Symphony OS

I've removed advertising from most of this site and will eventually clean up the few pages where it remains.

While not terribly expensive to maintain, this does cost me something. If I don't get enough donations to cover that expense, I will be shutting the site down in early 2020.

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The funniest thing about Symphony OS is the posts you'll sometimes see asking if its Mezzo Desktop can be ported to Linux. The reason it is funny is that Symphony most definitely is Linux - it's based on Knoppix and nobody is even trying to hide its Linux roots:

SymphonyOS is based on a pure Debian "unstable" system.

( http://symphonyos.com/wiki/ (link dead, sorry) )

It's just that Mezzo is so very different, both in initial looks and usage. You can see screenshots at http://symphonyos.com (link dead, sorry) (I have found the entire Symphony site to be extremely slow at times, so have patience).

Mezzo does away with menus and uses the corners of the screen as click points to bring up desklet applications. These apps are simple scripts that output html snippets; that ultimately gets drawn on the screen by Orchestra (link dead, sorry) If you know Perl and a little HTML, you can produce your own desklets in seconds.

Why is Mezzo so different? Blame or praise Jason Spisak. He based Mezzo on his own ideas about interface design, which he wrote about in an article entitled "Laws of Interface Design". I had a heck of a time finding this on the web and in fact could only find it in Google's cache. I'll just quote a small part of it here:

If you can find this (try googling for "www.symphonyos.com/uilaws.html" and use the cached copy if it is still there), it's worth reading the whole thing.

I can see setting up a kiosk with this or customizing it for a computer-challenged person you want to drag into the Internet age. It's beautifully simple and intuitive, and best of all very easy for you to customize to your needs. It would be a fantastic way to distribute simple html based applications: for example, I could put my Skills Tests on this very easily (note to self: not a bad idea). I threw them a $30.00 donation just because innovation deserves reward and if I actually use it for something I'll definitely send more.

Fun stuff, worth putting up with their sometimes slow web site to get a download.

If you found something useful today, please consider a small donation.

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