Sorry guys if I am a bit late on this, and didn't really follow all the discussion, I just wanted to throw on the table a project by some fellows which might be related and of interest:
thanks, that's some love ;) I got all the pdf's, i downloaded them via "save as..", and i created a folder called "itsme.it" within Places>Documents doing so, to store them in.
Doing that required skilled handling of the "Save as.." dialog window and its advanced features. At some point in this discussion, i was hoping that would become enough of an issue to be formulated as a bug report.
I'll go through the material in a quiet hour, it seems interesting and is somehow yet another metaphor for a classless system of categorization, which can also evolve hierarchically.
so to sum up the metaphorical approaches:
* Folders and Files (the "Office" metaphor) * Projects and Media (Kao Chen) * Venues and Stories (itsme.it)
any more variations of this [CONTAINER] - [CONTENT] metaphor?
Going back to where my original inspiration came from to address the fileless thought, content itself. I'd like to present another example approach, which i mentioned before: GNOME Storage¹.
* Living Storage Items
I think this is the way to go. Because: the CONTAINTER - CONTENT approach presents no innovation to the dual concept we currently have, taken from the ancient "Office" or "Desktop" metaphor.
We made Files and Folders, because we needed a fast solution to the following question: "How should we present content in a graphical user interface?" Back then, it was not yet conceivable to design a content oriented interface, since personal computers were not meant for HD Movies and extensive music playlists or the like..
But today, we have all the content we used to manage with our hands in shelves, playback on TVs and Hifi systems, inside our computers: on harddisks, flashdrives, cloud storage and network drives, USB mp3 players, i-gadgets and smartphones. Everything is digital now, even Video is all ones and zeroes on optical media..
The time for the files and folders we once introduced into the desktop is not over, it is just that.. ..we need files, folders, DVDs, CDs, Albums, Libraries, Stories, Venues, Projects, Activities and all of these things, to represent the vast diversity of things that now exist in our computerized world, visually in our GUI, aka DE.