Dynamic icons and Information VisualizationRe: [Nautilus-list] Idea or Question

[Alain Vaillancourt <vaillana MAGELLAN UMontreal CA>]

Hello!

I joined this list for nearly the same reason.  And I also have nearly
the same idea. In the fall of 1998 I presented a paper proposing such
things at ACM's New Paradigm in Information Visualization workshop at
the annual Conference on Information and Knowledge Management.  I also
presented a further extension of my ideas along that line in a paper I
presented at the Canadian Association for Information Science's spring
of 1999 annual conference.  And I am now writing a longer article on the
topic.

One difference with you is that I joined the list with more of a goal of
watching for quite some time before posting my idea(s), since I saw the
large dynamic icons of Eazel has a potential support for my systems in
the long run (about 2 years). One other difference is that I see
filesize data as only one of many possible sources of original,
significant images for dynamic icons of 48, 64, or 128 pixel size. For
people having to do a lot of version control, (of CADD files or source
code in big projects) a 128 by 128 pixel image giving a visual glimpse
at the version hierarchy progression would be more useful than filesize
bars or starbursts, or other visual expressions of size.  For people
doing a lot of database searching and saving of results, glyphs
extracted from an information visualization module of a database search
engine would offer even more significant images. This was the main topic
of my first paper.  For other people who interact a lot with others,
corporate and institutional logos and human faces (photos of actual
persons or simple blowups of smileys) found and generated automatically
by mail programs anbd browsers would be the most useful kind of dynamic
icon.

But for most people in offices, however, the ideal would be a constant
offering of all those elements, and the capacity to instantly do a "mix
and match" regardless of the source. In other words, the capacity to
instantly look at a variety of small dynamic images from different
"personal" or workgroup sources (filesize, usage statistics, data
glyphs, other icons even) and picking any to represent a file size in
less than three clicks or three keyboard commands.

Au revoir!

Alain Vaillancourt

Universite de Montreal

kampi wrote :
> 
> Sorry, if I'm offtopic or simply far behind the real development. When
> I last visited the nautilus pages I had an idea and joined the
> mailinglist to see if I could post it here. Unfortunately there is not
> lots of traffic, so I couldn't figure out, if this the place to go...
> So far for the polite-talk ;-)
> 
> The Idea:
> I would really like to have a visualization of the size of a file/the
> contents of a dir, when browsing a filesystem. As far as I know there
> is almost no filemanager that shows filesize in a graphical way
> instead of or additional to the numbers you get with ls -l. That could
> be a real benefit over the almighty command line which is still _the_
> filemanager for me. Maybe it could be done with a background for the
> icons or something?
> 
> I understand that Nautilus is in early development and maybe you are
> interested. If not, consider this message not sent :)
> 
> regards
> Stefan K
> --
> $dom = "skamphausen.de";   ##   May The Open Source Be With You!
> $Mail = "mail $dom;  $Url = "http://www.$dom";;
> -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
> Version: 3.1
> GS/CS d--- s: a- C+(++)$ UL$ P++$ L++$ E+$ W++(+) N++ o? K? w-- !O !O
> !V !PS !PE Y+ PGP t+@ !5 !X R* tv> b+>++ UF+ D+ G e+++ h--- r+++ y+++
> ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Nautilus-list mailing list
> Nautilus-list lists eazel com
> http://www.eazel.com/mailman/listinfo/nautilus-list