Linked by Marcus Carlson on Wed 21st Jul 2004 18:17 UTC
In these days there has been much fuzzing about the new browsing with files organizing themselves with the help of meta data. Maybe you ask yourself "What have this to do with the spatial browsing in gnome and how can it improve the browsing?". That's what I did. As I see it, the gnome people have introduced the spatial browsing so we are used to it when this new browsing is coming to town. This is very intelligent move of the gnome people and will help us adopt faster to this. This is when the spatial browsing is really making sense. I hope you see this when you've read this article.
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He didn't really answer, but I understand where he's going.
It's just in looks only. I'd counter that just because it is usually a single pane view of your files doesn't make it spatial. Just single pane.
In WinFS and Storage, the many screenshots I've seen are spatial in appearance (but not practice).
Here's a white paper with screenshots of WinFS and Aero.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/Longhorn/understanding/ux/default.aspx?pu...
It uses the Outlook 97-style semi-spatial UI with favorites pane on the left and files on the right that Apple also uses in OS X's Finder.
If you go up a level in the top breadcrumbs bar, there are plenty of articles with screenshots that reinforce the "spatial-like" view.
You can't really browse dynamic folders/stacks/ saved queries. They aren't heirarchical and don't really lend themselves to that structure. The way you'd work with it would be in a single pane window, shallow directories with many files in each. Think iTunes with 1 massive root library and the playlists are just abstracted folders. If you delete it from the folder, you disassociate it from that keyword or sort query but not physically delete it. Folders are like "smart playlists" in iTunes, WMP9, MC10 and other jukeboxes. I can see working in multiple windows ala spatial. If you drag a file from one window to another you'd be associating that keyword/ search attribute to the file.
On the other hand they definitely aren't spatial. Spatial reinforces the view that "this icon" is "this file." A folder has a location and a size and they open the same way that you left it. There's no reason why it can't open these saved searches in a similar manner, but since everything is abstracted you've lost the whole reasoning behind spatial.
As far as the general trend in this convo toward a metadata system.
I've been ripping CDs for a while now, not to mention my old cassette and vinyl collections I haven't started. I have to keep myself disciplined to keep the metadata up to speed.
On the other hand, I can't see the average non-anal non-music freak doing this.
I do think there are plans to categorize docs & pdfs based on content. Photos may be categorized based on date, size, aperture, etc. Songs and contacts have inherent properties that can be metadata. The push will be for applications to provide as much automatically generated metadata as possible. Integrated face scanning software to group photos for instance. You keyword one picture "dad" and it will recognize most occurences.
In any case, it will always be a lot of work. I have a few thousand CDs, records and tapes. I have a large library of books. My bills need organizing. Pictures are scattered all over the house. It takes work to keep everything organized. If you look at someone's house or garage, it's probably as organized as their PC is and vice versa.