Vision Overview
Project Origin - The Solution Finds Its Problem
The inspiration for Vision came one summer when I was writing a packet sniffer for Mac OS X. To view the packets as they were captured I used a ListView-like object to organize the different fields and packets by columns and rows. This served about 90% of my needs for that part of the interface that I had envisioned for the project. The problem was that there was no reasonable way to get the remaining 10% because I did not have access to the source code or any way to significantly augment or replace functionality of the object. I found myself with two choices: 1. Learn to live within the confines that I had been given or 2. Do everything from scratch, neither of which appealed to me. Also during that summer I had watched the movie Minority Report and I had been especially impressed with the creative and quick moving 3D interface of the Precrime computer. As I watched that scene I said to myself "We have the hardware and software capability to do that kind of stuff now! Why don't we have it yet?" I thought about modern video games which are very impressive visually, have lighting fast interactivity but are restricted to the specifics of the game needs. It was then that I conceived of a project that would combine both the power and freedom of extensible interface structures with the creativity and imagination of the 3rd dimension and game-like visual effects. I imagined a completely new operating system interface framework built from the ground up with these ideals in mind.
Project Objective - To Take Over The World
The aim of the Vision project is to provide the computing world a flexible, robust and forward-looking programming framework with which to construct and run graphical user interfaces. Although current operating systems have performed adequately in this area for the last twenty years, a system more suited to the computing requirements and hardware of the future will soon be needed.
Vision aims to fill that need.
However, Vision in and of itself is not an operating system. It is one portion of the operating system that dictates what is seen on the screen, how people interact with programs on the computer and how the interfaces to those programs are built. Vision has been developed with the primary goal of becoming the graphical user interface of an operating system. Although it has been designed as an operating system component it also functions very well as a standalone application framework that runs alongside or within existing user interfaces. Currently the application framework is in public release to allow developers to get their hands on the technology.