On Sat, 2010-04-10 at 00:25 +0100, Alan Cox wrote: > > The other approach is when expiring or archiving to move files > > from ~/Desktop to an archival location like ~/Documents. > > How does moving it work with non aware applications or a shared file > space ? You risk opening a file having it moved, saving it and ending up > with a copy in documents and one stale which could lead to nasty user > errors. Seems safe to just filter the view (after all large directory > enumeration ought to be fast these days ?)
Yes, this is one of several problems with the archive-by-moving approach. > As a completely off the wall comment related to this - the fact I can't > drag documents into my calendar annoys me, because that's effectively how > some people organise some things in the paper world. I guess that backs > up your model but it does mean I expect to see my desktop bits from a > date in with my calendar. I think you may be on to something here - the files I use, or even the web pages I visit only make up one component of the stuff I'm doing - so should there be a distinction between: My calendar: appointments, etc. for each day My "activity journal": the files I used on each day ? Maybe the calendar is the appropriate place to find the files I was using the week before GCDS. (Obviously you wouldn't want to just always clutter the calendar with incredibly detailed file information, but you could imagine an abbreviated list with the ability to expand, or something like that.) And certainly we do think of putting files onto the "Desktop" as posting them to attend to in the future. I don't think we'd want to always want to make users assign a date to that action, but you could imagine allowing that optionally, perhaps with the drag-to-calendar gesture. > Is stuff migrating to a filing cabinet by date ("This wek, last week, > march, ...) a metaphor for the desktop - > time stuff ? > > Also I guess this lets you fix the bin so you can delete last weeks > documents rather than just "empty trash". It's mildly amusing that you > still seem to have to use "find" incantations to make the bin work well 8) In general, I think an effect of de-emphasizing browsing through the complete contents of directories will be to de-emphasize deleting things. There are basically three reasons to delete things: * Organization - be able to find things. * Save disk space. Hard drive manufacturers are largely solving this for us. Certainly there are still movies/ISO images/kernel git trees/ etc - things that take significant amounts of disk space. But most files just aren't big enough to worry about. * Privacy. Some things you don't want hanging around. This use case is as much there as always. It doesn't seem to me there is much change in the ability to partially empty the trash can, or auto-delete things after a while - we could do either easily right now - the deletion date is already stored in a look-aside .trashinfo file. - Owen _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list