Re: "Stacks"

Jollino wrote:
In article <Z64Wi.728$zb3.150@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx!nnrp1.uunet.ca>,
Clever Monkey <spamtrap@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I never found this of much use, but it appears that many other people did.

I keep /Users/myhome and /Applications there, for quick access; sometimes if I'm working on a (photo or video) project for a few days I will keep a shortcut for the working directory there too.

I just use the Finder sidebar. I figure if I'm going to make gesture to open a Finder view, I may as well have easy access to all the top-level directories I may be interested in (i.e., home, music, pictures, dev tools). In this manner, the stacks paradigm is actually more useful for me, but only for relatively flat folders like /Applications.

I never understood putting /Applications on the Dock, though I see other folks doing it (and, for the record, my SO does this, and has found that Stacks is a better system than a simple folder of apps for her). It is about as useful as the Windows Start button to me. I keep the currently most important apps on the Dock since I rarely need daily access to more than a handful, and most of those are running all the time anyway. If I need an app it is a simple gesture to invoke it from SpotLight.

If an app becomes more important I'll leave it on the Dock, and if I don't use another for awhile I'll drop it off the Dock. Current projects and work go into flat folders on the Desktop, unless I'm working with a specific app that manages content, and then I let the app do its thing; perhaps creating a smart folder if I need to see specific aspects of that work.

I guess we all get used to the gestures we make in the UI.

Folders are (to me) just directories, and I only care about directories when I'm in a POSIX shell.

Do you have a single folder called "Everything" and put everything there? ;)

No, but I have SpotLight and smart folders that slice across those folders for me. I want the computer to collect the data for me, not for me to go hunting for it.

Heck, even apps like iTunes and Lightroom are special purpose apps that happen to act as asset management tools so one doesn't have to crawl through subfolders looking for something. My computer has two fast CPUs in it that mostly sit idle. They should bloody well do the work of finding data for me!

Like I said, if I'm going to hunt for it, I can navigate using the Terminal faster than clicking though subfolders.

The paradigm that works best for me is slicing across your dataset to create views of the exact stuff you want.

I'm personally still quite fond of directories/folders, and can't get into that mindset. The first thing I did after installing Leopard was getting rid of the "search" things in the left pane of the new Finder. I suppose that directories give me some sense of safety, as I tend to consider them (wrongly, I know) more "hardcoded" -- if that makes any sense -- than a database view. Also, the concept of directory is common to most operating system, and that's quite handy when working with different machines at the same time, or simply when moving things from one to another. (I haven't tried whether one can somehow access a "search view" through FTP, perhaps by means of an OS wrapper or whatever; but in the meantime I'll personally keep using folders. ;)

Well, the writing is on the wall.

Filesystems based on a tree of directories do not scale well, are easy to corrupt and offer less ideal ways of handling arbitrary metadata. Worse, there is often a time/space trade-off that really kicks in once we start talking about terabytes.

Even if the directory paradigm is supported in the future, it will probably be a view into a more cohesive and normalized dataset. What we gain in flexibility (user-defined metadata, filesystem level tagging and searching, bit-error detection and correction, &etc.) is just a win that gets better as disks get bigger (and no safer at the hardware level -- bit errors, even if they stay the same, will mean larger drives will be guaranteed to have undetected [in most current filesystems] bit-level errors).

Heck, right now a Finder view showing a filename and an icon is still an abstraction. Unless you inspect the filesystem with the right tools, you don't really know what that filename represents. That is, it is not quite the concrete representation of a "file" that we think it is.

Anyway, completely off-topic, I know. I just think its interesting what bugs folks about Leopard. For me this has been the best release ever. Even the stuff I don't care about (i.e., Stacks) has added something that I'm more likely to use than before.
--
clvrmnky <mailto:spamtrap@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Direct replies will be blacklisted. Replace "spamtrap" with my name to
contact me directly.
.