Re: Object model of ThreePointZero

[Claus Schwarm <c schwarm gmx net>]

Hi, Dave!

On Tue, 15 Feb 2005 17:09:37 +0100
David Neary <dneary free fr> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Claus Schwarm wrote:
> > I'm know this is not the right list to ask but does anybody know, or
> > is able to explain what this "object" paradigm for threepoint zero
> > means? Is this really just: "An object (ie. a file with a certain
> > type) has its own window"? What about the rest of the desktop?
>
> As far as I can tell, you are thinking at far too low a level.
>
> An object is something like a conversation. So you can search
> conversations about your camping trip, find photos from the 
> camping trip, and so on.
>
> When sending an e-mail, you send it to a person, not an e-mail
> address. When saving a file, you are saving a photo, or an
> article, or a document, or some other thing. The fact that the
> back-end stores it as a file, and can't tell the difference
> between your photo and your CV, is irrelevant. In other words,
> you focus on the user's view of the world, rather than forcing
> the user to adapt to the computer's view of the world.
>
> > Maybe there is a web site with a description how a typical session
> > under the model might look like?
>
> A lot of the docs on Beagle concentrate on this type of idea.

Well, I read the list of first class objects on the wiki [1] but I still
had problems understanding what it means for the user. For example, what
if a user wants to calculate something - 'calculations' seem to be
missing.

I wasn't able to find the documents you were talking about but the
people in the #dashboard channel were very helpful: I was told, objects
are represented by so called 'tiles' in the beagle search tool. I
think, this means those little rectangles in the screenshots, with a
header and a preview image, etc.

I guess, the similarity to 'files' is intentional. From this point of
view, a file manager makes no sense anymore. Nautilus would be more of a
'tile manager', showing you folders of persons, documents, and other
objects.

However, it doesn't make sense to 'manage' tiles when they are
associated accordingly - why should one move a 'person' into the
'documents' folder? From this point of view, the move to spacial
nautilus makes a lot more sense, as well as several other stuff I read
on the mail archives but that just appeared as strange.

This seems to be the part I was missing all the time; it's quite funny
how you can get used to certain kinds of representations.

Oh, if anybody wonders what this has to do with marketing: It's
obviously always better to understand what 'products' you're trying to
market, right? ;-)


Cheers, 

Claus

[1] http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero_2fFirstClassObjects