Mark - It's as beautifully simple and elegant as it is well thought out and explained... I would love such a file manager... but I think its shortcomings lie in who you and I are... you and I are both extremely technically literate people with a natural intuition about working within any computing environment be they graphical or CLI... any system that gets plopped down in front of us, we'll develop a natural comfortability and understanding of the paradigm of interaction with that environment... Unfortunately, most computer users are not like this... To us such a solution is extremely simple and elegant in that there are only a handful of fixed rules of interaction (DnD, Context Menus, etc.)... but computer users who are not wired like you and me need visual choices of what to do... this is why most users are terrified and confused by the CLI; there's no visual option of what to do except the blinking cursor indicating you should type something... these users need the visual presence of back, up, forward, home, location bar, etc. to make it clear that these are among the options of what they can do... you and I might say it's quite obvious that these choices are in the context menu or they are irrelevant within this paradigm, but the context menu is hidden until summoned and technically illiterate people don't operate on an abstract enough level to adopt paradigms... Feel free to differ... maybe I'm just spouting some deeply held misconceptions within the school of UI design... but regardless your solution is beautiful, elegant, and simple... we should all be so lucky... -jag On Tue, 2003-02-18 at 14:20, MArk Finlay wrote: > I've been trying to work out in my head how to make a truly simple > object oriented file manager for a while now. And while I am most likely > totally wrong this is what I have come up with: > > http://evolvedoo.sourceforge.net/oo-file-manager.html > > Thought some people on desktop-devel and nautilus-list might be > interested. If this design is good for nothing else, it might inspire > some intesting discussion. -- --------------------------------------------------------- Joshua Adam Ginsberg Cellphone: 970.749.8530 Rice University '02 Email: joshg myrealbox com St. Mark's School of Texas '98 -_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_- "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin ---------------------------------------------------------
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