The Desktop Fishbowl
tail -f /dev/mind > blog

Thursday, 18 July 2002

Oh, and while I'm on a posting spree, I pre-ordered a copy of Jaguar this morning. I'll let you know if it's any good when it arrives (in the middle of August, apparently). 11:17:46 PM

The problem with that is that some people have already built mental models that include where the data is on why physical device. I have used "dumbed down" systems where things like this were completly hidden, and it led to a feeling of vertigo as I couldn't find where said program was putting my files. Made me want to reach for find. But this was win3.1, not linux. :) [Brett Morgan's Insanity Weblog, "Dumbing down can be dumb"] I expect you also know what a hard drive looks like, and even what hard drive platters look like. My mother, on the other hand, went through a long period where I would occasionally be called on to "find" all her documents, because Word wasn't opening the Open dialog in the same directory that it used to. You have a feeling of vertigo because you don't know where your files are going, and you don't trust the program to be able to find them for you if you need them. But the concept of "where your files are" is already an artificial one. You're used to your files being "somewhere" in a directory tree. Do you also worry about which inodes your files are using up, or pay specific attention to how each file is fragmented on the disk? The heirarchical filesystem will never go away, because it's a very efficient way to sort files, and it's a very convenient organisational model for programmers. Power-users are also used to the filesystem, and would feel lost if it vanished. What needs to be done is more work to shield the user from the confusing things that the programmer and power-user like. I'd like to see a world where the heirarchical filesystem is like the Unix shell in OS X. If you know what it does, it's a powerful and useful thing to be able to use directly, but if you don't know what it does, you can safely ignore that it even exists. BeOS made a good start in this direction by adding rich meta-data, and database-like querying to the fs. You didn't have to organise your mp3s into directory by artist and album like I've done on my Windows machine (although I'm sure people did anyway), because you could tell the filesystem to just grab and sort all the mp3s by artist and album. It's no coincidence that iTunes and iPhoto hide the filesystem, as does every non-Unix email program in existence. The problem is that because the capability to make a better way of finding files is not built into the underlying OS, it is different from application to application, which makes those apps that hide the filesystem harder to use the moment you want to copy data between them, or open a file in an application it wasn't created in. 10:30:27 PM

I am sitting at work, hitting myself over the head with a plastic dinosaur called 'Fluffy'. Fluffy is our release token. You have to be holding him to integrate your code into source-control. In a previous project, the release token was a big blue plastic head full of {Australia: lollies, UK: sweets, USA: candy}, but I gained several pounds during that project so it probably wasn't too good an idea. I wanted to get a rubber chicken instead of a dinosaur, but the only place we could find one was in Gowings, and they were asking $AU25 for it. I still think we should have bought it, just for the fun of expensing "$25: Rubber chicken". 4:13:42 PM

I just upgraded to Ximain GNOME Desktop on my office workstation. Cleverly, it spotted all the SMB shares I had mounted in /mnt, and put them all on my desktop as icons. The icons were stylized drawings of HD platters. The Mac does it little better - the default HD icon on my OS X TiBook was a very nice drawing of a hard drive, another thing that your average user isn't likely to recognise. I know, I've done tech support. 75% of the people I did end-user support for when I worked at Q-Net thought "hard drive" meant "That big off-white box thingy with all the computer stuff in it. Windows 9x represent drives as plastic things that seem to represent external hard drive cases, something that's not exactly been common for PC users since the early 90's. I spent a while thinking about this, and the reason we can't come up with a good metaphor for drive arrangement that doesn't assume the user knows what a hard drive is, and what one looks like. I then hit myself on the forehead and realised I was thinking the wrong way around. All our icons for hard drives suck because... the hard drive is not a concept that the UI should be exposing to the user. Until we abstract the filesystem to the point at which it is invisible to the user, and the user just thinks in terms of organising and sorting their various bits and pieces, filesystem programmers and desktop UI designers haven't done their job properly. 1:34:47 PM

Where does he get those wonderful toys?". Do you remember the original Batman movie? I think whenever MacWorld is on Bill Gates becomes the Joker. I picture him sitting at home watching the keynote (on Quicktime of course) saying "Where does he get those wonderful toys?" (WAV) [rebelutionary] *laughs* That fits.. 1:02:53 PM