Re: [Usability] Automagic cleanup of home folder

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Fri, 2004-01-23 at 10:35 +0100, Maarten Menheere wrote:
> Usually when working on something I make a new folder for it an put the
> files there. In that folder after working on something for a while I get
> a lot of old cruft I don't need. I then make an Old folder and put al
> the garbage that could still potatialy have information I need in there.
> 
> My point is after working on something for a while things start to get
> messy. You don't even wan to see the My Documents folder of my parents
> XP box. I have probably given up on organising that one.
> 
> As disk start bigger the need to delete stuff gets less important (not
> talking about video but ordinary files) I think its a good idea to just
> magicaly let files slip under the waterline after a sertain time. That
> way you never have to delete anything and you only see what is current
> in the Gui view of the filesystem.  

No.  no no no.  No.  It is quite common to have documents around you
rarely (if ever) edit, but yet need to read.  We have tons of examples
of this at my work (transcriptions and minutes of old board meetings),
and even at home you see examples like people keeping notes and such.  I
have a document on my disk now that's almost a year old, but I've never
edited it (it's a PDF - I don't even have software to edit it, easily at
least) that I open up for printing every couple weeks.  (It's a form.)

Users need to organize their files.  That's their problem for being
sloppy, just as if they left piles of paper on their real desk.

A metadata system would also get around this, as users could search for
all word processor documents less than a month old that contain the
topic cheese, or whatever.

Simply hiding files from view (and thus likely making the user think
they're gone) is *definitely* the wrong answer.

> 
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-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.