On 5/28/06, Günther Noack <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi!
Am 28.05.2006 um 03:27 schrieb Hubert Chan:
> Just wondering how you think ExtendedWorkspaceKit design is wrong,
> and how you think it should be designed. I started writing my own
> file manager a while ago, before I came across Etoile, and I
> thought it would be better to help out the Etoile file manager if I
> could.
Speaking of file managers, I have and idea of which i would like to
know what you think of it.
Many applications that run on OSX* today (iTunes, Mail, iPhoto etc.)
are what I one may call 'Collection management' applications: On the
right you have a list of items (Mail/Song list) and an extra view
that "inspects" them (Mail body view, Player controls). On the left,
there's a - possibly hierarchical - view of folders where those items
are put into. Ideally, you can also have 'smart folders'.
Shouldn't all that be the task of the file system layer? If the file
system layer natively provided smart folders and meta-data for files,
every application capable of using files and exporting meta-data
would get all this functionality for free. (Of course this is only
the case when there's a file manager which supports all this.)
Is something like that planned for the Etoile file system access code?
-Günther
[*] I know we are not developing for OSX. :-> But the overall
strategy of GNUstep to attract OSX developers who want to develop
cross-platform applications is possibly going to lead to many similar
applications on GNUstep in the long term, too.
What you are describing is exactly the way things should work. The
SPOT rule (Single Point Of Truth) is crucial to Etoile, and I think
that's where we should go. Let's sum it up, the only reason why
developers tend to implement a hierarchical stuff-view into their apps
is because they want their data to be readily available to the user
when working with the app (i.e. inside it's window).
NEXTSTEP tried to go a different way - most of the things were
available from the file viewer (files, documents, even hierarchical
address lists) and most of it was done using drag'n'drop. It's a shame
Apple reversed this direction and went for a more traditional approach
of each app managing it's own data store.
I think we need to stick to the NEXTSTEP way, BUT, we need to (and
will) solve the problem of switching between windows. We'll simply use
the tabbed shelf for all the temporary data the user may want. We
could add a feature to the tabbed shelf which would track running
apps. Each app would have it's tab inside this special set of "context
tabs" and define where to the root of it's tab lies (which directory).
The user can then nagivate with the tabbed shelf and drag'n'drop data
into the app from the shelf without any hassle. The shelf always stays
on top or can be easily hidden.
When the user switches to another app, the tabbed shelf switches to
the tab of the selected app. Even better, the user can easily feed
data from the shelf to a different app than it's maintainer - since
it's all files which everybody understands, you'd have drag'n'drop of
almost arbitrary data desktop-wide available. And the tabbed shelf
remembers where you left your hierarchy when you quit an app, so when
you restart it, it goes back to where it was.
What do you people think?
--
Saso
_______________________________________________
Etoile-dev mailing list
[email protected]
https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-dev
