Operating system level undo/replay (02-Nov-2009)
At present, undo/redo is implemented in an application specific way, usually consisting of lists of discrete "undoable" operations performed and enough information to reverse those operations and do them again as necessary. The idea is to remove this need from applications by allowing state flashback at a system level, and to integrate this with an intuitive timeline video for selecting what point to return to.
Operating system level undo/replay
Sometimes when a program is used (for example Eclipse*) the mouse is accidentally clicked on a menu, or a window is dragged/closed to the wrong place. It is possible that afterwards. the user can be left with a screen missing certain information or the user can have a workspace which is unfamiliar to the user or unwanted. If the user doesn't know what key or mouse click they made then it is very difficult, if not possible to go back to where the user originally was. Also clipboard space and selections are lost, for example if the user highlights some text, copy it to the clipboard and close the document, then go to another document, highlight some text the user wants to replace, and hit ctrl-c instead of ctrl-v by mistake. The text on the clipboard is then lost normally.
At the moment the user just has to play around trying to work out what it is, but in these days of multi-level undo it would be nice, and very convenient, to be able to undo any action on the computer, not just local actions in each program. Copy and paste are global across every application, so undo could work the same.
The invention would take a snapshot of the system state after every action made on the computer, and store the state for a configurable level of history to avoid taking up too much memory a bit like SVN or a logging database. If a user has made a mistake they only have to look in the history to find out exactly what the screen looked like before and where on that they clicked, and then they can snap back simply to the system state at that moment. This means they don't have the problem of trying to remember the original settings and they have a consistent way of viewing the history of everything they have done at that computer.
Ideally i...
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