Re: Finding and Reminding, tech issues, 3.0 and beyond

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Sat, 2010-04-10 at 00:25 +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
> >   The other approach is when expiring or archiving to move files
> >   from ~/Desktop to an archival location like ~/Documents.
> 
> How does moving it work with non aware applications or a shared file
> space ? You risk opening a file having it moved, saving it and ending up
> with a copy in documents and one stale  which could lead to nasty user
> errors. Seems safe to just filter the view (after all large directory
> enumeration ought to be fast these days ?)

Yes, this is one of several problems with the archive-by-moving
approach.

> As a completely off the wall comment related to this - the fact I can't
> drag documents into my calendar annoys me, because that's effectively how
> some people organise some things in the paper world. I guess that backs
> up your model but it does mean I expect to see my desktop bits from a
> date in with my calendar.

I think you may be on to something here - the files I use, or even the
web pages I visit only make up one component of the stuff I'm doing - so
should there be a distinction between:

 My calendar: appointments, etc. for each day
 My "activity journal": the files I used on each day

? Maybe the calendar is the appropriate place to find the files I was
using the week before GCDS. (Obviously you wouldn't want to just always
clutter the calendar with incredibly detailed file information, but you
could imagine an abbreviated list with the ability to expand, or
something like that.)

And certainly we do think of putting files onto the "Desktop" as posting
them to attend to in the future. I don't think we'd want to always want
to make users assign a date to that action, but you could imagine
allowing that optionally, perhaps with the drag-to-calendar gesture.

> Is stuff migrating to a filing cabinet by date ("This wek, last week,
> march, ...) a metaphor for the desktop - > time stuff ?
> 
> Also I guess this lets you fix the bin so you can delete last weeks
> documents rather than just "empty trash". It's mildly amusing that you
> still seem to have to use "find" incantations to make the bin work well 8)

In general, I think an effect of de-emphasizing browsing through the
complete contents of directories will be to de-emphasize deleting
things. There are basically three reasons to delete things:

 * Organization - be able to find things.

 * Save disk space. Hard drive manufacturers are largely solving this
   for us. Certainly there are still movies/ISO images/kernel git trees/
   etc - things that take significant amounts of disk space. But most 
   files just aren't big enough to worry about.

 * Privacy. Some things you don't want hanging around. This use case
   is as much there as always. 

It doesn't seem to me there is much change in the ability to partially
empty the trash can, or auto-delete things after a while - we could do
either easily right now - the deletion date is already stored in a
look-aside .trashinfo file.

- Owen