On Saturday 02 July 2011 01:43:38 you wrote:
> Stop trying to think in place of a pseudo average joe but instead try
> to create things that are useful for you and the normal users will
> follow. 

Can I use this as an excuse whenever somebody asks "why do I have to go to the 
command line/edit conf files" ? :) Arjan mentioned Apple as one example of this 
"Just works" and at the same time never too far from being hackable. The 
question is, as usual, how wide you can stretch your acceptance band. By now, 
it should be clear you can't have one interaction paradigm that will rule all, 
users, developers and random bystanders alike. The real problem is, thus, not 
that paradigm A or paradigm B is better or worse for a group of users, but 
that you limited yourself to ONE (usually along the lines of grab much, gain 
little) approach in the name of simplicity.

> To come back at the subject of the need of a file browser, lets
> suppose that you had a trip in a foreign country with friends and that
> now you want to show them all that you have from the trip. Will you
> prefer to have one folder with all the videos, photos, pdf scan of
> documents or to open the photo viewer to show them the photos, then go
> to the video player to browse the videos then to the pdf viewer to
> browse the pdfs, then to go back in all those applications to export
> to an usb key or import these data?

This is more of a filesystem philosophy argument - what you want for these use 
cases is a tag-based filesystem (with another argument, how to get the tags 
there without annoying the user). You assumed one use-case here, but that 
works only as your context is "the trip" and "ALL data". What if you were 
looking for "pictures/videos of John", or have pictures in there that will get 
you on the sofa if the wife doesn't get to deselect them. The bottom line 
being is that a directory is an okay method for grouping data - it's just that 
it has the same limitations as it did 30 years ago, so trying to find better 
ways to organize data is not necessarily bad (with the caveats from my 
previous paragraph).

Best regards,
Attila Csipa
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