| Wednesday, September 27, 2006 |
12:47 - Labor-creating devices
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0ODskdEPnQ
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Sam M. sends this video of a live demo of that "Piles" metaphor we've been hearing about since about when people said it was going to be a great new feature in Panther. (Remember that?)
The idea is that with a pen/stylus and a little bit of mental indulgence, you can turn the virtual desktop space into a collection of tangible objects with real physical properties like mass, inertia, relative size and orientation, and the ability to be swept up into neat and tidy piles—or sprawling messy piles, depending on what you want.
Neat idea (and clearly done by Mac-heads, judging by the prevalence of QuickTime files and other UI intangibles like the "fisheeye" browse effect); but what I kept thinking while watching was that while this might be a cool addition to your normal navigation paradigm, or even the primary one in which you might choose to operate on a daily basis, there's still no case to be made that this is a better way to organize your stuff than a hierarchy of files and folders that alphabetize themselves for you. It's great to come up with a desktop metaphor that mirrors your own physical desktop, on the assumption that the way your desk normally looks is the way you like your desk to look; but that doesn't mean we don't constantly nag ourselves to clean up our desks and put things into the file cabinet in neat folders where we can find them later.
If this were my desktop, and there were some other items in the workspace like an application launcher and a file cabinet into which I could send files I don't want on my desktop anymore (which would take be into a representation of the tried-and-true filesystem hierarchy), this could really be something.
It's certainly a lot better than all those well-intentioned but ill-grounded proposals to replace the desktop metaphor entirely with one that clashes head-on with the way the human mind wants to work, like the "time stream" one. The desktop works; otherwise we would have come up with something better in the past twenty years. But the desktop can always be improved.
As long as it doesn't end up creating more work for me than I had before I sat down at the computer...
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Brian Tiemann
