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

[Carl Worth <cworth redhat com>]

On Mon, 13 Dec 2004 18:14:01 +0100, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
> I think we should look at the task of sharing files as a whole here.

Yes, I should have mentioned that in the original mail.

> 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.

Sure. If I had been aware of some world-writable directory in my wife's
home directory I would have sent the files there. And for the future,
I'll likely set one up and use it rather than /tmp to share files with
her.

I'd still choose to use rsync or some such to send the files there, but
I accept that many would not consider me part of the primary design
target audience.

> 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...

But ~/Public, (or *sigh* ~/Desktop/Public), is actually no compromise
for command line usage. That would work fine for me, (modulo the ongoing
translation issues of course).

-Carl