[haiku-development] Re: RFC: Packages and the Deskbar menu
- From: John Scipione <jscipione@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: "haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 22 May 2013 06:09:28 -0400
On May 22, 2013, at 3:16 AM, Axel Dörfler <axeld@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Am 22/05/2013 00:39, schrieb John Scipione:
> I see the word "organized" here -- a single list with hundreds of
> applications is not organized.
> Since you don't like categories all that much, it seems like a good idea to
> give you an alternative at hand :-)
Organized does not have to mean categories. A flat list is organized too.
>> Except when they don't... you are seriously going to tell me that
>> Apple and Google have figured out a foolproof categorization system
>> for apps? I find that notion to be arrogant and ignorant.
>
> Who cares if it is foolproof? It cannot be, as the application developers are
> responsible for finding the category (or rather categories) that matter.
> This doesn't really matter, though.
It does matter. Arbitrary categories are worse than none as I'll explain below.
> Hm, have you ever actually used Android, or iOS, or even Windows? Having to
> search for an application out of tens of them is purely annoying. Especially
> if their location may change from time to time (for example, my Android phone
> had a completely random application list after each restart).
You give those platform too little credit, there is wisdom there you are
ignoring. Allowing users to organize apps arbitrarily, prominent search,
showing a few apps at a time, remembering the relative locations.
> A keyboard to search would seriously help, but my phone certainly doesn't
> have one.
Well, it does, a virtual one.
> In Windows, the apps are arbitrarily put into folders, mostly of their
> company's or even distributor's name. Useless.
>
> I really don't see any reason why this should be something to duplicate.
We shouldn't duplicate Windows, we should provide a flat list instead.
> If you search for your application by entering some name, there is no reason
> to keep the categorization intact, anyway, besides presenting the search
> results in a better (!) way.
>
>> We
>> have ways of dealing with a 100 item lists: pagination, scrollbars,
>> and search. Yet there's something very wrong with categories, they're
>> arbitrary, they're confusing, they make it harder to find your
>> applications because they put them in places you don't expect.
>
> Why would you think that every market place out there is using categories?
> Why is music categorized in Rock or R&B or Jazz? Why is everyone trying to
> categorize everything? Is everyone insane?
> Without using categories your brain would be helpless finding the way out of
> your bed in the morning.
>
> Categories pretty much always help you find things, even if they are
> completely arbitrary. You could just put your apps in A-M, N-Z and it would
> still help find you an application faster than having to scroll a hundred
> pages more.
> And as Ingo pointed out, even if they are unintuitive, you'll just have to
> remember that once -- it's not that you have millions of applications
> installed that you can only ever find by searching for it.
You're assuming that applications fall into meaningful genres like music does.
That isn't true. And arbitrary categories are not helpful, they are harmful.
They produce a labyrinth of arbitrary choices that the user MUST navigate each
time. Meaningful categories would be helpful but there are none.
And it isn't a one time cost, arbitrary categories make it harder to find the
app your looking for each and every time. I'll never remember the category some
developer decided on for their app so I pay the price thousands of times.
> Most Linux distributions are using categories to organize their list of
> applications. When they manage to reduce the number of top-level categories
> this works quite well to explore the installed applications.
Most Linux distributions present applications poorly. We should not follow
them. A few do, but only by minimizing categories and instead providing a
paginated list filtered by search.
> And finally, search is only really helpful if it is using additional info,
> not just the name of the application. For example, if I search for
> "calculator", "DeskCalc" should be in the search results. There is no way we
> can do that yet (ie. the app's description should end up in some attribute to
> make that possible).
Search is helpful even if it only searches on a name. Sure, searching apps
could be enhanced by using attributes, but that is another discussion.
>
>>> Oh, and Terminal goes in Utilities, and Magnify goes in Accessories. Easy.
>> Why does Terminal goes in Utilities and Magnify go in Accessories. Why
>> not the reverse? What is a "accessory" anyway? It's just a word you
>> decided to use to categorize something that isn't categorizable.
>
> Well, you came up with those, you could easily merge them together if you
> like, and put "Tools" there as well.
> As I tried to explain above, it doesn't really matter unless you need to find
> the application from millions of unknown entries (like in a market place).
Yes, but Tools is just as arbitrary as the above. It's not a one time cost as
you assert, I'll never be able to remember which category Terminal got stuck in
and I'll have to guess and hunt for it each time. This is a problem for me on
Linux, it simply doesn't work, copying Linux here would be a step backwards
from where we currently stand.
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