Re: [Usability]Hello

["D. D. Brierton" <darren dzr-web com>]

On Sun, 2002-04-14 at 08:58, Alan Bailward wrote:

> Fascinating read!

Thanks!

> I really like your ideas.  I'm not completely hip to all of them, and I
> personally don't like the idea of evolution or nautilus growing even
> bigger, and becoming even more unwieldy in what it does, but the idea is
> still great.

I guess that I wasn't really thinking of evolution or nautilus becoming
bigger, but rather I was thinking in terms of greater bonobo-isation and
component-isation. Both evolution and nautilus are fantastic
applications, but they both seem too application-oriented. I was trying
to think of ways of working that were more action and data oriented.

If the components were done right then having two big applications which
were frameworks for embedding them would become redundant - rather there
would be just one.

  A bonobo component, or maybe part of gnome-vfs, that can
> deal with mbox folders maybe (why restrict something like this to the
> evolution format... ),

(... well evolution is a good target because it is already bonobo-ised,
and it understands mbox, mh and maildir formats ...)

 and knows how to handle things, so that if
> someone browses to a "mail folder", be it through pan, nautilus,
> evolution, hell, any gnome app, they can go "into" the folder, and see
> basically an "email view".  The potential, if done right, is a bit
> overwhelming :)  I doubt this will arrive any time soon, but I'd love to
> see some discussion on this list about the ultimate design for this
> wishlist item!

When I posted the idea previously a couple of people said how much they
liked the idea of a "View as Mail" view in Nautilus. But that is only
one side of the coin. The other is associating data files, messages,
contacts, appointments together by project, or some other logical
category. That is actually a bigger deal for me - when I'm working on a
project my filesystem is used to organise my work, but when I'm in
evolution I get a totally separate organisation of my data. I imagine
the same must be true for developers working with CVS (I'm embarassed to
admit that I don't use CVS for web development - we're a sloppy bunch us
web developers!).

This article:

http://www.asktog.com/columns/035SquanAdv.html

has several suggestions for visual representations of related data -
piles, scrapbooks, etc. I don't really like any of them, but it seems to
me that they are all trying to scratch the same itch I have. In one
sense it seems to me that the traditional folder and file (plus symbolic
links) system is more than adequate, so we don't need "piles" and
"scrapbooks" to supplement them; what is needed is more "virtual"
folders and files, and ways for applications to access and edit these
virtual folders. We need to have representations of people, institutions
and other entities - ways of grouping contact information, appointments,
messages and data files according to some kind of point of contact;
groupings according to projects, and kinds of projects; and also
according to data types - so that there are views of all (and only) my
mail, my contacts, my appointments, etc. If I understand it correctly (I
haven't used it yet) Windows XP creates directories called "My Music",
"My Pictures" etc. That seems quite wrong headed in one sense - normally
pictures or whatever are scattered across my file system according to
more logical categories, but it is also clear that having instant access
to all the pictures that I have would also be useful; it seems that
these would be ideal candidates for virtual folders, but then why
shouldn't "My Email" be one as well, instead of having its very own
directory?

Anyway, one of the simples points I was trying to make in my original
posting was this: email is the killer internet application, not the web
(and I guess as we're all subscribed to at least one mailing list there
must be some agreement on that). So if using the web as a UI paradigm
was a good idea, what headway could be made with using email as a UI
paradigm?

-- 
======================================================================
D. D. Brierton            darren dzr-web com           www.dzr-web.com
        Trying is the first step before failure (Homer Simpson)
======================================================================