bumptop
This looks very cool — someone please keep it away from Steve Jobs’ sight because it all certainly makes for a cool demo — but I would imagine in practice this user interface would just be another fancy way for users to crud up their desktops.
I treat my desktop like a shelf. Life for files on my desktop is nasty, brutish and short — as far as I’m concerned, the desktop is an exceptionally temporary place to plunk what I’m currently working on, work on it, and after that, I group all the assets together in one semi-intelligently named folder and file it in the “Documents” folder of my home directory. This technique works pretty well — other people work in other ways, as evidenced by their perpetually crunked up desktops, but certainly metadata search like Spotlight* or trigger launchers like Quicksilver in Mac OS X or Deskbar in Gnome or Launchy in Windows make the “file janitor” paradigm of projects like this largely obsolete. Cool mouse gestures though.
~jeff
* check this out — it makes Spotlight genuinely useable. I curse the lame-ass, totally broken “live update” of the Mac OS X Spotlight search window, I curse it, I curse it, I curse it.
June 22nd, 2006 at 12:56 pm
Yes! That’s exactly how I operate, as well. I wish more people did likewise.
June 22nd, 2006 at 6:03 pm
I’m the same way… especially at work… I do a whole ton of sql work daily, and I save all my files to my desktop… if, by the end of the week, that shit isn’t in SVN for some reason or another, I toss everything on my desktop. People who leave icons, and files all over their desktops drive me nuts.
June 23rd, 2006 at 10:59 am
Yes, a beautiful demo, but it looks completely unusable in real life — I mean, a pile of documents, all with the same Adobe PDF icon? Which is which? Where are the file titles?
Even with the demo-happy Dock, which is useless for documents for the same reason, shows the file name when mousing over.
June 23rd, 2006 at 3:55 pm
Watch out for the next Mac OS X 10.5 evolution, goatse desktop switching:
http://www.necroglide.com