What is coming next
The first full release is the desktop finished. What comes after it is about the person you look after: a parent in another country, a friend who rings you when something stops working, a computer you are quietly responsible for.
Being built now
These are coming. They are not in the beta yet.
Say its name
Anything the ring can do, voice can do: switch windows, take a screenshot, turn Wi-Fi on or off, change brightness, lock. Putting updates in and shutting down always need a click as well. The listening part comes as the Talk plugin.
A screen reader of its own
Written in Rust for Trindle, with no outside program behind it. Super, Alt and S, a switch in Settings and a button on the login screen are already waiting for it.
One mouse and keyboard for two computers
With the Flow plugin, push the pointer off the side of the screen and it carries on at the other computer, with the keyboard and clipboard following. Paired once with a short code.
Every app is a portable app
Each app lives in a folder of its own with everything it needs. Remove it and nothing is left behind and nothing else breaks.
Every .deb is boxed
A .deb from anywhere arrives in its own sealed box with its own libraries, so it keeps apart from everything else.
Help from a distance
Someone you trust, sitting at their own desk, doing the ordinary jobs for you: installing an app, joining a Wi-Fi network, finding out what is filling the disk. No talking anybody through a menu on the telephone.
You switch it on, you choose who, and you can switch it off again. Anything that changes the computer asks you first. If you would rather an assistant did the watching for you, that would be your choice to make too.
Sharing the screen
Some things cannot be explained down a telephone: buying a ticket, filling in a form, working out what a message on screen actually means. For those, the other person needs to see it.
One button in Apps to set it up, one press to let somebody in, and one press to put them out. Nothing runs until you say so, and a strip across the screen says who is there the whole time they are.
A health check
One page that answers “is this computer all right?” in plain words. Room left on the disk, how warm it is running, how the battery is holding up, anything that failed, updates waiting.
Not a wall of numbers: a short list, worst first, with the one thing worth doing about it. Most trouble is found before it is felt, and it is better to hear about it than to be rung about it.
There is more than this, and it is not decided
These are three of the ideas. There are plenty more, and the order they arrive in is not fixed. If you look after a computer for somebody and we have missed the thing that would actually help, that is worth more to us than any of the above.