GNOME.org
 

Re: [Usability] User problems and practices with modern desktopsystems

Thank you for all your comments, there are some aspects i didn't mentioned yet. What I would like to have or like to design is a new filesystem, maybe based on a relational database, but not on top of an existent filesystem. The system may still run on a filesystem, but not the userdata, that what we now call "desktop" and the objects inside. 


Am 08.11.2004 um 20:22 schrieb <john erling blad aftenposten no>:

Am 08.11.2004 um 17:06 schrieb Alan Horkan:



A journalist might write 10-20-30 articles a day (or even more), or
something like 2 - 10 000 articles a year. It will soon be apparent

that

you can't continue to dump articles in a single directory for very

long.
We all (lots of us) have a similar problem with our download, articles and mails we read. I save it somewhere in my filesystem, hoping I will find it when I need it. 
How much time do we spend in organizing our information?
Maybe we have a filesystem that will us allow to add some keyword as metadata to every file. Most users use a limited but expandable set of keywords. Today we use keywords to name folders or files, but this is very inflexible. Some other metadata stores the importance, mime type, relationships to other data, coloured icon, last placed on x,y, etc. To save comparing differnt versions of objects optionally it also should be possible to log if objects are copied to other devices and changed till they are copied.
My "vision" in the user's view is my desktop (i wouldn't call it desktop any more) with a list of my last opened important files and important keywords (mostly used in near past). Selecting one icon shows related objects. A toolbox will help to blend out or in special objects with special properties like "done last summer". The importance or range of an object will be dynamically calculated with a kind of fuzzy logic like how close to summer, how close related to the selected objects ...
Of course, you may even store this metadata into the files like it is in html or mp3 and what I am saying isn't completely new, but this will be an integral approach. Handling the metadata has only to be placed in the file selector and the file browser and not necessarily in every application. Also copying with or without private or public metadata will be possible without editing the file. 


What I think we are missing is a standard "Document History" for the
document that overflow and leave the Recent files list.  With a

document

history you can massively reduce the search space to only the

documents

that were used previously in the current application.

I make massive use of this kind of functionality, my Mozilla History

file
Thats the reason I mostly use emacs for my curricula vitae and my job applications. just comment phrases in and out and have a complete history with RCS. 


This problem can be and should be tackled from both directions,

although

automatically aggregating and searching information is useful it is

also a

good idea to encourage users to organise their data little better.


I don't think it is a very good idea to enforce to much manual
classification on the user. He simply won't use it. What I do believe is
But you do it already, while giving the file a name and looking for a right place in your folder structure. people who get into deep trouble finding their files are used to give long explaining filenames. 


Directories like Documents, Pictures and so fort don't really add much
information as the information already exist as suffixes, ownership and
so forth.

What Pictures will do is to collect those files in a common directory.
But think about it, what if Pictures wasn't a real directory but some
kind of meta folder. It could be a collection of all pictures on the
system. Of course it would be a huge folder. Now, what about some kind
of balancing algorithm which added the directory instead if there was a
directory with a lot of images? This is something that is more or less
like locate.
What is the problem with a huge directory? there is only a search problem. If we add a button to nautilus hide everthing exept picture or docs or music files, we will have a similar result as we have with different folders. This will be one step to that what expect to have. 



But really, isn't this a special case of one single file type? Perhaps
it could be generalized somehow?
Maybe instead of Documents there could be something like "My files", all 
of which are owned by the current user? This would limit the number of
files a lot compared to a complete traversal of the complete file
system!

Perhaps a folder like "At same time" (in lack of a good word) which
contains files opened at the same time as whatever you have open right
now. Most likely you would have a database with previous results from
scan by lsof to make this work.

Perhaps you could even have a folder "Similar files". That could be
interesting. At least one such system relies on plain mapping into a
Bayesian vector space for classification.

An alternate presentation of actual files in such folders could be
something like a normal file system but pruned to only show what's
included, like images or files with a specific ownership. I personally
don't like this as the hierarchies will hide information.
Now, if there was some kind of list where you could easily organize sort 
order on several levels according to metadata. For example music, you
could organize your music collection within artist - album - track that
is folder hierarchy of depth 2 with tracks in album folder or album -
artist - track with track in artist folder.
I'm not sure if you mean the same thing, I avoid to use the name "folder", cause folder are strict hierarchically and disjoint and may irritate. 



Actually, this could be some kind of folder with meta order. I like
meta, it is so.. uhm .. unspecific..) Then there could be a music folder 

not in that meaning. just information about something.


with one organization and other Pictures with a completely other
organization. For example date - location - tema. Given the situation
the user could create as many such folders as necessary.

You would also need some kind of method to set explicit inclusion and
exclusion of files to get the one of interest but that is pretty simple.
I didn't say that it is mystic, but its a fundamental change. I would like to start doing it, but don't have the resource and knowledge, but maybe I find some time to do a simulation. 

Lutz



____
Lutz Mueller
Bergische Universität Wuppertal
GNU-PGP Key:  http://familiemuellerinremscheid.de/mueller.gpg
[Date Prev][Date Next]   [Thread Prev][Thread Next]   [Thread Index] [Date Index] [Author Index]