Not the big issues

I can't take on the big issues anymore, it takes the fun out of too many things. That doesn't mean that I'll stop thinking about them, but I'll put them to rest a little and focus on other (fun) things instead. It's too much for me to sacrifice fun (and happiness) for desperately trying to solve a problem.

However, I'm still very much interested in them and even more into other people thinking about or proposing solutions to the problems. So, here are the ones I can think of right now:

• focused desktop environments (including a notion of projects, relations between documents)
• software as information agents (helping the user make sense of data)
• a document abstraction (web pages, pdf documents and code are all kinds of documents, why can't we even read them using one interface for them, yet? also, why can't we reliably link any kind of document, yet?)

Some inspirations (in no particular order): Tad William's Otherland, LightTable, Smalltalk/Lisp development environments, ZigZag and probably lots of other things.

If you're also thinking about some of these things or know projects/people involved with these ideas, I'd be happy to hear from you!