Re: [Usability] Mezzo interface [was Re: nautilus ... ]

[Diego Moya <turingt gmail com>]

On 15/07/05, Eric Larson <elarson novell com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-07-15 at 13:31 +0200, Diego Moya wrote:
> > Those seem to be the relevant actions of current educated computer
> > users: launch dedicated working environments (i.e. main applications),
> > launch transient applications (desklets), find content (document
> > search & browsing), and configure the computer settings & peripherals.
> I have to disagree with your analysis regarding the separation between a
> user launching apps and then finding content. Most users rarely
> associate content outside the scope of a particular application. A
> document or email is most often seen within the context of the
> respective application. To turn this back to the initial thoughts of how

I agree that users have problems separating content from applications,
but as long as the current desktop paradigm does not totally hide apps
from the user, it's a good thing that the documents (which belong to
the user) are clearly separated from the applications (which belong to
the computer). They are managed differently anyway - you can't "create
new applications", move them to arbitrary places in the hard disk (OK
in Mac OS X you can, but it is quite different than Linux) etc.

There are also task-based applications (as opposed to document-centric
ones) like IM, mail, games, P2P and any setup/control panel. In this
kind of apps, the user can clearly distinguish the app from the
content (you can take a mail out of Evolution and save it as a
document, mlDonkey downloads files from the net to the hard disk)


> this fits into user putting things on the desktop, a good example can be
> seen in how some use bookmarks on their desktop. Some users create a
> bookmark for their favorite sites on the desktop and then click those
> bookmarks to visit the site, closing the browser each time before going
> to the next bookmark. While I don't think this is the most common use,
> it makes it clear that a document is considered primarily within the
> context of the application that works with it.
> 
And that's why I say that applications are seen primarily as "context"
or "working environments" (as opposed to how engineers see them, which
is as "programs", prebuilt sets of instructions).