Re: Just an idea to please everyone

[Gregory Merchan <merchan phys lsu edu>]

On Tue, Sep 16, 2003 at 11:57:58AM +0100, Julien Olivier wrote:
<snip>
> I guess the main problem people are having with OO-Nautilus is the fact
> that each folder will open in a new window. So, if you have some music
> in ~/Desktop/Documents/Music/P/Portishead/Dummy/, . . .

Wait! Stop right there.

Why did you set it up that way in the first place?

Did your music source not have proper metadata?
Did your downloader/ripper not attempt to get that metadata?
Did nothing notice a music file written to disk and try to get metadata?
Was the metadata there, but not visible in the folder?

I'm guessing Portishead is a band and Dummy is an album.
Why did you organize by band name first? Why not album name?
Why not be able to retrieve easily it either way? At a bare minimum,
why don't you have a Details view with sortable columns appropriate to
the data?

Why is the primary view of the directory ~/Desktop/Documents/Music a folder
instead of a music player? Does a gnumeric file open in a text editor showing
the xml, or does it open in gnumeric? Why then does the system present you
with a folder where a music player is more appropriate?

Why did you put the Music folder in the Documents folder?

Sorry for the battery of questions, but every designer and programmer should
be asking questions like these about everything. Consider:

 - If the Music icon is on the desktop, it's one step closer. This isn't
   Windows where the desktop is a billboard for every app you install.
   You don't have to deeply nest folders because of icon clutter.
 - If the default view of the Music directory is a music player, that's about
   3 steps closer. (I'm guessing the actual music is in the Dummy directory.)
 - If the folder view of the Music directory is metadata-aware, then you
   don't need deep directories to sort it - and you can change the sort
   more easily.
 - If something (say, the file _manager_) detects a music file and can
   get some metadata, you don't have to. Even if the initial metadata is
   sparse (e.g., file named ABCD1234 and nothing else), there's still the
   data itself. Maybe the best the system can do is a fuzzy match - e.g.,
   audio data is similar to audio data from Quux genre. But, hey, computers
   are stupid and the smart user (relatively, any user) can have some
   indication (maybe an emblem) that the computer is confused and say,
   "Ha ha! Stupid computer! That's Portishead, not Radiohead." This should
   not be popping up an alert or requiring any data from the user! What's
   needed is a modeless indication to the user that the computer is confused;
   something like the "alarms" discussed in the 8th chapter of
   "Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines - Advanced Topics":
     http://java.sun.com/products/jlf/at/book/index.html
     http://java.sun.com/products/jlf/at/book/Alarms.html
   That, and a easy way for the user to correct the computer.

This example is specific to music and mentions technology I've never even
seen - audio analysis to identify genre, band, etc.[*] - but I hope you can
see that similar things apply to other types of data.

Another example: email. If ~/evolution were renamed to Mail (either in $HOME
or on the desktop), and the file manager recognized it as a collection
of mailboxes instead of just a directory, then double-clicking the Mail icon
on the desktop or in the home folder could open Evolution instead of just a
folder. The user should not need to be bothered by the implementation detail
of what application presents the view, but the programmers and designers
need that detail. I'm not suggesting the file manager handle mailboxes,
though that shouldn't be hard to do for a fallback.

Deep hierarchies are not a problem for an object-oriented user interface so
much as they are a problem for users. Lack of a model, or the presence of a
bad model, has exacerbated the problem. Though humans naturally create
hierarchies, they are more flexible, redundant, and intricate than any
computer hierarchy. Even in that most obvious hierarchy, taxonomy, there
are at least two major theories of classification, occasional upper-level 
restructurings, disputes, and "hard cases". Human hierarchies tend to be
expedient and unprincipled, with notable exceptions in kind and degree in 
science, business, armies, and governments. Where hierarchies are deep,
the humans often specialize and deal with only shallow part.

I hope this change in Nautilus will discourage managing depth and encourage
eliminating depth.

Cheers,
Greg

[*] Maybe this kind of audio analysis does exist. I've seen car radios that
    adjust to the type of music a station plays, but that may be because
    of "metadata" in the signal.