Most of the objections in the comments seem to come from people who think this is going to get annoying after a while and/or that it's inefficient either of human or computer processing cycles or of screen real estate.
They're going to hate me then.
Because I don't think Dan's gone far enough. I think he's suggesting that we can learn from Movie OSs to make things more usable and easy to grasp. I think we should do it to make them more fun.
I'm wondering what Mr Shirky's idea that "abundance breaks more things than scarcity" might do to UIs and OSs. How would you write a note-taking app if you could waste as much processing power and screen space on it as you liked? You wouldn't add extra functionality, you'd add extra cool and humanity. You'd break all those ideas about efficiency and wrap other stuff around it instead. As in the real world; people don't buy Moleskines for the extra functionality.
Because while some set of application development is going to be about solving new problems and developing new technologies some other set is going to be about finding new ways to solve the old ones. And some of those new ways won't be about function or efficiency they'll be about beauty or values or context or fun.
Why, for instance, aren't there app equivalents of a Mil Spec Pen? Or a space pen? If NASA made a note-taking app, I'd buy it.
Wouldn't it make sense for the app market to end up more like luxury goods than anything else? Like pens, watches, sunglasses, handbags, shoes. Lots of innovation in design and craft, not much in functionality and most of the value in associations and story.
Why for instance are the likes of Brietling and Glycine offering free apps which replicate their watches when they could be selling $900 Premium Apps which promise superior handcrafted, pilot-influenced swiss chronometry.
And, significantly these Pretending Apps don't have to be all dumb and gaudy, they don't have to wastes of screen real estate, they have to be subtle. As I've said before, it's the difference between The Fun Theory piano thing (all on the surface, flashy, not long-lasting, no imagination required, the play's in the world) and Grey World's railings (hidden, restrained, permanent, the play's in your head).
Yes, a huge flashing WARNING icon would be annoying if it happened all the time. But if it happened very rarely it would be funny, especially if the regular app interface had some tiny subtle hints that it might have been made by Smersh.
