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

[Lutz Mueller <lutz familieMuellerInRemscheid de>]

Hi John,

happy new year and hope you had a nice christmas.

> > 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.
> I would prefer if categorization and other indices about file content
> was stored as file metadata, sill the metadata could be indexed by some
> external means and stored in some relational database.

the metadata information must be stored in the "filesystem" because it 
should be copied or moved with your file.
try to move data with an emblem in nautilus, the emblem is lost. i 
would expect that such information even belongs to a file if its moved 
by shell command, or copied via rsync for backup reason.
With a flexible kind of metadata it may also be possible add 
information if the file was changed after copied. i often got the 
problem to find out what is never, the file at home or at work. the 
same problems appear with bookmarks, (yellow) notes, adresses etc. 
There are lots of solutions, but they individually depend on your 
software.


> > > > 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

i believe that the classification now is to complicated and to 
restricted. if there is no folder that fit your classification you have 
to
 - open browse for other folders
	here you get struck with a lot of windows and functions (no critic on 
the gnome file chooser, it is good, the 	problem is the underlaying 
structure)
 - hit create folder
 - type the name

i prefer a text field one or more dropdown menues like:
http://wkm.kunst.uni-wuppertal.de/~mueller/file.gif
this is simply a first idea.

choose one or more categories or type an other topic. the categories in 
the popup are the 10 most used in the past, and the text field uses 
autocomplete.

in the filechooser there is the same field to blend all other files 
out, that don't belong to that category.

> Search isn't very user friendly unless you are very familiar with it. 
> My
> idea of a balancing algorithm is something you could manipulate. Let's
> say you have a music folder. When this grows large enough information 
> is
> extracted from metadata to build an artist level. When you traverse 
> into
> a folder with enough files this will again be divided into albums.

i don't like search either. i prefer a situation that only shows the 
files that are important for me now and a set of tools that hide or 
unhide necessary files.
http://wkm.kunst.uni-wuppertal.de/~mueller/browser.gif
(some filter settings maybe possible today)

> You could imagine that you was able to set one of several schemes for
> how this would be done. In fact given a specific type of folder a 
> scheme
> could be predefined. A folder like "My Pictures" cold be balanced by
> information from exif data.

exif is a good thing, but only for pictures, mp3 tags are only for mp3. 
and both are different to read or change.

The desktop developement is going to be finished some day. The next 
step will be how we manage our data device independent and across the 
devices. thats needs a flexible and application independent set of 
information about our data.



lutz
____
Lutz Mueller
Bergische Universität Wuppertal
GNU-PGP Key:  http://familiemuellerinremscheid.de/mueller.gpg