unity-design team mailing list archive

[Jo-Erlend Schinstad <joerlend.schinstad@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 26. feb. 2012 19:23, Adrian Maier wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 26, 2012 at 20:02, Michael Hall<mhall119@xxxxxxxxxx>  wrote:
> > > The hierachical directories is concept too deeply used in all
> > > operating systems .   It will not go away just because many users use
> > > their computers only for web and searching  photos/videos/music .
> > Phones and Tablets don't expose a hierarchical filesystem, which proves that
> > users can easily adapt to a metaphor that don't use folders.
> Yet they still have a hierarchical filesystem .

That's debatable. It's perfectly possible for the same file or folder to 
belong in two different subtrees at the same time. That's not 
hierarchical. All modern operating systems support that. And when I say 
modern, I mean newer than 1993 or so. I use the term rather loosely. 
However, when a file does exist in many places at the same time, using a 
hierarchical navigation scheme becomes cumbersome.

> A smartphone deals with a very limited range of files , which makes it
> possible to :  save photos in a predetermined directory , save videos
> in a predetermined directory ,  play music from a predetermined
> directory   ,  and  store the ebooks in a predetermined  directory ,
> and so on  .
>
> I don't see such a scheme working on a general-purpose computer.
Files doesn't have to be saved in a predetermined directory. They 
probably shouldn't be saved in directories at all. It is an ancient and 
completely outdated way of locating stuff.

There's really no reason why a file should belong in a hierarchy at all, 
really. The only reason it is that way, is because it's been that way 
for thousands of years. Literally. You've needed to use paths in order 
for the human librarian to remember how to find stuff. Because when 
there are thousands of books, it is difficult to remember where each 
book is at any moment unless you follow some predetermined ordering 
system. Then, in the early days of computing, you needed a way to tell 
the computer how to find stuff. Since the compute power was so extremely 
limited, you needed a direct path. That's no longer the case, and I 
really think single-path navigation to be a thing of the past.

For instance, let's say you have a photograph from your wedding, with 
your wife, your friends and family. What is the right path to that 
photograph?

/media/photos/friends
/media/photos/family
/media/photos/wedding
...

There should be no fixed number of ways to access that photograph, of 
course. It's "location" should depend on what you're looking for. Let's 
say you have Bluetooth and everyone uses that on their mobile devices, 
which they obviously always carry with them. Then your system should 
recognize who's present and you should have "People nearby" category in 
your Photos lens which would always display photographs of the people 
who are in the room with you.

You may think that sounds like fantasy, but it's actually quite easy to 
do, though it obviously requires some work. Doing that using 
hierarchical structures, would be much more difficult. Using metadata to 
describe data content instead of just referring to a location, makes it 
possible to do extremely cool things with relative ease.

That's what the semantic desktop is all about.

--
Jo-Erlend Schinstad