Oliver Hamann released a new version of his futuristic user environment called Eagle Mode. But the most interesting news is probably his project philosophy. There he lists pros and cons for replacing most of today's user interfaces by zoomable user interfaces. But unlike others, he don't want to replace the concept of desktop windows.
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Member since:2006-05-26
You're just not visualizing things in perhaps the way they'd expect you to visualize it: there's no reason that shrinking visual representation of files as they're added to a file is illogical, if you consider the concept that the root of the filesystem is the absolute top-most view, or aka "30,000 foot view" and all levels below it have a sense of perspective that makes them look smaller from a distance: thus, the lowest level on the filesystem tree, until you're in it, looks some degree of much smaller, until you descend the filesystem tree, and treat that as conceptually coming in for a landing onto a lower level, or just skimming along the top.
If you take that sort of perspective into account, it's at least as reasonable of a way of viewing a filesystem as the current desktop idiom, since that's not a perfect visual-spatial interpretation of what really happens, either: when you open a single folder that has other things in it, you don't extend them out to n levels of depth and stack them in windows or trees automatically, do you? Not to mention... I'd find it very unusual if there are any real-life folders of items that have 8+ levels of nesting, like a Russian Doll mating with a filing cabinet of documents.
Member since:
2005-07-09
Zoomable interfaces definitely have a future (especially if you provide multiple ways to drill-down/zoom your data), but using it in the file system case is just plain wrong.
What Eagle Mode is basically saying is that putting a file into a subdirectory shrinks it. That's not the way most people understand subdirectories. People understand the tree metaphor. People understand the nested file folder metaphor. The shrink metaphor doesn't fly.