Lisa Touch: the concept of Lisa on every touch surface
This post is about something that does not exist yet. Lisa Touch is Lisa for every touch surface, and today it is a concept: a flavour in the specification, a touch dialect in the interface guidelines, and a handful of decisions. No touch image has been built, and no device runs it.
We are writing about it anyway, for two reasons. Several things we build now are shaped by it. And saying exactly what is decided, and what is not, is the honest way to talk about a product before it exists.
What is decided
It is the same Lisa. Lisa is one platform in flavours: desktop, server, touch and smart. They share the same frameworks, the same contracts and the same release, with an image of its own for each flavour on each architecture. Lisa Touch is not a separate project with its own toolkit. It is the touch flavour of the platform that already runs our desktops.
The name is what the interface is. We named it for touch, in September,
rather than for a device or a brand. The flavour’s key in every availability
list is touch, and the product is Lisa Touch.
It is for every touch surface. A phone, a tablet, any device whose screen you touch. We first ruled, at the end of September, that Lisa Touch was a phone OS. On 1 October we widened it: the phone is one touch surface, not the only one, and the flavour is for all of them. It is also of no particular maker, and that part is deliberate. We are not designing around one vendor’s hardware.
Touch-first controls, not shrunk desktop ones. The guidelines already carry a touch-primary size: a control a finger presses is at least 44 points, and it is never silently shrunk on the desktop. Lisa Touch uses the same frameworks with controls made for a finger. It does not have the windows the desktop’s compositor has.
It stands on the same contract. A touch device conforms to the same desktop profile of the platform contract as a desktop does: graphics and input, audio, networking and Bluetooth on a Fedora family base. That is part of why Lisa is strict about running on 16K memory pages and 4K alike, and on aarch64 as well as x86_64. A phone or tablet base will need both.
Why the desktop waits for it
One whole area of the desktop is deliberately held back until Lisa Touch exists: everything that moves between your devices. That means handing a document from one device to another, a clipboard shared between them, sending something to a device nearby, using one keyboard across two machines, or a phone’s camera as your computer’s.
On 4 September we ruled that none of this ships in the first release. It makes sense once a person has a Lisa in their pocket or on their desk beside the computer, and it arrives with Lisa Touch. Until then, things move between machines by sharing them, and the docs say so in one place, so nobody builds half of it in the meantime.
It is easy to ship a half-feature that later turns out to be the wrong shape. Waiting for the device that gives the feature its meaning is cheaper than building it twice.
What is deliberately open
Almost everything else. We have not decided the home screen, the gestures, the notifications, how apps adapt from a phone to a tablet, which hardware to bring up first, or how a person goes from a desktop app to its touch counterpart. The docs say it plainly: beyond the flavour and the continuity ruling, nothing is specified yet.
That is on purpose. Lisa’s way is to write the page first, then build to it. For Lisa Touch, most pages are still to be written. When they are, this blog is where we will say what we decided and why.
Where to read more
- Flavours: the four flavours and what each one is.
- Between machines: what waits for Lisa Touch, and why.
- lisaos.app/touch: the product page, marked specified, not built.