Re: [Ayatana] Symbolic Folders - Icons for a better experience

[Walter Wittel <wittelw gmail com>]

On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 6:52 AM, Frederik Nnaji
<frederik nnaji gmail com> wrote:
> here's 2 mockups of how a properly organized filesystem can look.
...
> anybody?
>

I think this could be quite nice in a narrow domain (for instance
provide a view of well known document types under ~/Documents).
However I see several problems completely replacing the hierarchical
view throughout the UI. The hierarchal view should always remain an
option as long as the underlying file system is hierarchical.

For example I would like to copy some related files of different types
to a USB drive to be consumed on another system. How is this
accomplished? Jumping between icons. And how are those relationships
discovered (mp3 and album art)?

Where are files displayed w then the type can not be easily determined
or doesn't fit the available icons? Are all files all parsed to figure
out where they should be displayed? This is costly (but of course an
index could be maintained).

I think a "filter everything under directory xyz" Nautilus view such
as you illustrate would be great (but where would it start - perhaps
it could only be for Documents). Also this view as a standard "file
open" dialog used by apps would simplify things for end users and help
bridge the way to an eventual non-hierarchal file system.

However I don't agree that the hierarchal nature of current file
systems should be totally hidden from users (or force them to terminal
to do file management). Initially this should be a flat / symbolic
view hosted in applications (and maybe a startup shell showing only a
subset of home), and the user should be able to switch to a hierarchal
view for browsing external media (or just if they want to). We're
talking MVC here and this would be a great supplemental view in the
file system "model".