News Item Dated: 29 January 2003
From: Application Development Trends Online  (01/28/03); Vaughan, Jack

Yale University computer scientist and veteran developer David Gelernter says he is now focusing on creating tools that make it easier for users to find "stuff" on their computers and otherwise improve the end user's computer experience. Gelernter says the mouse, icon, and windows metaphors are no longer able to manage the flood of information on most people's PCs. He says, "As email and the Web became a big thing, it was clear that the hierarchical file systems and tools we've inherited from the 70s would not work." To solve this problem, his company, Mirror Worlds Technologies, has released a beta version of Scopeware, software that runs atop normal desktop operating systems.

Scopeware, available free via download, allows users to search for standard documents on their PC by keyword, but presents the results as a visual, time-sequenced narrative. Gelernter says the user should determine the presentation of information, not the machine. "I want my information management software to have the same shape as my life, which is a series of events in time," he says. "I want the flow to determine the shape of the picture I see on the screen." Gelernter says that future iterations of Scopeware could allow a community of users to share documents pertinent to them through peer-to-peer systems. Gelernter was instrumental in devising the parallel programming techniques that allowed for the Linda language; his work also laid the foundation for Java and distributed memory architectures. He says it's now time to create software "for the user as an everyday tool," not to meet the needs of code developers.

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