Hi Everyone,
I just sent a(n unedited) transcript of the discussion on SILC this
evening under the title of 'No more files!' to the list, but it seems
not to have arrived, so I have posted a full copy here:
http://silc.etoile-project.org/NoMoreFiles.txt
Dramatis personae:
frosty: James Frost
ipaqah: Isiah Beerbower
jross: Jesse Ross
rburns: Rob Burns
theraven: David Chisnall
yjchen: Yen-Ju Chen
In summary:
Conventional file managers try to solve two quite separate tasks in
the same way:
1) Finding objects.
2) Arranging objects.
We propose that the second of these be solved using our existing
project interface concept, where virtual desktops are arranged in a
nested fashion, as a discretised version of Raskin's zoom UI. Unlike
Raskin's interface, projects could easily have multiple 'parents',
even recursively. Two projects, one for code and one for
documentation might each contain the other one, for example.
The first is somewhat more difficult. We want an 'Object Sieve.'
This will give a view of all objects and allow this view to be
progressively refined based on metadata selected by the user. It
will need a separate view for different object types, since there is
no good way of displaying (for example) photos and music tracks in
the same view. This will replace dedicated applications like iPhoto
and iTunes, since you will just narrow your search to 'all music' and
then have a single view containing the results. The Address Book
would be accessed by sieving first for 'all people' and then sieving
for a particular tag (e.g. colleagues, friends) and then possibly
names containing a few (user entered) characters.
By the way, I would rather that we adopt the term 'sieving' rather
than 'searching.' Searching implies that you are looking for
something that is lost. Sieving (which, if you read the transcript,
you will see I have problems spelling) implies stripping out the
things you don't want.
David
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