Re: [Ayatana] "fileless" paradigm

To: Dylan McCall <dylanmccall@xxxxxxxxx>

Subject: Re: [Ayatana] "fileless" paradigm

From: "frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx" <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>

Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2010 19:53:55 +0100

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On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 16:58, Dylan McCall <dylanmccall@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 2010-12-16 7:34 AM, "femorandeira" <femorandeira@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, 14 Dec 2010 14:14:12 +0100, Roberto Guido <bob4job@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> I think enforcing "search" against "browsing" could be a good
>> compromise [...]
>>
>> If massively used and integrated in
>> the DE, the user could forget folders and just search what needed from
>> time to time instead of browsing his own folder hierarchy. [...]
>>
>> A Spotlight-like application can completely substitute the file
>> manager
>
>
> Then why are people still using the file browser much more often than
> searching for their documents, even when the filesystem has remain
> basically the same and search tools have kept on improving?
>
>
> Felipe

This happens because a great deal of cruft has made the file browser an everyday thing instead of a tool for people who care about raw files. Applications are connected together by files, and with today's file chooser dialogs we directly expose that to users.

Want to share a photo you organized in Shotwell with one of your IM contacts?
Too bad: it is going to turn into a "file" at some point, with all the limitations, generalizations and implementation details that entails.

Excellent example!

These are the problems you identify, when observing people with little computer knowledge. They simply want to get stuff done, and find nothing but challenges in their way, instead of being presented with obvious friendly and nice-looking solutions.

Because of that, the beautiful abstraction provided by Shotwell ends up being a detriment because people end up forced to think in "files" whether they like it or not.

a workaround to MVC above the filesystem via context layer is of course always to use temporal relevance, i.e. "recent" and "frequent" to sort query results.

So much for queries.

I think this thing is gonna lift off properly, when we begin to integrate all the different methods with each other usably.

fuzzy search, spacial filemanagement with folders and files, tagging and filters, metafolders for specific mediatypes, e.g. music playlists, temporal methods (zeitgeist) and incremental adaptation (learning software).

Dylan

(And I have been slowly working on a solution to this; blog post coming soon, finally, I think)