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3D File Manager on Linux Wins NSF Prize
MadFarmAnimalz writes "Science Magazine's reporting on the results of the NSF's Science and Engineering Visualisation Challenge and the first prize in the Illustrations category has been claimed by the Innolab 3D File Manager, which was developed on linux. Apparently this involves arranging data in a ferris wheel type structure." The data is arranged by its relationship with its content, rather than by its physical position on a hard drive or its file system.
/: bin boot cdrom dev devs etc floppy home initrd lib lost+found media mnt music opt proc root sbin tmp usr var vmdebian vmlinux vmlinux26 /bin:
arch
bash
cat
chgrp
chmod
chown
cp
cpio
csh
date
dd
df
dir
dmesg
dnsdomainname
echo
ed
egrepe--
false
fgconsole
fgrep
fuser
grep
gunzip
gzexe
gzip
hostname
kill
ksh
ln
loadkeys
login
ls
lspci
mkdir
mknod
mktemp
more
mount
mt
mt-gnu
mv
nc
netcat
netstat
pidof
ping
ps
pwd
rbash
readlink
rm
rmdir
run-parts
rzsh
sed
setserial
sh
sleep
stty
su
sync
tar
tcsh
tempfile
touch
true
umount
uname
uncompress
vdir
zcat
zcmp
zdiff
zegrep
zfgrep
zforce
zgrep
zless
zmore
znew
zsh
zsh4
And the list goes on. One HELL of a ferris wheel.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Does this mean that you have to wait for your files to get back down to the bottom to be able to read them???
No, I didn't RTFA, and I'm sure I'll get modded Offtopic, but the thought occurs to me:
Why are we, the free software community, busting ass to integrate pseudo-3d technologies to the desktop (AA-fonts, SVG-icons, real alpha blending), while it seems obvious that the next step is going to be a fully 3d-enabled desktop, with 3d icons placed in the current 2d-metaphor? Already new computers with new accellerators can push so many polys that the overhead is not measurable by users.
Browsing your pr0n collection will never be what it used to be again.
No GNU has been Hurd during the making of this comment.
This looks really cool. Anyone know if it can be downloaded so we can take it for a test drive? Please post a download link if you have one. The article doesn't provide any links except to a static image of how the program visually organizes the files.
Rather than having a software layer which groups files by content rather than tree structure, why not impliment a SQL type of system to access ReiserFS after all it is a database underneeth.
Doing this through the filesystem strikes me as alot more efficient than a quick hack of a filemanager.
Even Microsoft are working on a file system based
There is no god
I'd have enough trouble interpreting that render (in the article) if it were made of real objects floating in front of me, but a 2D projection of it would just be hell.
It seems to me that the claim they make about the relationships not being displayable in 2D is false; the parent/child relationships are easy, and we've already got that sorted. The "related by some arbitrary, unspecified characteristic" (grey and yellow folders) can be represented by another pane in the 2D browser for "Things that are related to this elsewhere", which Windows XP already does for lots of its "special folders" as a substitute for actually putting them in a sensible heirarchy in the first place.
Some people have wondered in the past "What happened to the 3-D GUIs that were promised to us in the past from movies like 'Jurassic Park'?" Well, here it is. But really, what are the advantages of this system that cannot be offered by a 2-D GUI? It's really cool and all, but don't you think this would be a slight waste of CPU or GPU power?
10 Bits= $.25
100 Bits= $.50
110 Bits= $.75
1000 Bits= 1 byte
...They use 3D file system technology like this to run big theme parks. I know for a fact they use something similar to this over at Jurassic Park. :)
:q!
If you are on OS X and would like to sample 3D navigation of disk drive content, there is a nice free project that does this, aptly named 3DOSX.
It uses Open GL to make the file system into 3D rotatable platters, and the platters are linked together. Can swim around the platters looking at the different documents.
Some screenshots are here:
3DOSX Screenshots
The project homepage is here:
3DOSX Homepage
It is an interesting look into alternative ways of doing things.
-----
Cast a Cold Eye
On Life, on Death
Horseman, pass by
--W.B. Yeats' gravestone
No GNU has been Hurd during the making of this comment.
When it is an opensource product , it is bad manners not to give a bittorent link with a story posting. while Ican't do that either , here is an actual download page ... Kinda slow
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
This is more pretty-printing than real innovation. They claim to arrange data by relation but the thing still knows active folders, parent folders and subfolders. And the color scheme (subfolders are blue) focuses on the hierarchical structure of the folders and not the relation of the data. So they took one way of organizing and presenting files that works for most people most of the time but has a few big shortcomings, pretty-printed it in a somewhat confusing way and added relational sugar that can only add to the confusion.
Pretty, but not impressive.
Wait a minute.. Where are screenshots? How about a link to the project? I remember reading about 3D interfaces, getting excited, then seeing them and thinking 'oh crud'. I'd like to see the 'award winning' one, please.
Screenshots for above project are here:
Updated screenshots link
One problem with this type of arrangement is that it requires thoughtful meta-description of all content (which scientists do but PHBs don't). What you have an interesting way of representing "degrees of separation", not a "triumph of Linux on the Desktop." The challenge ( http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/events/sevc/overview.htm ) was:
"This new international contest is designed to recognize outstanding achievements by scientists and engineers in the use of visual media to promote understanding of research results."
So for the visual representation of linked data structure, sure this looks great. As a GUI, heck no. "File Manager" seems like a misnomer here.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
i want to give this a go, can i download it , no links to official site or anything
In Mac OS X you can set the dock to magnify the programs your mouse is over.
:-) The fact that list view has been here for so long should say something. People like lists where everything looks the same. Having things pop up from unreadable sizes out of nowhere seems a little unnatural.
This is how I am guessing this new 3D navigation works, by magnifying as you move around.
I turned my dock's magnification off.
I am inclined to say that the revolutionary idea that will change how we look at our computer desktop has not yet come.
tilTrue.info contechtext.info prettypowerful.info twitter.com/frets fb.com/prosody
How is this easier to use than this?
I'm already storing data by topic. I use a concept commonly called "directories". For example, all my pr0n is held in the ~/pr0n directory all my tunes are held in the ~/Tunes directory and all my pictures are held in the ~/Pictures directory.
I haven't looked at data based on physical location in eons. I used to read data sector by sector off floppy drives. Yeah, that did suck. Data wasn't necessarily organized by topic. But since the advent of filesystems, I've been able to organize by topic through use of these so-called "directories".
Does this look like a souped up ring interface from the classic Secret of Mana published by Square-Enix (nee Square)?
It does to me...
i don't see the big hubbub... this is an illustration prize. no one said this is a useful or even remotely useable filemanager. The screen snapshot the team submitted from the program is "visually striking," says panel of judges member Boyce Rensberger. the judging was on how their screenshot looked as far as i can tell. the runners up were a watercolor painting of a macrophage and the cover of a book. whoopee, a pretty filemanager.
I run OpenBox to avoid the overhead of KDE or GNOME, as well as for its better interface.
If a 3d interface is begun, it won't be an openbox/blackbox style system in which one can quickly and easily do what's needed after learning the controls. It will be a feature-barren, "dumbed down" interface like KDE or GNOME that for all intents an purposes is designed to look like winshit.
I have nothing against KDE and GNOME, they show how beautiful X can be and help entice new users. We already have 3d in the sense of virtual desktops, and 3d graphics are irrelevant in comparison.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
3Dwm is the most promising to really alterate our human-computer interaction.
Less is more !
Very interesting. But I think that 3D OS management apps peaked with that mod where you could kill your processes by shooting them in Doom. Nothing since has even close...
Rolodex.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
-kgj
It seemed to draw massive CPU, but here it is. Note that the reason it wasn't so responsive was because I was compiling openoffice-ximian in the background. And I was running the XFree nvidia driver, instead of their proprietary... Maybe you'll have better luck.
/ in nolab/3dfm-1.0.tar.gz
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http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/opsys/linux/sf/subcat/in
Credits to: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=78355&cid=695
Yes....
The data is arranged by its relationship with its content, rather than by its physical position on a hard drive or its file system.
Well...
*****DUH!!*****
Please, dont mod this up..ppl get so aggravated
One of the few 3d interfaces I love to use is the Homeworld / Homeworld2 interface for rotating and zooming in space.
The build & research manager in Homeworld is 2d though.
For most types of data representations the 2d tree interface is ideal. Maybe we are far too used to it; we don't now really see what we can do with a 3d interface that we can't do just as efficiently as in 2d. Even in a lot of movies 3d is just an enhanced use of 2d displays.
What we do most is deal with text. Text is very typically a 2d thing because its on paper or a representation of paper (slashdot textarea box). Text in 3d space... doesnt make sense. We'd have to learn a language of 3d space to understand references. Once we learn such a language it might be extremely efficient though, I guess time will tell.
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
Hee hee hee, they're playing right into my hands. Now to contact my lawyers and have them finish my patent for filesystems based on carnival rides. I just need to figure out how to initiate the shutdown process using less than ten balls...
fsv.sourceforge.net Almost identical program, but open-source and for Linux. Now if only there was a way to run apps with it...
My Systems
Data has to first be organized in a meaningful way; how it is displayed -- 3D, 2D, a list, ... -- is output not content. Get angry; In 0.21 seconds Google! can find just about anything on the planet, yet the local network or the computer in front of you may take hours of effort and asking people to pull out the one important detail you need at the moment. Personally, I've spent months attempting to get basic documentation on systems I'm working on...not because it doesn't exist, but because nobody knows where it is!
Here are five ways to organize and retrieve data using computers;
Right now, file systems are handled by manual and basic search tools. (Minor frustration: Why doesn't Windows by default have something like the unix-style 'find -amin or -cmin'? Is it the tools or the file system?)
The next step should be system-wide VFolders and unlimited Ad-hoc queries. To be truely valuable, the results should show up as real and potentially persistant objects not as fake tool-specific or GUI-only results.
Unfortunately, in the name of 'ease of use' the Automatic structure that is tool-specific will probably become dominate in both Windows and MacOS...leading to more data being ignored and eventually lost.
Gnome and KDE developers are moving in the right direction with virtual file systems (VFS, ioslave) though the device concept is specific to the UI or the supporting libraries and has no reality at the file or device level.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
The "amusement park" interface metaphor could really be taken places if you start expaning your thinking! Why not a "log flume" like interface? Or themed versions, like "Pirates of the Carribean"? Or for true filesystem navigation thrills, roller-coaster interfaces: the Revolution! Shockwave! The Viper! Superman Ultimate Flight!
Tweet, tweet.
Here's a demo.
As my cthonic(yet loving) wife often tells me, "Hey, -widgetx- is in the null-space accessed through a shimmering rift next to the Nth pan-dimensional eddy across from the lobed nodulus of Quron."
I should be used to such amphormous replies but even with those concise instructions I'm as visually imparied by the wonderous layering of semi-solid and even obdurite objects in a visual world as any meat-monkey. Worse yet, unless there's some squirt of delicious abject horror from the object once I've cast my withering stare upon it, how am I going to pick it out of the mess? How would visualizing my otherwise concise access to stupid digital objects make my life easier? Intuitively I know the answer, it won't. Most computer users look at the whole visual 3d-paradigm file-system as the close cousin to "AI" that it is. I applaud such wise beings.
Why anyone would want to visit some visual strucutre cluttered with the noise of everything including their target when they're looking for something like a script, "userthwack.pl", that's easily found by typing
userth[TAB]
in the appropriate folder at the command-line eludes me. Even the seething greed masters of Microsoft have begun their quest to sieze the glory of tab completion. What the image in the article reminds me of is an interface in some filthy Microsoft development package that presented circular tree diagrams that you could grab and sworl around. It was fun, but ultimately useless.
Humanity is just smart enough to know when something works and stupid enough to think they need to twist that into something "visual" when it shouldn't be. The command-line requires the user to bring something to the table, namely a brain and some knowledge on how to use the available tools. We need to appreciate and value the knowledge we have as users and we should rail against anyone or anything determined to make us nothing more than button-monkeys. Yes, most of userspace is populated by eye-cattle button-monkeys, but that doesn't mean I want to be treated like that.
When the machines are sophisticated enough to perform complex bio-electro-chemical analysis combined with adaptive filters that genetically shape their responses to the user in some kind of B.F.Skinner "wet-dream" of a causal negative-feedback loop associativity so that as a user approaches the machine the computer can seamlesly deliver exactly what the user wants (Porn, online-store, report a thought-criminal,share something) to do then a visual file-system is exactly what we should have.
Until that day, the intelligent computer user will enjoy the command-line and fall-back to a GUI when it's the only offered means, and the veal will let their corporate masters mold and shape them into the banner-add pop-up eye-cattle button-monkeys they deserve to be.
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
Don't bring E17 here - it won't be finished before Hurd is done.
Less is more !
then we could use a three-dimensional interface.
The point of 2D is that you can see all of your viewing area at once, without stuff getting in the way, and you can interact with anything in your view, again without stuff getting in the way.
There's a reason we play two-dimensional board games, and things like 3D Chess end up being simply awkward novelties.
As 3D beings, we would have less control over a 3D system than we do over a 2D one.
And then we come to this piece of crap interface which is getting an award for some reason. They could have put lists of "related files" (not like those are going to be useful; who ever navigated by the "What's Related" menu in Netscape anyway?) in a 2D list, and it would have been more functional than this big huge ferris wheel displayed on a 2D screen where most of the things end up being so far away that they're a couple of pixels in area.
An interface in the physical meaning (the surface that divides two regions of space with different properties) can't possibly be 3D. An interface in the computer meaning, one between human space and information space, shouldn't be 3D either.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
You can download the source code from http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/opsys/linux/sf/subcat/in/in nolab/3dfm-1.0.tar.gz
Be aware that there are some library checks left out of the configure.ac that will prevent ./configure from finding all the library dependencies. To fix this, add the following lines in configure.ac in the library check section, to wit:
Then run "autoconf" to update the ./configure, and proceed as usual.