Re: "special" places in Nautilus

[Elia Cogodi <eliacogodi tin it>]

I know this sounds like a 'me too' post, but I really think that the
issue of broken metaphores is more serious than it appears at first
sight, thus I'll paste a piece of a post I wrote a few week ago but was
eaten by the mail monster:

        ...
        The real perversion here is the very concept of 'virtual folder'.
        That's what breaks the spatial paradigm of course, and that's what goes
        against what nautilus' spatial file management has been for the last two
        years. Just to be clear: I _really_ want to to be able to save live
        queries on my desktop in a persistent way to open them at will... I just
        don't want them to be presented to the user through the metaphore of a
        folder, because that's not what they are.
        
        Users are probably familiar with the library model: books are placed
        somewhere on shelves, and of course each book object sits on one and
        only shelf. But to 'virtually' categorize them at the same time by
        publisher, genre, title, year etc this devilishly clever idea was
        conceived, of the index cards inside a metal cabinet. When you have to
        build a bilbiography you build up a set of references to the real objects 
        by browsing thorugh the index cards, but you are well aware of
        the difference between the cards you're looking at and the real books.
        The computer makes it even more simple, so that it can magically conjure
        the books for you, but the important thing is that you have built a set
        of references... not magically built a big book collating the ones you
        were looking for.
        
        So, give me live queries objects, but don't try to show them as folders,
        because they have not the functional characteristics of folders (move
        objects in/out of them, mainly). I'd say go for a different metaphore, like 
        that of an 'Index' object, give it a properly different icon and a very
        different visual representation. Nautilus could do that itself, but
        place a watermark or a big 'search' icon somewhere in the UI, use colors
        or layout to show it is not "just a weird folder". I'd even say use a
        new, different view. Maybe somewhat like the list/tile things used in
        beagle's best/holmes GUIs... something that screams "I'm a list of
        references: I found _this_ item in _this_ folder. You can open the file
        or the folder, but it lives somewhere else"
        ...

So, yeah, in the end 'me, too' thinks having searches integrated in
Nautilus _as a special folder_ is a bad idea :)

-- 
Elia Cogodi <eliacogodi tin it>