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

On Tuesday, February 5, 2002, at 02:40 PM, Simon Wistow wrote:

On Sun, Feb 03, 2002 at 04:54:11PM +0000, Matt Webb said:
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.

Yes. Umm, that's why I quoted it as well :)

Darn, my lack of >3 second memory lets me down again.

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.
[ snippage ] 
Yeah! That's views, or dynamic searches, or whatever you want to call
them. On that,

They would rock. The big problems here are

1. performance -
FS access would be *slow*. But memory is cheap and I've got clock cycles
to burn so we'll let Mr Moore take care of that for us.

I don't know much about BeOS, but I think I've read something that claimed they'd fixed this problem? Maybe. I can't remember.

Effectively DB file systems and also individual files would have the
equivalent of DTDs (the file that describes an XML file for the buzzword
protected) but for lovely shiny binary files. Al Snell would be proud.

Essentially it would describe the data contained within the
file/filesystem. When you transferred a directory over if you didn't
already have the correct DTD it would get transferred over aswell.

It sounds gorgeous, but this is where my lack of computer history is really a problem.

A binary file with a separate definition document gets rid of the primary advantage of XML, namely that it can be edited in a standard text editor. In that case, why is a binary file like that better than files being objects? If they had specified accessor methods, they could pretend to be any file type they needed too.


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


This sounds suspiciously close to 'my' idea of document centric
interfaces which I keep bringing up.

have a look at http://www.thegestalt.org/scr/old/msg00023.html

Woo! We're riding the crest of the memewave!

Actually, I'm thinking about a different level.. Applications/documents/Opendoc etc, yes, brilliant. What I mean with tools and looking isn't at a scripting level, it's *physically* [can I say that?] moving the cursor to the same place as the thing if you want to alter property-of-thing. It's a look n feel thing.

[insert Whole Other Rant here.]

Please do :)

Oh, I need to stumble onto the topic somehow. But briefly:

I will assert that there is some pattern[s] to the way the universe works. The closer an interface is to these patterns, the more familiar/intuitive it will feel. Therefore better.

The problem is twofold:
- the patterns are quite deep, so we've never really considered building them in to computers. I'm talking about patterns like cause and effect, weight, small changes only rarely having big effects, don't eat poison berries, that kind of stuff.
- with things like cars, they operate within the range of physical-reality so we get patterns for free. Stuff like turning a wheel having a proportionate effect on the turning circle (although I know that wasn't an inevitable innovation, and to alter the mirror position you *touch the mirror itself* (genius, you wouldn't get that in Windows). However with computers we're creating a whole other reality, and we're losing a whole load of things we never knew we had: peripheral vision, the idea of stretching to grab something, alter-at-a-point.

So computers have to be consciously designed to reintroduce these things, which is going to be hard. But it has to be done carefully and consistently.

Looking is one of those things. Consider a signpost at a crossroads. Far away, it's quite small. As it gets more important [you're closer to the crossroads], it gets bigger! What's more, the longer you look at it, the more detailed information you see, information you can neglect next time you encounter it because it'll be the same (you can tell because if it was different, the signpost would look new). Wouldn't that be great with dialogue boxes?

The problem is that signposts exist in the physical domain so that get stuff like perspective, and distance, and aging for free. And we're going to have to emulate that.


Hey, you remember I said "But briefly"? I lied.

-mw