unity-design team mailing list archive

[Jason DeRose <jderose@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 7:23 AM, frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx <
frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 14:51, femorandeira <femorandeira@xxxxxxxxxx>wrote:
>
>>
>> On Fri, 17 Dec 2010 13:37:12 +0100, "frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx" <
>> frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>>> yeah, you're absolutely correct. The tools have improved a lot, but
>>> none of the technologies has been installed into the default
>>> distribution's UI in a generative place.
>>> The first change we surely need to advance the semantic abilities of
>>> our DEs is to add a tagging system to the "Save as.." dialog window.
>>>
>>
>> Is it a problem with the tools, or is it something about how people think?
>>
>> There are great differences between:
>>  - navigating step by step to a location and being required to "teleport"
>> yourself there
>>  - recognizing your document when you see it, and being forced to recall
>> some of its characteristics
>>  - always using similar steps to get to a document and having to come up
>> with an appropriate search strategy each time
>>  - etc...
>>
>> There is some research that shows that people like to have stable
>> structures for their personal archives and that a strong physical metaphor
>> ("one item is in one place and one place only") can decrease the cognitive
>> load required to use such a system. Search is usually *only* used as a last
>> resource tool when the user can not remember at all where he put that
>> document...
>
>
> True, but we don't want to say here that the user is incapable of managing
> a library, do we?
> Often, in larger libraries, we don't know where something is, we can't
> remember.
> Memory, as madbob already points out on his pages, is settled in the
> temporal lobe of the brain. It degrades with increasing temporal distance to
> the event.
>
> Now imagine you have a library of photos covering a 3 year period. Are you
> sure you can locate all items by date, then by thumb?
>
> Fred takes an average of 1 picture per day, he will have 365x3 pictures to
> go through in this case.
> Fred remembers the photo was taken in year 1, winter, so he has about 150
> pictures to look at via thumbs.
> So much for spacial navigation combined with temporal sorting.
>
> This is perfectly ok, it works for small libraries like Fred's.
>
> Now imagine Jane has a new camera and goes on 4 vacations per year.
> On each vacation, Jane takes several hundred shots.
> After 3 years, Jane has 4300 photos she made all by herself, he Uncle's 200
> wedding photos not even included.
> As she tries to find "that picture with Auntie Mabel on that rock" from one
> of the vacations, she is confronted with 1200 photos to go through.
> Now she complains: "darn, i wish i could just tell the computer to show me
> photos of Auntie Mabel".
>

Agreed, and compared to pro use cases, 4300 photos is still a tiny library.
For what it's worth, my wife is a professional photographer and will shoot
4000 photos at a *single* wedding.  Most of these photos will be deleted as
she narrows them down to the very best, but even so, her current Aperture
library is over 30,000 photos (representing about 2 years).

Now I'm not saying that a traditional file manager is suitable for
professional volumes like this, but it would a shame if the "fileless"
paradigm was even *less* suitable.  Ubuntu has a huge opportunity to become
the platform of choice for pro photo and video.  IMHO, we need to make sure
the "fileless" paradigm has the flexibility needed to accommodate pro users.

I need to get up to speed on the Ayatana "fileless" paradigm, but I'm hoping
the Distributed Media Library can be used as a potential backend for media
files - https://launchpad.net/dmedia

I think there are some good examples to follow in OSX in the way it allows a
domain-specific database of files to be viewed through Finder in a fairly
uniform way (you can find Aperture photos this way).  So the "fileless"
paradigm doesn't itself need to support professional media libraries as long
as it's possible to expose say a dmedia database with a plugin.


> The reason why we need labeling is not because the other methods don't
> work.
> Labels and tags are necessary, because our libraries are growing too big to
> be handled without topical, categorical or attributive management.
> As long as we can not associate identifying attributes with storage item
> other than filenames, there is no chance at a simple approach to an
> intuitive management of larger libraries.
>
>
>
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