Nah, I've seen plenty of interfaces that were worse. I think the N800's interface is quite usable, but I agree that there's plenty of room for improvement and at present no one would hold it out as example of a very "slick" interface.

I don't mind the fact that it's "one window per application." I can see plenty of pros and cons to that decision, but in the end I doubt that multiple windows would really be that much better -- just different.

Ironically, since they're using free software as their base, I suspect it's harder to get new software developers to sign up as compared to, e.g., Windows Mobile where people see somewhat more money to be made. :-) Still, there are plenty of great software apps for the N800, even if many of them are ports of well-known apps initially developed for desktops.

I read that article last week, and I agree that he has a lot of good points, and I think it's 100% correct that a major source of problems is the fact that -- it appears -- no one on the Maemo development team did much research into the history of GUIs on N800-like devices, and therefore it's not surprising that the "homegrown" GUi that is Hildon has some warts and is nowhere near as well-developed as what the Newton finished with.

Yes, absolutely, please do this. I think the idea of an arbitrary number of clipboards represented by little "widgets" around the screen's perimeter is a great idea! The fact that the N800 is open source is a saving grace here -- given time, the desktop will become just that much better than it is today.

The lack of a printing subsytem for the N800 is also a bit of a letdown. This too I think can be readily addressed by the open-source community: Windows 3.1 around had scalable fonts and installable printer drivers back over 15 years ago on machines running 10x slower CPUs with 100x less memory, so I'm convinced we can come up with something usable here as well.

---Joel