On Sat, Aug 16, 2008 at 3:05 PM, Albert Cahalan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Benjamin M. Schwartz writes: >> forster at ozonline.com.au wrote: > >>> I remain unconvinced that a journal, even with enhanced >>> tagging and searching, is the best solution. >> >> I am pretty well convinced. > > You're using it exclusively, right...? (no bash, no MacOS, etc.) > > If it's not good enough for you, then it's definitely not good > enough to be forced on other people.
That would be like expecting gnome/OSX/windows developers to use the GUI exclusively without using the command line. The GUI is for a particular set of users, power users and developers might need something else. A 10 year old student and a tertiary educated software developer will have different needs from a file system. Gmail and delicious (and no doubt others) use a tag-and-search system; they both work great for me, and if a similar functionality existed for my regular filesystem, I'd use it in a second. >> Both tags and hierarchies provide a combinatorial explosion of >> labels for objects. In fact, unless you have directories like >> /foo/bar/baz AND /bar/baz/foo, tags are just as good as directories >> for uniquely identifying objects. > > Could those tags at least be usable via the folder metaphor? > > At top level, show tags and anti-tags (absence of tag) as folders. > Sort them by how evenly they split the files into two groups, > with the most evenly splitting ones first. delicious bookmarks have a functionality like this; I think this is a good idea. >>> I have found the concealment of the underlying directory >>> structure from the user quite frustrating when working >>> with email attachments. >> >> It would be good to hear your specific frustration in this use case. > > It appears that you are not a Journal user. :-( > > Here is an example: pretend you are a kid who wants to learn about > his computer by exploring the filesystem. You want to look in /dev, > look in /etc, and so on. Using only Sugar, can you do it? No, just like you can't do this in OSX using just the GUI. That's what the terminal is there for. >>> The journal is OK but should it be the only tool available to the user? >>> Isn't the best file system the one which most empowers the user? >> >> How does the Journal fail to empower the user? With tagging and >> versioning, the Journal design empowers the user to organize their >> objects, find their objects by organization scheme or by content, and >> never lose something because they forgot to save it. That seems like >> plenty of power to me. > > Clearly you are not a Journal user. You may have played with it, > and you may have even written some code for it... but clearly you > do not really use it. This is the tricky part - we are not the intended audience of the journal/sugar. The intended audience is school kids. We need to be looking at how they use it and if it suits them, not if it suits us. > Oddly enough, XP makes it possible to use traditional UNIX tools > on the user's files. Desktop files reside in the filesystem under > normal names. With cygwin or SFU, you can operate on them. Suger > users are unable to do likewise, despite being on Linux. All the > power has been taken away. There are various levels of file system. Look at a typical modern linux filesystem. There is the kernel VFS, several specific filesystem drivers, and the gnome vfs. There are things I can do in the gnome vfs that I can't (easily) access through the command line. I'm pretty sure a similar thing happens in OSX and windows (can't say for certain as I don't use them). "All reasonable men accept the status quo. Therefore, all progress is made by unreasonable men" - George Bernard Shaw vik _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
