Re: [Usability] Automagic cleanup of home folder

[Daniel Borgmann <spark mayl de>]

On Mon, 2004-01-26 at 12:33 -0300, Mariano Suarez-Alvarez wrote:
> > I agree but sometimes this just doesn't work. I've told my parents to
> > clean up their stuff loads of times (hmm this sounds weird :) ). And you
> > haven't seen my desk, I'm still looking for that autodesk cleaning
> > robot. If you are able to make things easier than you should IMHO. 
> 
> Hmmm, I'm not sure pedagogical file managers is what we need...

Pedagogical would be if we'd tell the user he has to clean up his mess
himself. :) I believe that the job of a computer is that of a butler or
secretary: Do work for the user.


> Apart from 1, these kind of things will only complicate rather clear
> interface nautilus people have gotten us. Specially in a spatial
> “context” where the user gets to puts things in folder windows in a
> persistent way, moving things around when they become “old” is not a
> good idea.

I agree. But maybe it would be nice if the user could tell the computer
to archive certain files. This would be similar to "Move to Trash", just
with the implication "I want to keep these files, put them somewhere
safe please but out of my way". This would be not much different from
just manually creating an "Archive" folder and putting all those files
in there though (I'm trying this right now to see how well it works). If
the folder would be special, then the computer could attempt to
categorize files in the archive automatically, so the user would still
have a chance to find what he is looking for after two years.
On the other hand, this probably won't be necessary anymore once we can
give the computer orders similar to "show me all my image files from the
archive, sorted by date" (preferable via voice input ;)). 

Daniel