7 ms·
I agree. I actually like the hierarchical organisation, and I don't like the 10 year usability trend, particularly driven by Microsofts attempts to patch over
by kpil 10y ago
I agree.
I actually like the hierarchical organisation, and I don't like the 10 year usability trend, particularly driven by Microsofts attempts to patch over their horrid structure with even worse workarounds.
The solution to learning my mother were to find her documents is not hiding the place 15 levels deep and having 10 symlinks to it.
Fast, unobtrusive indexing and a good structure is all that is needed. Humans organise and memorise things in hierarchies, and while categories is another helpful abstraction they tend to be confusing if they do not point to a fixed position in a hierarchy in my opinion.
You can also explore a hierarchy; Not so with a cloud of things connected to a bunch of tags.
- ori_b 10y agoTags are a subset of hierarchies + symlinks. If you have a one level hierarchy, you have the equivalent of tags.
- alpyne 10y agoI'd argue that tags provide a more graph-like structure, of which a hierarchy (tree)[1] is just a subset. Symlinks provide an "escape-hatch" to hierarchical systems allowing objects to appear to be in more than one directory. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_(graph_theory) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_(graph_theory)
- ori_b 10y agoHow so? Unless you can tag tags, you can't represent a tree with them. If you can tag tags, you get an arbitrary graph, with all the problems that represents. I don't think I've seen tagging systems that let me tag tags out in the wild.
- zaphar 10y agoYou can create a DAG from Tagged objects if you use Set operations. The set of things with tag A includes things from other sets. Those sets form the next level in the hierarchy. The tagged objects define the relationships between differing tags which allows you to define that arbitrary graph. The graph can be viewed as an effectively infinite depth tree if you wish to.
- DougWebb 10y agoThe 'path' in the tree can be represented as a tag. It's a simplistic way to go, but you can get pretty far with it to emulate a folder structure using tags.
- vlunkr 10y agoYou have to realize though that this software doesn't take away your heiracichal system, it just gives you another way to look at it. Recently I've been cleaning up my music library and I'm seeing some of the shortcomings of the current system. What do you do with a compilation album? Have a folder for each artist or put them all together, (Which would separate them from others works by the same artist)? iTunes or whatever media player you use will probably list them in both locations depending on how you sort or whatever. I find this to be a useful feature, why wouldn't you like to have the option to do that sort of thing from the command line?
- stormbrew 10y agoThat iTunes view is still a hierarchy, though. More accurately, it's still a DAG. The hierarchy is not the problem here, it's the rigidity of trying to put something in only one part of that hierarchy.
- andrewflnr 10y agoTags are still a DAG, too. I don't see what you're trying to prove here.
- zaphar 10y agoTags are unordered sets that can be viewed in a DAG format if desired. Tag's themselves do not specify a DAG though.
- ozim 10y agoSpot on, for file system now it should not be a problem to have links in different places in hierarchy. You can have "favoriteSong.mp3" in catalogue with artist name and use links to put it in catalogue with "ultimate super songs". But I think people are not aware of possibilities.
- neohaven 10y agoIt's multiple, interwoven hierarchies, which you can look at by "seeing" a particular DAG (a subset of the actual graph). You can see this twin representation conceptually as Artist->Album->Song and also as Compilation->Artist->Song, the latter being a small folder with symlinks to the actual song directly. It's really just two different trees.
- igravious 10y ago> Humans organise and memorise things in hierarchies Big claim. Proof?
- tremon 10y agoBig proofs. Conceptual categorization is a big part of how we humans comprehend and analyze the world around us, and it relies on a hierarchy of defining attributes, from abstract model to concrete specimen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_theory#Basic_level_categories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_theory#Basic_level_c... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype#Cognitive_functions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype#Cognitive_functions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_learning Maybe less abstract: if you try to remember where your phone is, do you follow a pattern like "which room", "which coat/pants/desk", then "which pocket/drawer"?
- igravious 10y agoI actually wnt to believe you because it accords with my own intuition but I don't trust my intuition on this! Conceptual categorisation + language + ? is totally how we humans comprehend and analyze the world around us, granted. (The devil is in the details of course.) But I don't see how we can go from there to "it relies on a hierarchy of defining attributes" I don't buy your example because the concepts in our heads seem to be organised in context-specific word bags, i.e. tags. I think I would believe you if cognitive science discovered that tree-hierarchy navigation relied on built-in neuro-spatial machinery or something like that :) I _want_ to believe you but I also want proper proof! :) edit: thanks for the heads up on prototype theory, can't believe I'd forgotten about this. also, thanks for making me ponder more deeply about stereotypes.
- tremon 10y agoGlad to be of (some) help :) I'm not a developmental psychologist btw, just have an interest in cognitive development. The proof you're looking for would be more the field of cognitive neuroscience. There definitely are graph-like connections between concepts all over the brain, I didn't mean to suggest that our brains work hierarchical only, to the exclusion of all other relations. As an example: if our brains were strictly hierarchical, we would be unable to see the similarity in colour between a grey table and a grey hare. I just meant to explain my thinking on how abstract thought is tied to a attribute/property hierarchy, not proclaim that I know how the brain works. (edit: snipped on-topic content, best reserved for a separate post)
- blakeyrat 10y ago> Humans organise and memorise things in hierarchies, Humans also track a lot of things based on spatial memory, which no OS since Mac Classic has even tried to make use of, which is a shame.
- Bjartr 10y agoI wouldn't say no OS has tried, the windows 8 start screen was designed to exploit spatial memory for instance.
- tambourine_man 10y agoTrue, with the exemption of iOS spring board. It's a great spatial memory comeback and a testament to the easy of use of the model, even if it doesn't scale well when you get into the 100s of items.
- therein 10y agoHow did Mac Classic make use of that?
- chongli 10y agoIn Mac Classic each folder you opened created a new window which remembered all of its settings for size, position on screen, scroll position, icon size/layout, etc. This window is an explicit and exclusive representation of that particular folder and attempting to open the same folder again does not create a new window, it simply shifts the focus to the already-open window. The change in Mac OS X towards a browser for navigating the filesystem hierarchy caused an active debate over spatial[0] vs. navigation (or browser)[1] file managers. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_file_manager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_file_manager [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_manager#Navigational_file_manager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_manager#Navigational_file...
- therein 10y agoVery interesting, thank you.
- choosername 10y ago>Humans organise and memorise things in hierarchies, ... Well, sure, if things do have a hierarchical relationship, but a hierarchy is just one form of network. It fails for concurrent dependency problems, e.g.