[IAEP] [Fwd: 0.84 goals]

[victor rajewski]

On Sat, Aug 16, 2008 at 3:05 PM, Albert Cahalan <acahalan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Benjamin M. Schwartz writes:
>> forster at ozonline.com.au wrote:
>
>>> I remain unconvinced that a journal, even with enhanced
>>> tagging and searching, is the best solution.
>>
>> I am pretty well convinced.
>
> You're using it exclusively, right...? (no bash, no MacOS, etc.)
>
> If it's not good enough for you, then it's definitely not good
> enough to be forced on other people.

That would be like expecting gnome/OSX/windows developers to use the
GUI exclusively without using the command line. The GUI is for a
particular set of users, power users and developers might need
something else. A 10 year old student and a tertiary educated software
developer will have different needs from a file system.

Gmail and delicious (and no doubt others) use a tag-and-search system;
they both work great for me, and if a similar functionality existed
for my regular filesystem, I'd use it in a second.

>> Both tags and hierarchies provide a combinatorial explosion of
>> labels for objects.  In fact, unless you have directories like
>> /foo/bar/baz AND /bar/baz/foo, tags are just as good as directories
>> for uniquely identifying objects.
>
> Could those tags at least be usable via the folder metaphor?
>
> At top level, show tags and anti-tags (absence of tag) as folders.
> Sort them by how evenly they split the files into two groups,
> with the most evenly splitting ones first.

delicious bookmarks have a functionality like this; I think this is a good idea.

>>> I have found the concealment of the underlying directory
>>> structure from the user quite frustrating when working
>>> with email attachments.
>>
>> It would be good to hear your specific frustration in this use case.
>
> It appears that you are not a Journal user. :-(
>
> Here is an example: pretend you are a kid who wants to learn about
> his computer by exploring the filesystem. You want to look in /dev,
> look in /etc, and so on. Using only Sugar, can you do it?

No, just like you can't do this in OSX using just the GUI. That's what
the terminal is there for.

>>> The journal is OK but should it be the only tool available to the user?
>>> Isn't the best file system the one which most empowers the user?
>>
>> How does the Journal fail to empower the user?  With tagging and
>> versioning, the Journal design empowers the user to organize their
>> objects, find their objects by organization scheme or by content, and
>> never lose something because they forgot to save it.  That seems like
>> plenty of power to me.
>
> Clearly you are not a Journal user. You may have played with it,
> and you may have even written some code for it... but clearly you
> do not really use it.

This is the tricky part - we are not the intended audience of the
journal/sugar. The intended audience is school kids. We need to be
looking at how they use it and if it suits them, not if it suits us.

> Oddly enough, XP makes it possible to use traditional UNIX tools
> on the user's files. Desktop files reside in the filesystem under
> normal names. With cygwin or SFU, you can operate on them. Suger
> users are unable to do likewise, despite being on Linux. All the
> power has been taken away.

There are various levels of file system. Look at a typical modern
linux filesystem. There is the kernel VFS, several specific filesystem
drivers, and the gnome vfs. There are things I can do in the gnome vfs
that I can't (easily) access through the command line. I'm pretty sure
a similar thing happens in OSX and windows (can't say for certain as I
don't use them).

"All reasonable men accept the status quo. Therefore, all progress is
made by unreasonable men" - George Bernard Shaw

vik