Jose - you're right that it's awkward to have stuff for a given project scattered across multiple apps. I think there's a fairly simple fix to that: a smart system-wide model for tagging objects (files, emails, database records, etc.) I've noticed, for example, that I often have email folders that correspond closely to filesystem folders -- why have to define those twice and keep 'em in sync? There are early efforts along these lines in OS X (the OpenMeta project, but it's not widely supported).
An app-centric approach is not necessarily bad, since the tasks that one does with a given kind of information vary greatly. If you're editing a video, you want a video-editing UI, and if you're creating an email, you want an email-centric UI. We've had several stumbles along the path to a document-centric approach -- embedded OLE editing was massively confusing, for example, and OpenDoc never got off the ground. And these days, I think many of us would agree that a significant part of our computing day is NOT spent creating documents in the traditional sense of the word. If your goal is to gather and organize documents and other objects in a meaningful way, trying to replace the desktop metaphor is overkill. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=42903 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
