Hi! Am 28.05.2006 um 19:20 schrieb Hubert Chan:
And I heard that in BeOS, the file manager was the mail reader.
I didn't work very much with BeOS, but I played around with it for a while, so I'm not sure about mails, but the general principle in BeOS was really exactly what we have been discussing in this thread: Most "items" that would usually only be present inside their applications were files there.
That worked, because they had metadata attached to their files, and the file system automatically stored an index. (Just like spotlight, right. Only much earlier. ;-))
The coolest thing were IMHO the addresses: The address manager application was simply an application that was able to modify special metadata fields that were defined in the "Person" MIME-Type. The "Person" files itself were usually empty or could be used for notes.
You could also display your person folders with table view, where each attribute had a column. So after all, this provided everything what applications like iTunes, Apple Mail etc do by hand now.
I think that in the long term all this will be available on OSX and Windows too, again. Remember that it was originally also planned for Windows Vista. And this means, that we'll probably have metadata support on Linux and FreeBSD, too. So I think we should just build metadata support into the Etoile file classes (a category for NSFile?) and start writing applications that use this, so that we'll be prepared when we get kernel-level support for it. :-)
Btw, I'm thinking about re-writing the Grr RSS Reader so that it stores feeds and articles as files and I don't need to implement all this 'collection management' functionality. So this would simply become a very lightweight NSDocument-based applications that is able to open files of the Feed type and of the article type. Suggestions are welcome. :-)
-Günther _______________________________________________ Etoile-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-dev
