[Usability] The virtual meta filsystem druid

["Blad, John Erling" <john erling blad aftenposten no>]

Just a crazy idea..

Imagine you can somehow flag a removable disk as
something you want to keep an image of even after
you remove it from your system.
Let us assume that this image can be traversed and
that all files look pretty close to what they should
look like, but perhaps with an added symbol to make
it clear that it is not the real thing and without
any large data structures.
Now, a user clicks on some virtual file that is no
longer part of the system and a dialog pops up with
a statement "Insert disk xxyy" with a "Mount" button.
So the user inserts the removable disk and clicks "mount"
and suddenly those special symbols on the file icons goes
away and the selected file works as expected.

Such virtual meta files could contain enough data to
make it possible to search for some content, perhaps
an abstract or summary. At least it should keep indices
from mp3 files and similar files.

This won't work with a disk that isn't static in nature,
for example a digital camera. But hey, why would you flag
something like this in such a system? The computer isn't
clairvoyant (sp)! 
It also won't work with a disk that is shared among several
computers because the content will change without all the
computers knowing about the changes. But what if they all
have a common nfs drive?
CD's and DVD's on the other hand, and all other read only
devices will work great!

I guess this should go to the Nautilus list..


John

This idea was not sponsored in any part by Micro$oft after searching
through a large collection of files in Windows Media Player,
looking for a specific piece of music that wasn't on a
removable disk.. :p