The CreativeOS Manifesto

I wrote this piece of text 12 years ago, on March 24th 2008. I am brave enough to publish it now - without any recent editing. As it is, as it was written. What do you think?

CreativeOS

Simple. Bright. Human.

(Because today's OSes are still missing that final human touch.)

The world's first truly creation centered operating system - with a completely hidden application layer.

creative = "creatus" (Latin) = "to have grown"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity

To all the operating systems out there: it's time to grow up!

To all the bright IT talents out there: I need your help!

This document describes the motivation and driving factors behind CreativeOS, some of its key features.

As many of the great inventions out there this one is also coming partly from need partly from frustration.

Having spent two decades in the software industry I think there are some aspects which we seriously need to rethink (and rebuild). Now.

The main driver behind our digital universe, our human web is creativity. In order to add more creative content you need the help of digital frameworks, computer operating systems.

The operating systems and software applications available today many times block the creative flow of ideas. When you sit in front of a computer you are inside a framework that's not (yet) good enough to let your creative mind extract your ideas in digital form quickly and efficiently.

In order to use these systems you need to learn a lot and think in a particular way: the way the creators of these software tools were thinking and not YOUR way of thinking. There's the file system with its hierarchical folder structure - getting more and more complex as we move forward.

We have a growing number of applications, we need to learn how to use each of them. We have to update / upgrade and maintain them, learn and again learn more once a new version comes out. Many times we even need to know the exact version number of that particular software tool. What a waste of precious creative time!

We need to stop doing things like this.

There are operating systems out there which almost got it right. MacOS and Google's gOS are good examples. They are almost there. Almost.

But they are still missing the key point here - and that final human touch.

In my vision I imagine an operating environment - not necessarily an entirely new operating system - where on the main screen there's nothing else but something representing a blank document. Tabula rasa.

No menus, no long lists of applications, nothing. But a simple blank canvas to start with.

Then all of a sudden, once the creative flow starts moving inside you and you start touching this clean "document" the necessary tools appear - no fancy names, no version numbers, nothing stopping you from focusing on the main thing: the creation itself.

At this point you're becoming a part of what I call the creative path.

Creative path: the new concept of human-computer interaction

That's the path I'd like to build and use it everywhere in our entire digital realm.

Stop spending time on updating and upgrading your software applications, maintaining your operating system, reorganising and moving your files around.

What a waste of your invaluable time! It's not your task.

You are human. Do what computers are not good at: create new things. Beautiful and breath-taking, bright and amazing.

Don't let your software applications rule and block you.

Unlearn version numbers and application names.

Go and create.

In order to let creativity flow and manifest itself in digital form we need to hide everything that's blocking this process. We need to hide and unlearn everything that's necessary today.

We don't even need to show the file system, a creative mind does not need that information. Not at the time of the creation.

Maybe I'm wrong here or maybe the solution is already out there somewhere. I just haven't found it yet.

I think the building tools, the little components for the next generation of creative operating systems are pretty much already out there. We just need to collect and re-arrange all the pieces together and make them work together.

Maybe what I'm describing here is what they call the coming WebOS, or something that will be represented entirely inside a web browser one day.

There's a long road ahead of us.

Today's OSes are still missing that final human touch.

What is CreativeOS?

CreativeOS will be the next generation of today's computer operating systems focusing on the human side of computing and the digital content creation process rather than the technological side of using a computer.

With CreativeOS you can unfold and pour your creative thoughts into digital form easily and quickly by-passing any blocking gates currently existing in today's operating systems.