Le 7 avr. 05, à 05:40, Jesse Ross a écrit :
Regarding the name Étoilé (...)
Fully support yen-ju position on that..
Okay, to the good stuff...
============================================
THE DISTRO
============================================
I asked Nicolas, Quentin and Banlu about their ideas on developing
Étoilé as a full operating system (on top of Linux or *BSD or Hurd
(one day... maybe...)). All three mentioned being in favor of doing a
desktop environment instead. I personally am interested in a full
distro, and here's why (...)
Well, I would *like* to have a live cd -- for the reasons you outlined.
But I don't think we need to focus/work on that at the moment, it's
slightly prematurate imho :-)
*when* we'll have our basics components of our desktop working, then I
think we should try to integrate that to the current GNUSTEP Live CD,
or use the live cd as a basis for our own, etc. But we have a few
things to code/do before trying to make a live cd, frankly...
============================================
THE INTERFACE
============================================
Here are some things that I want in an interface and some
counterpoints to things I've read in the archives and on the wiki.
Everything that I said here <
https://mail.gna.org/public/gnustep-ui/2005-02/msg00050.html > still
applies, except for maybe the desktop being used as the home folder.
Here's some more stuff and more fleshed out stuff (since this is
probably a more appropriate place :)
- A buffer or visual pasteboard / quick launcher. I want a spot where
I can drag snippets of text, or images, or URLs, or email addresses,
or color swatches, or folders, or network locations or whatever.
Anything I think I might use in the near future, I can drop here.
Clicking on said snippet will launch the appropriate application for
content (text will launch a text editor's window, URLs will launch a
browser, folders will launch the workspace manager, etc). Dragging the
snippet into another application will act as if I had that snippet as
the current item in the pasteboard (text, including URLs and email
addresses, will paste as text, images will paste as images, folders
could paste the path or copy or move the folder, depending on the
target of the drop, etc).
That will be provided "for free" by a tabbed panel (like openstep 4) --
you'll be able to dnd things on it, not just file, but other common
pasteboard types (image, sound, text, etc.). There's an OSX app that
does that btw, don't remember its name.
- Annotations are a brilliant idea!
I think it can be useful, yes, but we'll need to take care of the UI /
implementation imho ... it should be extremely easy for the user to
deal with that function.
- Spacial interfaces can be extremely painful and lead to a lot of
windows on the screen. I do like 1 window for 1 folder -- that's a
good idea, as is keeping the location and view of a specific folder
consistent. Browser navigation is really slick for deep hierarchies --
we just need to find a way to unify the two concepts. Or...
- Ditch the ability for regular users to create folders altogether
and put all files in one spot (probably their home folder merged with
a Shared folder for all system users). Make the workspace manager an
awesome searching and filtering tool. Add buttons to the workspace
manager for "Music" or "Photos" or "Letters to my boss since last
Tuesday" or whatever, and just make those shortcuts for queries (live
search folders). Never use a Save dialog again -- when you make a new
file, just give it a name and it's automatically added to the user's
home folder, ready to be searched on.
I actually think this approach would be good, yes. Anyway more
traditional filemanager like gworkspace are available, so we could try
something more innovative, indeed.
============================================
THE TECHNOLOGY
============================================
Here are some random bits of other technologies or ideas that might be
inspiring.
I told the guys I've been reading Jef Raskin's _The Human Interface_
lately. Not all of his ideas are great, but some of them are stellar
(< that's a pun) and really resonated (< and so is that) with me and
with what I read about Étoilé. What was really the trigger is he is
all about productivity and workflow -- exactly the same concepts this
project is trying to find a better solution to. Where I think Raskin
goes wrong is that he tends to favor a more command line approach,
instead of the more intuitive approach of direct manipulation. He also
tends to look at files as textual elements when, for me, the majority
of what I manipulate every day is graphic. Some of his good points:
- Eliminate model interfaces as much as possible. Different
applications (tend to) mean different modes (different key commands,
different interaction methods). By breaking applications down to
services that can be summoned and combined as needed, Étoilé seems to
be working on making this idea more of a reality.
Yes, as much as possible we should try to build an environment based on
components -- which doesn't mean we won't have "applications", but that
the applications will be very task-specific and easily combinable with
other applications / components to form a more powerful / flexible
system; i.e., take the unix approach of combinable small tools to do a
job rather than the emacs approach.
- Build a history of selections. If I make a selection in a body of
text, that is selection 0. If I make a new selection, the new
selection is numbered 0 and the previous one is numbered 1. This goes
on for as many selections as we can technically handle. All the
selections might be badged by their historical number (or some other
visual method). Swapping two pieces of text now becomes insanely easy:
just have a menu item labeled "Swap". This is far superior to "select,
cut, paste, select, cut, find previous insertion point, paste".
It's probably not too difficult to create a "pasteboard viewer" in fact
-- something like that used to exist on NeXTSTEP if I remember. Perhaps
integrate such a viewer as a special tab on the panel..
- Make alerts that don't require interaction to show up, then fade
out, and keep track of all alerts. You know the JavaScript alert()
function? Horrible. It pops up with some text and an OK button, and
forces the user to disrupt what they're doing to get rid of it. I'm
using Growl < http://www.growl.info/ > now for alerts on downloads and
new emails, and it is exactly how alerts should work: it shows up, it
stays for a bit, it fades away. Elegant, informative and unobtrusive.
Now if only we could build a simple way to pull up old alerts when
you're busy doing something else and the alert fades before you get a
chance to read it, it would be perfect.
Yes, i think we'd need some kind of On Screen Display server that
applications can just use to display info on top of the screen...
- Everything is undoable. Everything. Forgiveness is a virtue... and
a requirement for a friendly system.
Agree. It's something to put into the guidelines. No way you shouldn't
be able to undo closing a webbrowser window containing lots of tabs :-D
- Incremental search. Like OS X is using everywhere, like Filie has,
like Google Suggest < http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en >.
Good idea -- let's make that type of search really easy for developers
to implement.
I think that a "search textfield" in the filemanager window is nice,
but contrary to OSX, I'll prefer to use it to
filter the current view rather than doing a search on the hard drive
(Filie does that, no ?)
On a different note, the Google Gmail mantra "Search, don't sort"
seems like a really good thing to keep in mind. You're already going
down that route with Lucene; here are some other links with ideas:
- http://www.mozilla.org/blue-sky/misc/199805/intertwingle.html
- http://logicaldesktop.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html (a variation
on sorting using task selection and searching)
That would be useful if we put everything at the same level +
metadatas, yes. I know, quentin would advocate a system-wide metadata
support, etc. But I think even if we restrict such a "managed"
presentation to the user's documents, it will be useful enough. After
all I don't care to much about doing a search based on metadatas in
/etc, but I'd like to do it and to filter / search things as I want on
my own documents..
--
Nicolas Roard
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
-Arthur C. Clarke
