Re: Some thoughts on hiding the file system, (and an OS X anecdote)

[Marco Pesenti Gritti <marco gnome org>]

On Mon, 2004-12-13 at 07:07 -0500, Carl Worth wrote:
> On Sun, 12 Dec 2004 12:01:21 -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > > The Unix file system isn't a design implementation that shouldn't be
> > > exposed, its an inherent and deeply ingrained design choice that cannot
> > > entirely be eliminated from the UI without a massive amount of pain.
> > > Even MacOS exposes some of the nature of the file system. 
> > 
> > But OS X also does exactly what I am advocating ;-)
> 
> And I think the hiding in OS X already causes confusion, and as such is
> not an ideal model for emulation.
> 
> Here's an actual experience that occurred last night. My wife
> (non-"technical" user of OS X), was burning a CD of photos for my
> sister. I had some of the photos she wanted on my (Linux) laptop so I
> (being the nefarious shell-user of this thread) did the following:
> 
> 	rsync -avz photos herlaptop:/tmp
> 

Hi Carl,

I think we should look at the task of sharing files as a whole here. All
that was needed here from a desktop user perspective was to drag the
photos a "Public" folder on the desktop or to hit a send to button or
whatever. Abstracting over the filesystem is necessary to make these
tasks more natural and easy to UI users.

I agree it's important to keep compatibility with command line usage and
with file system concept, but it's not the primary usage case. Sometimes
you have just to compromise...

Marco