[Usability] totally abstract task/document-oriented desktop questions

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

Hey, dudes-

late night brainstorming led me to a question- in a hypothetical
document-centric/app-hiding desktop, how does one initiate actions that
are not document-centric? i.e., if evolution-as-app goes away, how do I
initiate the action of sending a mail? [For that matter, how does one
create a new document?]

Alternate/secondary question- what about things where the file/document
manager is a spectacularly crappy metaphor, like managing a playlist or
playing music in general? i.e., in a strictly document-centered world,
the 'basic unit of manipulation' seems limited (offhand) to having the
granularity of a single document- opening a word doc seems easy/is
intuitive in this world-view, but how do I 'open my music collection' or
'open my mail' when those things do not really exist as an object I can
manipulate via the file manager?

Finally... I suppose that a possible answer to the above is 'you can't
do that because your file-system is an archaic abstraction that should
not be the center of a document-based desktop'. Certainly that's where
seth is leaning, and it seems MS is following his lead. If that's the
case, where is the user entry point for these meta-document tasks? Does
the app create a meta-entry somewhere, or is the user expected to do
'find all music files' followed by a 'play the selected files'?

Anyway, I suppose this is maybe all covered in the Storage writeups;
apologies if that is the case... I'm literally sleepless tonight and
writing this without an ethernet connection so I'm sort of winging it.
:)  

Luis