Following Greg’s recent posts on Sugar, I’m playing with running it a bit; might even try to use it as my dominant platform for a while. Some thoughts, all written from within Sugar:

* lack of tabs in the browser (or even a quick ‘new window’) will drive me nuts. New windows you get via javascript don’t have controls on them, which is even worse.

* conceptually, the single-window-single-app and simplified UI design choices are appealing to me, but in practice it still seems very rough- like there was a vision here, but one that was not well communicated and hence implemented very unevenly. Hopefully that will improve with time.

* You never know when you’ll miss having a clock.

Two major observations I take away from this:

* It was tremendously ballsy of the original design team to make so many radical, paradigm-shifting changes to the user interface and (more importantly) to the mental interaction model.

More here