

Temporal User Interfaces - bensummers
http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/03/05/temporal-user-interfaces/

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crosvenir
Neat concept, although the organization of items in a temporal fashion is
different from culture to culture. Dr Alice Gaby speaks a little about this in
episode 41 of The BrainScience Podcast
([http://docartemis.com/brainsciencepodcast/2008/07/bs41-alice...](http://docartemis.com/brainsciencepodcast/2008/07/bs41-alicegaby/)).

For instance, given a series of photos of a baby, a young boy, a man, and an
elderly gentleman, Western cultures would normally place these items from left
to right then top to bottom. Chinese cultures might place them from top to
bottom first and Israelis might place them from right to left.

She also speaks of an aboriginal tribe that has no concept of left or right.
Whereas you or I might say, "Would you please pass the salt to your left" they
might say, "Would you please pass the salt north. She speaks of the above
experiment being performed with people from this tribe. Not all, but a
statistically significant number put the temporal or from East to West
(sunrise to sunset).

So while interesting there are always surprising items to consider when
writing your software. Know your user, for he is not thee. ~David Platt

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mbrubeck
The OLPC Sugar UI also uses a "Journal" interface:
[http://www.sugarlabs.org/index.php?template=gallery&page...](http://www.sugarlabs.org/index.php?template=gallery&page=media_05)

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Flankk
Neat idea. If you need something like this, then I don't think you're
organizing your files well enough as it is.

~~~
m_eiman
That's kind of the point - people can't or don't want to organize their stuff
in the way that suits their operating system best. There's definitely room for
usability improvement in this area.

~~~
bensummers
A hierarchical filesystem is an implementation detail, and it's unhelpful to
expose it to the user. It doesn't really match the mental models.

It's interesting to see how the lack of filesystem is handled in the iPad. The
video for iWork where the slides are flicked backwards and forwards (like
pages in the iPhone Safari) doesn't look like it'll scale. Maybe you have to
use a search interface when you get more docs than you can comfortably flick
through?

~~~
joeyo
Yeah, I think filesystems are (inevitably?) converging towards search or some
sort of computer-aided file organization.

I've been meditating a lot on this recently. The way I organize files is in a
current directory for the last N weeks, or for the duration of the last
project or similar. I then batch process it every so often and delete the
files that need deleting and squirrel away the ones that may need referencing
later in an actual hierarchical file system. This way a small number of recent
files are readily available, and I have some hope of finding historical files
later (at the cost of some upfront work).

Anyway, it occurred to me that I really don't enjoy doing this, that my time
is better spent doing other things and that computers are supposed to be good
at boring work like this anyway. Ideally, the computer should be able to help
me "get the files I want" either by placing the files somewhere where I can
later find them myself or by searching and providing them for me when I ask
nicely.

All this leads me to wonder: are there any tag-based filesystems out there?

EDIT: answering my own question after a google search:
<http://code.google.com/p/xtagfs/>

~~~
ThinkWriteMute
Tag based structuring is rather progressive thinking.

People who write/design file systems are neither progressive nor creative.

Don't believe me? Just look at the names :P

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jff
Indicative of the entire philosophy of software development--the newest stuff
is the most important, and things from years ago don't matter (now we can keep
re-inventing the wheel).

~~~
jrp
Well, the visual aging didn't give me that impression.

