[Sugar-devel] Article on "Why files need to die"

[Alexandro Colorado]

On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 5:31 AM, Alexandro Colorado <jza at openoffice.org>wrote:

>
>
> On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 4:54 AM, Christoph Derndorfer <
> christoph.derndorfer at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 11:50 AM, Christoph Derndorfer <
>> christoph.derndorfer at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 11:13 AM, Alexandro Colorado <jza at openoffice.org
>>> > wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 4:03 AM, Christoph Derndorfer <
>>>> christoph.derndorfer at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Hi all,
>>>>>
>>>>> I just saw this article over on O'Reilly Radar and a lot of what the
>>>>> author says also applies to the Journal: "Why files need to die: Files are
>>>>> an anachronism in the digital age. It's time for something better." (
>>>>> http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/07/why-files-need-to-die.html).
>>>>>
>>>>> So while it's still early days I definitely feel that the Journal is
>>>>> generally moving into the right direction, especially with all the new
>>>>> features and whatnot discussed during the eduJAM! summit:-)
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I am not purely convinced on eliminating the files paradigm, maybe the
>>>> folders would be a different conversation. But files are well... pretty
>>>> obiquos. Since you seem very interesting in having this paradigm of a
>>>> journal. I wonder if you got inspired out of Zeitgeist project in gnome (I
>>>> think they rename it now to something more normal like gnome-journal or
>>>> something).
>>>>
>>>
>>> Not sure that there's necessarily a direct connection between Sugar's
>>> Journal and Gnome's Zeitgeist but if there were then I'd probably argue that
>>> it went from Sugar to Gnome rather than the other way 'round;-)
>>>
>>>
>>>> I would like to hear your validation of the journal and why is it a good
>>>> idea, and how deep will this change goes beyond the UI and apps to a
>>>> commandline environment.
>>>>
>>>
>>> See the aforementioned article, it really contains most of the reasons
>>> why I personally think that something like the Journal is a good idea. It
>>> seems to be that a stream-like interface combined with a database based
>>> backend is a good combination for today's computing context.
>>>
>>> On an even a broader scale back in Uruguay in early May Bert Freudenberg
>>> pointed out that mobile operating systems such as Android and iOS and now
>>> increasingly even desktop operating systems (e.g. OS X Lion) are moving into
>>> a direction where you're not really interacting with files anymore.
>>>
>>
>> Please also see this article (
>> http://blogs.gnome.org/mccann/2011/06/08/new-pony/) which Tomeu Vizoso
>> (one of the early Sugar developers) just shared on Google+, well worth a
>> read!
>>
>> Christoph
>>
>> --
>> Christoph Derndorfer
>> co-editor, olpcnews
>> url: www.olpcnews.com
>> e-mail: christoph at olpcnews.com
>>
>
> Well is interesting, nevertheless I think that we are sugarcoating the real
> OS. GUI is a represntation of the CLI which arguably is the "Real"
> interface. Changing a DE will just make the perception change, but the
> actual files will still be there. It can't be an eternal stream of
> information. However I remember in college I watched David Gelernter
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gd6jX40Kn4 talked about the same issue,
> and even did a DE with the paradigm of the eternal stream of information
> related to date as opposed to Folders, Cabinets and Files.
>
> The issue with the stream is that it doesnt really works either. If you see
> twitter, is impossilbe to look without search at your tweets from last month
> or last years. While folders present you with a cognotive map that holds
> more information. Dates are well... rigid. Even technology such as Beagle or
> Kat hasn't really taken off. Extended filesystems in the commandline also
> hasn't taken off either, even with things like pyaxttr
> http://pyxattr.sourceforge.net/html/
>
> There are two paradigms, making people think like computers, and making
> computers think like people. A failure of example is what you are seen with
> the ipad and even newest OSX that spend too much time on 'page turning'
> because we want to emulate the analog world. And we want to see pages turn
> like in books.
> http://www.thegraphicmac.com/wp-content/uploads/mac_lion-screenshot.jpg
>
> This is a waste of time and productivity. I always thought that the menu
> was a bit of a failure, because is grouped list which are useful in the
> beginning but how many times you need to think "Edit" to think "cut" versus
> simply call "cut" command as an action. I loved linux because I never really
> touch the menu. I just type ctrl-f2 and type whatever program I want to
> launch.  The same can be said about dates, I dont need to think an exact
> month to remember my trip to new york. I usually think rather.. new york and
> then I just have 3 times I have been there. So forcing me to go through 2009
> 2008 2007 to find the right time I went to new york, seems like a waste of
> time as well. I guess the invention of tagging, hashtagging and keywords
> really improved things. But I still think is hard to use even for things
> like bookmarks, adding all these keywords and remembering on time usually is
> not practical.
>
> --
> *Alexandro Colorado*
> *OpenOffice.org* Español
> http://es.openoffice.org
>
>
This is a bit back in the days and not related,but I used to get pretty
pissed at gnome back in 2002 - 2003 for their new 'innovation' in Nautilus
__Spatial View__ which also try to emulate Microsoft failures, but also the
spatial paradigm claiming to make us more productive.
http://www.bytebot.net/geekdocs/spatial-nautilus.html

I never bought that argument, but you can memorize about old years battles
(btw was also the rise of Longhorn and GnomeFS which never happened as the
db filesystem). Nat was enthusiastic about Dashboard which later became
beagle. http://nat.org/dashboard/
Fun screenshots and links to archieve mails and presentations inside.

On the KDE side I think things are somewhat still living (barely) with
Nepomuk which most users hate it for their intense memory consumption, just
like KAT once did. http://sourceforge.net/projects/kat/ |
http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main1/Project+Objectives

Finally there was the so called, change the paradigm of rectangular window
and menus, instead make it non squary. Cairo/Pango was supposed to change
that as well as make a vectorized desktop for different screen resolutions.
 And recently there was ZFS / BtrFS since Fedora 13 and then disappeared
into the fog even in F16 not that annouced.

Maybe is just me being jadded for so many paradigm changing promises, making
me kind of a Buzzkill, but it's been interesting seen how is this the time
to change everything.

Sorry for the rambling.

-- 
*Alexandro Colorado*
*OpenOffice.org* Español
http://es.openoffice.org
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