mail over; bulk mail goes to Newsletters, and what Spam Watch recognizes, to Spam. A reply is a document too: it's saved as a draft half a minute after you stop typing, and Send queues it in the Outbox, from which it goes when the network is there. Email in Desktop Minder is a section of its own.

Contacts and Notes

Your contacts are one file, MyContacts.vcf, in a format every phone and mail program can read. Open it and it's a table you edit in place. Drop another vCard file on the table and it's merged in. Sticky notes are text files in a folder, shown in a pane with the first few lines of each as its tile; open one and it's a text document, because it is one.

A Broken Shortcut

My favorite small example. Double-click a shortcut whose target has gone, and Windows puts up a box saying the item has been changed or moved, and offers to delete it. But a broken shortcut isn't rubbish. It's a name, a place on your desktop and often an icon you chose, pointing at a drive that isn't plugged in today or a folder that moved last year. In Desktop Minder it opens as a document about where it points, and offers three ways to mend it: drop the thing on the page, type or paste the new path, or go and find it.

The Desktop Itself

Each desktop's settings—its name, its folder, its wallpaper—are a document too: a sheet, opened from the desktop's tab, shown in the middle of the screen like anything else. Type a new name and press Enter, or just move on, and it's on the tab at once. Pick a wallpaper and it's behind you as you pick it. Nothing waits for an OK, because there isn't one.

Putting One Document Into Another

If documents are the thing, any document should be able to go into any other, wherever that makes sense. You can't meaningfully drag a video onto a printed page, but you can drag one onto a web page you're designing; and you can drag text onto a video, or onto a picture. Email is the kind of document that already holds most of the others, and everything else is meant to follow it as far as it sensibly can.

The machinery for that is built: every drag, drop and paste goes through one set of rules, and whatever is under the pointer says, before you let go, whether it will take what you're carrying, and why not if it won't. A file goes to a folder, obviously; but so does a paragraph of text from Word, which becomes a .txt file there, and a selection of pixels, which becomes a .png. Every place in the program a picture belongs—a desktop's background, an album's cover, a contact's photo—takes a picture file dropped on it, and a contact's photo takes a dragged-out selection too; a broken shortcut takes the thing it should point at. Paste is the same act from the clipboard, so a folder's Paste and a drop onto it can never disagree about what they've been handed.

What isn't built yet is most of the documents' own halves. Drop something on an open text, picture or film today and it tells you it takes nothing dropped on it. Each kind's page says what it should take, and how far that has got.

The rules are the same whatever the target and whatever the drive. A plain drag copies—the move with the least effort should be the least destructive. Shift moves. Ctrl+Shift makes a shortcut. And a program dragged with no key held makes a shortcut, because nobody has ever wanted to move Word.exe onto their desktop.