unity-design team mailing list archive

["frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx" <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello List,

Places has been a very rare topic as far as i remember.
It is quite obvious that the concept of having Places is step towards making
things more simple for the user.

Currently, we have the following Places:

* Documents
* Music
* Pictures
* Videos
* Downloads
* Computer
* Home
* Trash
* Templates
* Recent (History)

These 10 items have the potential to work in a useful way, complementing
each other.
An interesting comparison might be the Internet, which evolved a great
number of methods to identify, locate and access the billions of items
connected throughout it.
At first everything was seperated into classes, until the classes and
subnetworks became overloaded and a scalable solution needed to be found.¹
So the concept of classless networks was introduced.

In our local computing environment, Places is a mediating technology, trying
to bridge the conceptual gap between how something is stored and how the
user may best remember a path to accessing it.

The Internet Protocol has a very good analogy for this:

*A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route
indicates how to get there.
*

( see: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc791#section-2.3 )

In this understanding, Places would be the "how to get there" part,
filenames are "where it is" and Document Title or Name represents "what we
seek", in the best case accompanied by a very telling preview.
So Places are not physical locations, and they shouldn't be. Much more
appropriate would be to have a managed content space presenting items and
relational information to the user intelligently.
This starts with what we call XDG User Dirs, these are pointers rather than
fixed locations. XDG User Dirs are meant to put a particular content type
into a space that will manage it for the user..
At the moment, the only form of management in the default GNOME desktop is a
folder icon that represents the media type. This is insufficient.
Unity has a different approach. We have Content Managers, i.e.
Rhythmbox|Banshee for Music files, Shotwell for Pictures, hopefully soon
Dmedia for Videos and a potent system to present Documents, especially
recently and frequently used documents.

The reason why i think Content Manager haven't been so popular until today,
is because they were not designed to manage content, but to play it back or
to display it in Single Document mode so far.
Management of a library of songs was never part of e.g. Totem's agenda,
whereas Totem was always and is still until today the default music and
video player in Ubuntu.

In order to make this whole thing work properly consistently and without
app-related constraints, Unity might help by introducing intelligently
managed Places equipped with a relevance-promoting Journal.
I'll now attempt to sketch up what this might look like wrt Places>Documents
as an example:

Documents    [ type to find ...|    ]

SUGGESTIONS and RESULTS: {
   *   Pinned [Title - Preview|Thumb - Action-Emblems on hover]
   *   Most Recent [Title - Preview|Thumb - Action-Emblems on hover]
               /* including also most recently downloaded and most recently
received */
          show more >
   *   Last Modified1 [Title - Preview|Thumb - Action-Emblems on hover]
   *   Last Viewed1   [Title - Preview|Thumb - Action-Emblems on hover]
          show more >             /* showing frequently viewed|modified,
sorted by an adequate recency|frequency sort algorithm */
}


this pattern might also be applicable to Places>Pictures, Places>Music and
Places>Videos, whereas i would suggest to reconsider the "Pinned" part for
each Place.
Pinned is useful for Documents, but it might be disturbing when it comes to
music. I wouldn't mind pinning two or three genre types, or "collections",
such as "lounge", or "hacking", or e.g. "gaming".
It would feel very disturbing to have a single Song pinned or a single album
alwas come up on top when i go to my music library.. i want its order to be
arbitrary in a way, since that would be the closest thing to "dynamic" or
"live" that i can imagine..

Even though i rewrote this email several times with the aim to make it as
small as possible, i am noticing that it is getting a little large again, so
i'll stop right here and let the list decide if these ideas are valuable and
worth discussing any further.
Thanks for readin ;)