Here’s a short video showcasing the recent progress on Intent, kicked off by the wheel reinvention jam as a way of re-thinking Desktop UX. It is currently at a place where I can start experimenting with using it as a daily driver to switch between different contexts on Windows by managing the open and shown windows & processes. Currently in closed beta. Email me for access: [email protected]

Motivation:

Most desktop UX is a blank canvas with the whole universe of computing open to its users. In addition, the manipulative tactics of social media, video streaming platforms, and other software designed to constantly capture the attention of its users, leads to an extremely distracting environment full of easily treaded time sinks.

The goal of “Intent” is to reject this paradigm and bring mindfullness to the way we interact with our computing devices. Instead of sitting down at your computer and habitually opening the usual vices, “Intent” immediately confronts you with the question of “What do you want to accomplish?”. Select a session and do what you set out to without distraction.

Select a task and “Intent” will launch a pre-configured list of applications, websites, and folders to get to the task at hand. Pause sessions to hide the windows, switch contexts, and resume later. Set a timer and “Intent” will automatically close them down when time has expired.

Features:

Launch a session of applications, shortcuts, websites, and folders
- Fully threaded to speed things up
Pause a session, hiding all visible windows
Resume a session, restoring the hidden windows
End a session, terminating all processes of visible windows
- Also ends all processes that have a .exe path matching one in the session startup list. This is so that processes that close to the tray will terminate when ending a session It even resolves the launched shortcut path to the exe name!
- Shortcoming: Apps launched via Reparse points aren’t handled: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/reparse-points
- Shortcoming: Processes in the startup list that launch another process aren’t handled
  - e.g. Discord as found in the Windows search will be launched as a shortcut with target “Discord\Update.exe –processStart Discord.exe”
Set a timer to end a session once it has expired
Log activity of sessions (Work In Progress)
Display the active session startup-tasks and the list of visible windows
Display duration each session is active

Future Goals:

UX to construct sessions easily
Website block lists per session
Improved logging of usage
Properly restore z-ordering of windows when resuming a session
Layout launched application windows with multi-monitor support
- UX to design the layout of the windows in “Intent”
Single app focus mode.
- e.g. fullscreen, un-closable, and always in focus terminal or note-taking app
Aesthetically pleasing design and UX
Display Todo list
Experiment: Have user type an intention before starting a session that is displayed in a task bar
Stretch Goal: Calendar integration