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Shuttleworth's Take On GNOME 3.0, Coordination with Debian
suka writes "In a fresh interview with derStandard.at, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth talks about GNOME 3.0 — its strengths, but also about what he thinks is missing. He also mentions ongoing talks for a common meta-release-cycle with Debian which could delay the next LTS."
Or you could be less elitist and realise that we're far beyond having to manually file things in this day and age, indeed that is something the computer was meant to eradicate.
A tagged document repository (with versioning history) would be best. Coupled with desktop search and changing the system file open window to be one that lets you use said search and tags to find the file instead of clicking through folders. Most files people want are more recent, so a default view of reverse chronological for the filetypes the application supports would be best.
You do, of course, still need a traditional filesystem view of this repository, and that is probably where the work will go in. Sure, tags could be folders, and you could have multiple ways of drilling down to the same file. You'd probably have a folder hierarchy that shows the most used tags at the highest level, then each subfolder is really a tag filter.
The KDE 4.0 release was a total management cock up from start to finish but it did have some positive sides. If they hadn't released it as 4.0 a lot of people wouldn't have tried it out and therefore they wouldn't have found as many issues as they did. They certainly should have worked more closely with the main KDE distributions to make it clear to end users they 4.0 was going to be a dog. With hindsight I think it would have been better to have held off on 4.0 until it was 4.1 quality. That way they would have got most of the user testing but without so much of the "I want to stab you in the eyes for making me ruin my machine".
I don't hold out much hope for Gnome bringing great new things to the party. I try it out every now and then but it just doesn't do it for me in the same way that KDE does. All the Gnome LAFs look terribly dated dumbed down. While I don't spend my days admiring the widgets used in my applications I prefer to look at something that is pleasing to the eye just like I would rather the view from my house was green fields rather than a rubbish dump.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Sounds great to me - obviously you wouldn't call it that though!
Consider gmail "labels" vs traditional email/imap folders - labels are both easier to use for novices and more flexible for capable users.
YMMV, as ever.
people pick up a .0 release and are surprised its not as polished and featureful as a .5? WTF?
The kde4.0 snafu really highlighted a problem in ubuntu->KDE communication, other distros got that kde4.0 would be rough around the edges and at least offered kde3.5or shipped their 4.0 with a lot of patches ect. I tend to follow kde developement from afar and I've always know that kde4.3 is the first kde4 that is end user ready.
No, distribution packagers decided KDE 4.0 was good enough to include in their releases so it got sent out to a lot of people. I don't know if you tried 4.0, but I did. It was horrible. Saying, "it was not as polished and featureful," does not describe what happened with 4.0. KDE 4.0 was a huge, massive step backwards in functionality that should never have been considered for release. It was barely alpha-grade software at release time. It still contains idiotic major achitectural mistakes (like what amounts to an entirely new, and needlessly separate windowing system for the Plasma widgets) and requires a major reorganization to what goes where (I can never find the right submenu / screen to make adjustments because they're split over too many unrelated interfaces).
Blaming the users is shortsighted. Blaming the distro packagers makes some sense. But placing blame on the KDE team for the total cockup that was 4.0 is putting it where it is due. KDE4 is inching toward consistency and usability, but what we have NOW is what should have been the original release -- ignoring the massive mistakes in the redesign that remain deeply baked into Plasma.
The message here is simple: if you're going to radically redesign a product with a large user base, don't release the replacement until it's in much better condition than for minimal changes. With 4.0 and the introduction of Plasma, the KDE team should have (beyond being struck repeatedly with a two-by-four for being frelling nincompoops) skipped a release cycle in order to get things into better shape.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
you might enjoy this article (or perhaps you've already read it?): http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/wolfram-alpha-and-hubristic-user.html
I know I did.
I use that version on OS X, thanks to Fink project. While they don't promise any kind of 'final' version at this state, I can easily keep KDE 4 applications in my OS X Dock, using them instead of iTunes for example.
They are linked to actual OS X frameworks, down to Quicktime and very interestingly they use far less CPU and resources than regular OS X apps.
There are similar reports from Windows users who binary installed it and using Amarok 2 etc. right now. While on it, is there any reason why KDE 3.5 given up when KDE 4 installed? I keep using KDE 3.5 suite on OS X too. It doesn't conflict with anything at all including KDE 4.
I think what KDE 4 is and what a huge revolution it is will be understood in 1-2 years. For example when Nokia and other members of open source Symbian foundation starts using it in some form in their smart phones.
Arguably a Unix filesystem already is a tagged repository.
..)
In Unix-y filesystems, you don't put files in folders. You put files in the filesystem, where they get a number (inode number). Then you can set up other special files (directories) to act as indices, linking names to the inode number - as many as you want. Voila - nest-able tags (albeit not versioned in most filesystems.)
(Actually, if Unix hadn't insisted on banning '/' and NUL from filenames, a directory could in fact link arbitrary binary data to inode numbers. Bit of a missed opportunity there
Wouldn't surprise me if it goes back to xerox alto.
That doesn't mean that it's ultimately helpful, but it's so entrenched it seems harder tho change it than to fix it.
In any case, word excel and powerpoint documents can contain multiple sheets of paper, and I see a lot of people take that to extremes - for example having all the day's letters contained in one word document, or every single spreadsheet they work on in one excel document.
During the late 80s/early 90s I worked for a firm that had a satellite office with a single PC which was running Wordpress on DOS. The secretary there had a single document containing every single letter she had typed over the past three years. She typed letters for an office of 15 engineers and regularly wrote several every day.
Worse still, when she opened it (fortunately just the once per day) she would press the down cursor key repeatedly until she got to the last line. She spent approximately half an hour doing this I asked her how she found an old letter to check, and she replied it would be in the filing cabinet behind her. No matter ho many times I tried to show her how to use individual files, she went back to this single document. I once discovered we had no backup of this single file (it was saved outside of the document directory) and I still have the occasional nightmares about it.
What's it with this "i am too stupid to put a file in a folder, and therefore it is too difficult" "philosophy"?
I have tested every single one of those "automatic" and "intelligent" file management methods, and they always resulted in massive chaos, that was never the case with simple file systems and soft links. The problem was, that you could never be sure if a file was completely gone, in what "folders/categories/tags/whatevers" is still existed, sometimes moving files was a major hassle, and sometimes it was completely impossible to organize the files in they way I wanted (and always did with normal files and folders), because those "intelligent" methods were way to stupid, simple, and yet overly complicated. Or in other words: They had the elegance of a hillbilly Godzilla in high heels, stumbling down a red carpet at the Oscars.
If you want to make it actually better, create an ontology. Make it a semantic system. Just let it be elegant, clean and efficient at the core. And then add a properly fitting new UI concept to it, that completely throws the old models and analog-analogies away.
Then you will get a system that makes sense.
I still wait for someone doing such an ontology right.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
The pathetic thing is that I've never had trouble with it because I go to the website and read the Pulseaudio/Perfectsetup document. It's too bad none of the distribution or even package maintainers seem to want to read it, ESPECIALLY Ubuntu which does things WRONG, WRONG, WRONG.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"