Our mission is to take control of the desktop away from the major software manufacturers and put it in the hands of the world's independent software developers. In a year, we hope to give desktop control to non-programmers as well, so that everyone can alter their computational environment at will---and share that altered environment with others, just as the web now lets anyone share websites with anyone else.
The desktop has stagnated for fourteen years thanks to the reluctance of the major software manufacturers to introduce new designs in the interests of backward compatibility---and preserving profits. They have been telling us how we must live for decades. It's time to change that.
To accomplish our mission, we are building a smart, visual, and autonomous information manager of all of a user's information, whether that information is data or programs, and whether it originates on the web, via mail, news, ftp, an editor, or any other application. It is not a search engine, browser, desktop, or operating system, although it shares elements of all four programs.
It is written in Java to make it portable across as many computers, operating systems, and browsers as possible, and it is free and open-source. Unlike other open-source projects like Gnu and Linux, however, to make it attractive to everyone it needs to be adaptive, autonomous, and visual from the start.
To make rapid change possible, it must be well-written, flexible, extensively documented, easy to understand and modify, and easy to find and download from the web. Any Java programmer, anywhere on earth, should be able to extend it. If successful, it should lead to rapid improvements in user interfaces, adaptive agents, and information management schemes.