> A friend sent this to me and I found it very interesting:
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0ODskdEPnQ
>
> Obviously this is not something Haiku would even consider until R2,
> but I have to admit it seems pretty slick and intuitive.
I saw the video, and it makes a *great* demo.
IMO, though, that's all it can be is a really cool demo, because of how
much it duplicates a metaphor. Metaphors (like the desktop) are a way
to relate the familiar to someone unfamiliar quickly. They are good so
long as they are useful, but at some point, they break down. While it
does give the user choice in how to organize files, it still forces the
user to do it somehow. Not only that, some of the features that they've
implemented (like different ways of stacking items in the pile) are
implementations of what would be a Real Life hack. I'm not personally a
person to organize by piles, but, unless I miss my guess, it would be
for keeping certain items of a group within that group while also
making it stand out by another means. There are better ways of doing
this.
I guess it seems to me that by following the desktop metaphor so
closely, they seem to have made something which doesn't have to be
difficult more complicated than before. The secretary at the school
where I work literally has hundreds and hundreds of files, most of them
stored in My Documents hierarchy or on the desktop. Now imagine if they
were all in that workspace in the window and you want to find one file
in particular. Even with the different sorting and organizing features
that they showed, it would still take much longer to find something
than with what is currently in place with the whole My Documents thing.
--DarkWyrm
