Re: [NTLK] newtontalk Digest V8 #219

From: Simon Stapleton <simon.stapleton_at_gmail.com>
Date: Wed May 21 2008 - 17:21:25 EDT

On 21 May 2008, at 18:07, newtontalk@newtontalk.net wrote:

>> And the interface would still be GUI of a sort, but it would be a GUI
>> mindmap of my hard-drive (i.e., of my data), allowing me always to
>> see my
>> data in terms of itself and my purposes for it (optionally in 3D),
>> rather
>> than having to have an eye on which apps I need to use my data.
>> Application
>> selection and use would be seamless, a function of the OS
>> identifying what I
>> want to do with my data and handing me the tools to do it -- like a
>> good
>> surgical nurse who always has the right implements ready for the
>> surgeon.

I think this is probably the most important thing. The actual UI can
suck, hell it could be purely textual, but the ability to pull your
data according to *what* it is, in terms *you* can understand, as
opposed to *where* it is in (more or less) physical terms is where the
next change should be.

The Newton has this, in that it's pretty much a "dump" of data, and
modulo the omnipresent need to know if something is filed on a
particular piece of removable media, you simply don't need to know
where it is. No "~/Documents/Projects/foo/bar", none of that.

Look at iTunes. Okay, it's not a wonderfl piece of software overall,
but it allows you to search media according to almost arbitrary tags,
in real time, to have smart playlists, to alter where media sits in
those lists. It's a bloody sight easier to find "that track by Janis"
through the iTunes interface than to trawl through 3 hard drives
looking for an obscurely named file. This is where something like
spotlight, combined with ubiquitous metadata, both "file format
internal" like id3 tags on mp3s and "generic" like HFS metadata, and a
good ui for finding stuff (certainly better than the current abortion)
could make the finder a real - well - "finder", and not a "browser",
and that's only on some hypothetical desktop OS. For a tablet, you
could (and should) go way beyond that, fast forward all the way to 10
years ago and NOS 2.1

Something like Newton's soups, BeOS's file system, or even the file
system that was slated for Longhorn, might be a technologically
"better" underpinning for this, but computer performance is now such
that the actual implementation arguably doesn't *really* matter,
what's important is the way it's presented to the user.

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Received on Wed May 21 17:50:43 2008

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