[openbeos] Re: A very interesting 3D desktop prototype...

Miguel Zúñiga escribió:
It looks very sophisticated at the beginning, but after a 3-second-thought, it would be extremately difficult to the desktop user to use all that huge bunch of "techniques" in order to just manage files.
In everyday life round here, final users are not as skilled with the mouse as you, experienced programmers, graphical masters, Web CEO's, etc. I know many secretaries that, because they cannot use adequately a mouse, they ask and learn the desktop shortcuts, so they are on their real world typing the way they know, and they do it very quickly. I suppouse drag and drop is not implemented in Windows systems because of this. No "average user" in my everyday life would imagine, i know it, that if they drop a document file into the printer icon, it will print it. No one.
This sounds weird, what could be more intuitive than dropping, let's say, a file to a printer? It's like saying "Hey printer, I want this printed ASAP" ;-) Now serious, I never imagined someone having problems with drag & drop, guess we all (power users) have a lot to lear yet :-(
Of course it looks fancy, but in my experience, normal 2D files and folders are just being learnt by users, and new users prefer to have their files into just one location. Some of them don't even trust in the "My Documents" shortcut, and save their files into a folder named after them in the root of the disk.
Don't even "trust"? In what sense one folder is more "trustable" than another one? Honestly, I don't get the point.
Screams have been heard when this video was shown to just a few ot this "model secretaries". One said "how would i find a file withing a pile? If sometimes the icons overlap and i separate them" (by hand, let me say it) and another said "and how many "mouse turns" should i do to make the files go wherever they like?" To them, it looked like an Adobe Photoshop or an Autodesk AutoCAD demo: pretty amazing but pretty difficult to manage with that neat and skillfulness. Then, the normal comment: "I don't see that we change all the PC's we have to implement that. We are safe". And the final question was "Would it be switched off, like the XP theme?"
Hahaha, same here. It looks great but, IMHO, I'd be wasting time and patience with such an interface.
I vote for the Be search way. I write what i look for, and in a flash i get it. It would be great in the real world to find stuff this fast, and it is fantastic in the media OS.
Miguel Zúñiga González
No doubt, long live to search. Hope we have metadata searches soon enough in Haiku ;-)

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