Re: ::scr Ramblings of a Classic Refugee or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love OS X

[Matt Webb <matt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

<delurks />

Hello.

On Sunday, February 3, 2002, at 04:08 PM, simon wistow wrote:

> 'inbox' would be :
> select * from Mails where read=false;

On this topic,
http://www.namesys.com/whitepaper.html
looks interesting (although I admit I've not been able to read it to the 
end). Kind of xpath meets filesystems.

But god yes, the current filesystem sucks. You only have to look at the 
way email clients, mp3 programs, photo archives etc etc reimplement 
their own filing systems.

> together in a folder. It doesn't delete them from more conventional
> heirachical file systems but provides another tool for helping you
> organise your data. Like the LifeStreams idea. Only less crap.

Yeah! That's views, or dynamic searches, or whatever you want to call 
them. On that,
http://www.namesys.com/whitepaper.html
appears to be a kind of relationship search-engine for the filesystem 
kind of thing. It's not out yet, but that's what it sounds like.

How hard would it be for Apple to let you save Sherlock results to the 
Finder to appear as a folder? I mean, *really*. It'd be brilliant.

> The user plays round with an application. Depending on which items of
> functionality (hence forth to be referred to as functions) they use the
> genes of that function get stronger and breed more. Essentially. There's
> more to it than that but it gets a bit involved and then I go crossed
> eyed.

Right. I'm onto what you're up to here, and it's a brilliant idea. I 
think the problem is that it's very difficult to conceive a useful way 
to do it with the *current* interface metaphors.

Problem with current interfaces: My inhabit-every-day universe doesn't 
work with action at a distance. I mean, I have the TV remote control but 
that's *one thing*, and almost my ENTIRE computer life is done with menu 
options. Disparity.

So number one, get rid of all menu options in computer interfaces. And 
dialogue boxes. And anything else that appears. All on-screen 
manipulation should be done:
- by pulling a tool over to act-at-a-place; or
- by looking "closer" at the item to alter its properties

Looking closer? What kind of crazy talk is that? I mean that to change 
the font on some text in Word you'd "look" at it closer at see a dial 
for the font size, a dropdown for the face, whatever. Tools would be the 
same as Photoshop works at the moment.

(This isn't completely arbitrary, seriously. I'm convinced that we 
aren't looking hard enough at human-reality. If we did we'd find quite 
fundamental patterns we should be emulating. Interfaces are hard because 
we aren't.)

There would be a few things to do:
- implement some way of investigating properties ("looking closer")
- have some standard way of storing available tools
And because of the inherent problems with using the mouse to drag tools, 
we'd end up needing things like gloves (to manipulate multiple points on 
the screen simultaneously), and some way of emulating peripheral 
vision <-- that's the important bit.

Now the genetically altering interface can draw on these real life 
metaphors:

If you use tools from a toolbox, you tend to leave them closer to where 
you work. That'd help.

If you're on the lookout for something, it tends to leap out of your 
peripheral vision quicker.


Okay, so it's all quite up in the air, and the whole Looking idea is 
fairly undefined, but it's the lack of human reality in computer 
interfaces that's causing all these problems.

[insert Whole Other Rant here.]

	-mw