[haiku-development] Re: RFC: Packages and the Deskbar menu
- From: Axel Dörfler <axeld@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 22 May 2013 09:16:26 +0200
Am 22/05/2013 00:39, schrieb John Scipione:
I made it up. Okay, maybe categorizing your Deskbar app list is
important to some, but plenty don't care, they just want their
computers to work, they want things to be organized and
understandable. Ingo has limited time, I don't want him wasting it on
something most people don't care about.
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 :-)
Art applications let you draw pictures; photo editing applications let you
edit photos, and so on. The Apple App Store, Android Marketplace and so on
all categorize applications perfectly well.
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.
Would you really expect a single 100-item category called "applications"? Of
course not - stop trying to be different for no good reason.
I'm not trying to be different for no good reason, I'm trying to be
different for very good reason, because the status quo on platforms
that use app categories sucks. What is wrong with a 100 item list?
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).
A keyboard to search would seriously help, but my phone certainly
doesn't have 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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
Bye,
Axel.
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