On 4/4/07, Nicolas Roard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 4/4/07, brian muhumuza <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > On 4/2/07, David Chisnall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > 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 > > [ clip ] > Hello, i've written something about the ideas you discussed. I really liked > the way the idea flowed. Helped answer a haunting question (How to get rid > of the address book). Feel free to advise, correct, etc here's the link: > > http://brian.muhumuza.googlepages.com/object-manager.html Excellent page ! There's some things not detailed though: - "spatial" view -- where you can move the icons where you want, and that have annotation (eg you can write/draw stuff) - "proxy" icons/objects
I think this is a useful feature however, I recall some one trying to convince me that this behaviour wasn't so good. He had many arguments but i remember only the one about things getting messy like his work desk. I've always wondered why it's not currently possible to stick sticky notes onto files/objects and windows for that matter. I've always wanted to do it as some form of meta data but i guess tags work just fine. so then an object's tags should be visible somewhere even when it is open -- to help with identification. also, for the grouping, I think we should do them like "piles" -- eg
you select things, you group them, but you can also easily ungroup them temporarily (eg by holding a special key ?), etc.
But grouping objects is what tags are for? unless i'm missing something but using tags would be better than manually grouping/pilling objects. With pilling, we are always manually moving objects around from one pile to another then moving them back because piling isn't based on any common criteria but on imagination -- yet the computer is supposed to assist us here. Because pilling is based on imagination we may not have enough clues pointing us to where an object could be. "Now! which of these four piles did I put that doc? shuffle...shuffle....shuffle...." The idea of proxy icons/objects is that they would be "drop" receivers
zones. Eg when receiving something they'd act on it. For instance, a "contact" (agenda) object/icon would accept drag and drop. Imagine then that you want to send a file to somebody, you just drag and drop the file on the contact icon. Same thing for an FTP url, or for a printer, etc.
I like this idea. I really like it. Technically, the filemanager needs to "recognize" those specific
objects -- the filemanager is the one really handling the drag and drop in fact -- but then it will call the actual application in charge of this object type. So for instance, a ftp client can register to the system and advertise that it can manage dropped files on a ftp url -- it will be the designated "delegate" for this action. The ftp url would simply be a normal file (or a CoreObject reference in the future ?), the filemanager will "know" that such objects/files have a designed delegate for dnd (the ftp application), and will thus considered them as "proxy icons" (eg will allow dnd things on them). When dnd happens and if the dnd object is of a type that the delegate can manage, the filemanager simply call the delegate application and forward the dnd object to it. Same thing to handle file transfer via jabber, or to handle printing, etc. It would allow us a rather rich usability experience while keeping things absolutely straightforward technically... -- Nicolas Roard "La perfection, ce n'est pas quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, c'est quand il n'y a plus rien à enlever." -- Antoine de St-Exupéry _______________________________________________ Etoile-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-discuss
-- Happy day ------------- Brian
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