

Should UIs be document- or stream- centric? - raganwald
http://bryceharrington.org/drupal/docs_vs_streams

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teamonkey
>I wonder how non-technical people not knowledgeable about crontab and
scripting deal with such things?

I don't know without knowing the contents of his crontab. I can't honestly
think how using cron could help you become more stream-centric. I suspect he's
using the wrong tool for the job.

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swombat
This is either genius or completely stupid. I can't decide. I'm erring for the
former.

Probably this article tells the truth, but not the whole truth.

~~~
ynd
I think the problem with his theory is that he is thinking of the desktop as a
single entity. He thinks the _desktop_ should evolve to support streams
better. That's a mistake.

The desktop is just a bunch of applications co-existing. Some programs have a
document-centric interface because they deal with documents. Others have
evolved an interface suited to the streams they deal with. MSN, IRC, RSS
aggregators come to mind. I don't think there's more to it.

I agree that people are using streams more than before but I'm not sure of the
implications of this fact.

~~~
bsaunder
I think it's less about people using streams more (though I think that is
true) and more a representation of what is happening to information.

In the document (or batch) mode of interaction, you have full knowledge of
some set of content. In stream mode, you only know what's happening right now
in the stream and what has happened in the past. You don't know what you don't
know. Traditional web form submission seems very document/batch oriented. The
RIAs being developed are more stream like.

I think there are some fundamental information concepts going on here. We've
been treating information like it's a static set, but in reality it's more
like a continuous movement of data. At any split second in time, there may be
a static representation for some information. It's almost as though every
transaction in a relational database is like a single frame in a 3D game. I
think this will get more and more stream like and continuous as our systems
develop with greater distributed concepts like the semantic web.

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mojuba
This is intriguing. There is clearly a slow paradigm shift happening that
makes Windows/Office less relevant and UNIX-like environments more and more
relevant for end users. His terminology wasn't very convincing to me though
(documents vs. streams) but that's just details.

I'd rather call it socialization of desktop computers, because the stream of
emails, chats, feeds etc that are becoming increasingly important to us is a
result of various kinds of virtual social networks we build.

So, if there's a niche for a killer socialization application, what would it
look like? I'd imagine, as a random thought, a nice desktop front-end for the
_syslog_ , that shows all interesting events happening in the system: new
emails, feed updates, software updates, stock market alerts, calendar/todo
events etc. The user presumably uses this applet even more often than the FS
shell, as objects the user is interested in are mostly opened through the
syslog.

~~~
thwarted
It's always been faster to write (or modify slightly) an SQL query to give the
necessary results than to export the data to comma delimited, import it into
Excel, and create a pivot table just so you can click around on it.

When all you have is Excel, everything looks like a spreadsheet (even
databases).

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aaronblohowiak
The OS has 'pipe'

STDIN, STDOUT and STDERR

learnings from the nix

