home directory and desktops

["Justin Ross" <opiskin hotmail com>]

I was thinking on how the user will relate to the gnome desktop, and 
then a blizzard of possibilities occured to me.  

As it stands, the gnome desktop is a directory in the home directory. 
This seems a bit of an inconvenience to me, but it does afford the 
possibility of multiple workspaces, which one could activate and jump 
to.  For instance, you might configure one workspace, when called, to 
generate a desktop of two screens, with the gimp on the left one and ee 
opened to a directory of images on the right screen.  I imagine you'd 
store this as .workspace-graphics or some such.

But how to represent all these workspaces people set up?  One option 
would be just to put a stitch an item onto the root menu to list 
available .workspace-* files.  This is probably a good implementation.

But I thought of a perhaps better way: why don't we extend the desktop 
metaphor a bit?  If right now the desktop is the bottom in the heirarchy 
of user-interface objects, as in

     desktop object -> documents folder -> resume.doc

why not add a level anterior to desktop, as in

           | desk-default -> documents -> resume.doc
     foo ->| desk-gimp -> images -> splash.xcf 
           | desk-net -> tarballs -> some.tgz

Well, you say, because it will bewilder the user.  I admit that might be 
a problem, but I want something like this, and I think it's possible to 
do it in a way that minimizes confusion.

As I imagine it, 'foo' is the logical place to put quite a number of 
gui-environment objects.  The mounted and -able drives should go there.  
A network object should go there, and the control center should go 
there.  Printers, other devices.  Of course, we're going to want some of 
these objects represented on our desktops, so we'd link in the objects 
from the 'foo' level.

           | desk-default -> documents
     foo ->| desk-gimp -> images 
      |    | desk-net ->| tarballs
      |                 | debs
      |    | trash      | *trash alias*
      |--->| drives
           | control center             


The 'foo' directory should include the contents of the user's home 
directory, so if I'm on the command line and I throw a tarball at my ~, 
I can drag it from my personal root dir ('foo') to my desktop.

I think we should treat the user's home directory as this 'foo'.  We can 
then represent it as on the desktop with the user's name.  Instead of My 
Computer, Justin's home.  This is more appropriate for a multiuser os.

The home directory would presumably contain real and virtual objects. 
The control-center, printers, et al would be virtual, and I think gmc 
would take care of that.  But the home-dir's real contents, with the 
exception of dotfiles, would be there, handy to get at.

To avoid bewildering the user, we can deliver gnome with a default 
desktop with all the aliases one would expect.  Later, when the user 
becomes wise and weird, he or she can add workspaces.

The extra level would give us a logical place to put functionality that 
(a) we use less often, as in configuration stuff, and (b) is available 
across desktops, as in printers or file systems.  Perhaps the objects in 
the home-dir could have a simple switch would propogate/depropogate 
representations of the shared resource in all the desk directories.  
Maybe I want a common documents folder.  So I just create it in my 
home-dir, open it's properties, and tell it to propogate.  Now it's 
generalized.

Note, I don't think the home-dir would ever supplant the desktop as the 
screen background.  I imagine it rather as peering through one or 
another desk area to the 'floor', which is a gmc window.  

As a metaphor, it shouldn't be hard to describe, since it's like the 
real world.  Many of us have, or could use, more than one desk.  At one 
desk, we've gathered the tools we need for, say, collage work.  At 
another, say, carving.  At another, document preparation.  Just imagine 
we have all of these desks in a work area, a kind of home I'd say.  This 
'home' area is also where we keep: printer(s), file cabinets, etc.  
Seems to work, doesn't it?

One more thought: I'd be uber cool if the standard file selection dialog 
had an additional drop down widget which kept a list of all the desks.  
That way it's just one or two clicks to the places we most frequently 
want to put stuff.

Justin


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