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In a typical house there's likely also at least one alternative route to get to the office. How do you represent that path with tree hierarchy? Tags (at least n

In a typical house there's likely also at least one alternative route to get to the office. How do you represent that path with tree hierarchy? Tags (at least nested tags, as shown in OP) allow you to create a generic graph.

sjy 7y ago
For most desktop users this is solved with links and shortcuts; I might navigate directly to a document's location in the hierarchy, but it's more likely that I'll rely on an automatically generated link in the 'recent files' area, or a shortcut I created somewhere to the folder containing it.
theamk 7y ago
Even if there are multiple routes, I still remember by location. What I remeber is "The forks are on the top left kitchen drawer" -- not "to get to the forks from the fridge, turn around and walk two steps to the right; and to get to the forks from the table, turn left, then walk around the cabinet"
chongli 7y ago
How do you represent that path with tree hierarchy? You represent that by using a spatial Finder [1] (with aliases), instead of a browser. Files and folders can be organized spatially on the desktop and within each window. Since a given window is a permanent view into its folder (there was no way to open multiple windows of the same folder nor could a window ever show a different folder) it was extremely easy to remember what you were looking at, visually. The classic Mac OS also had tags which you could use to flag files and folders by colour and of course you could change folders into small icon or list view in order to handle many files at a time. These view settings permanently applied to a given folder, so every time you opened it you would see the same window, in the same place, right where you left off. To someone who may never have used this system, it's hard to describe how incredibly productive it was. Humans have extremely powerful spatial memory and the classic Mac OS Finder leveraged that perfectly. Just like the example of someone walking through their house to retrieve a book from their library or a letter from their desk, you could navigate your folder structure visually, without even reading the file names; it was incredibly powerful! [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/2/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/2/
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  Boo, the finder is the worst thing to happen to UI because it is like pulling all the leaves off a tree and then ranking them in interesting ways. I mean, it's useful and great but at the expense of stalling development on tree/graph representations for the last ~30 years. I mean look at this article - great writing, lots of good ideas, but not a single picture until page 9 of 10 and then you just get two lists and a card catalog metaphor. Whoo, dynamic lists. The problem with a spatial finder is that it's all about ordering things, which is a hideously constrictive thing even as a dynamic process because it reduces everything to one dimension and encourages quantitative rather than semantic thinking (let me be clear that I'm blaming Apple for this unhappy state of affairs rather than the author). We can see another instance of this in the mentioned bookmarks; it's 2019 and the only options I have for exploring my bookmarks in any of the popular browsers are as a 90s style menu tree. Why doesn't my browser pro-actively tag my bookmarks and allow me to apply any of many categorical schemas that people share. Likewise, why can't I configure my browser to be more selective about CSS? It blows my mind that websites and apps offer 'dark themes' as a feature when theming has been a basic part of desktop UI for >20 years. I should be able to view any website through a dark theme whose darkness and basic palette I've chosen for my browser, in the same way that I can put on sunglasses rather than having to wait for artificial things in my physical environment to be painted in less vibrant colors. I'm well aware that there are any number of CSS modifiers and plugins, I have used many over the years. But they all require either restyling individual website elements via a GUI or writing replacement CSS code. This is like saying that if you have an uncomfortable chair the solution is to take up woodworking rather than throw a cushion on it. I am never going to write code to increase my comfort (as opposed to developing new tools) because the discomfort of having to acquire competence with yet another syntax vastly outweighs the likely aesthetic improvement. It would make perfect sense if I was a working designer but I'm not and don't want to be. Invitations to code something oneself are implicit failures to understand the problem, confusing the cup with its content. I submit that part of the problem is that designers and developers are hopelessly constricted by their own axiomatic metaphors. Take bookmarks; I still use physical bookmarks occasionally, and they're essentially nodes for a particular marker in a one-dimensional linked list (the sequence of paper pages in the book). The browser allowed us to take a collection of such one-dimensional markers and structure them in a binary tree form. That's nice, but by now we should be up to using quaternions to explore 4-dimensional slices in n-dimensional semantic space. Frankly, if I were dictator of the internet my first rule would be that you can provide content or rendering but not both at the same time unless you want to be in an art museum. UI paradigms are like vessels into which content is poured; the web is the equivalent of having to buy drinks only in single-serving cans or bottles and then telling people to be happy with the huge variety of packaging options, with no regard to the time and cognitive overhead of trying to find what you want behind 500 layers of branding. Economists refer to this as the paradox of choice: little, no, or even negative value is being delivered to the consumer, while vast resources are being spent on trying to slightly expand market share through product differentiation. In some cases, far more economic resources than required for the manufacture and delivery of the underlying product and with significantly higher negative externalities in terms of energy and anxiety.

sjy 7y ago

For most desktop users this is solved with links and shortcuts; I might navigate directly to a document's location in the hierarchy, but it's more likely that I'll rely on an automatically generated link in the 'recent files' area, or a shortcut I created somewhere to the folder containing it.

theamk 7y ago

Even if there are multiple routes, I still remember by location. What I remeber is "The forks are on the top left kitchen drawer" -- not "to get to the forks from the fridge, turn around and walk two steps to the right; and to get to the forks from the table, turn left, then walk around the cabinet"

chongli 7y ago

How do you represent that path with tree hierarchy? You represent that by using a spatial Finder [1] (with aliases), instead of a browser. Files and folders can be organized spatially on the desktop and within each window. Since a given window is a permanent view into its folder (there was no way to open multiple windows of the same folder nor could a window ever show a different folder) it was extremely easy to remember what you were looking at, visually. The classic Mac OS also had tags which you could use to flag files and folders by colour and of course you could change folders into small icon or list view in order to handle many files at a time. These view settings permanently applied to a given folder, so every time you opened it you would see the same window, in the same place, right where you left off. To someone who may never have used this system, it's hard to describe how incredibly productive it was. Humans have extremely powerful spatial memory and the classic Mac OS Finder leveraged that perfectly. Just like the example of someone walking through their house to retrieve a book from their library or a letter from their desk, you could navigate your folder structure visually, without even reading the file names; it was incredibly powerful! [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/2/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/2/

anigbrowl 7y ago
Boo, the finder is the worst thing to happen to UI because it is like pulling all the leaves off a tree and then ranking them in interesting ways. I mean, it's useful and great but at the expense of stalling development on tree/graph representations for the last ~30 years. I mean look at this article - great writing, lots of good ideas, but not a single picture until page 9 of 10 and then you just get two lists and a card catalog metaphor. Whoo, dynamic lists. The problem with a spatial finder is that it's all about ordering things, which is a hideously constrictive thing even as a dynamic process because it reduces everything to one dimension and encourages quantitative rather than semantic thinking (let me be clear that I'm blaming Apple for this unhappy state of affairs rather than the author). We can see another instance of this in the mentioned bookmarks; it's 2019 and the only options I have for exploring my bookmarks in any of the popular browsers are as a 90s style menu tree. Why doesn't my browser pro-actively tag my bookmarks and allow me to apply any of many categorical schemas that people share. Likewise, why can't I configure my browser to be more selective about CSS? It blows my mind that websites and apps offer 'dark themes' as a feature when theming has been a basic part of desktop UI for >20 years. I should be able to view any website through a dark theme whose darkness and basic palette I've chosen for my browser, in the same way that I can put on sunglasses rather than having to wait for artificial things in my physical environment to be painted in less vibrant colors. I'm well aware that there are any number of CSS modifiers and plugins, I have used many over the years. But they all require either restyling individual website elements via a GUI or writing replacement CSS code. This is like saying that if you have an uncomfortable chair the solution is to take up woodworking rather than throw a cushion on it. I am never going to write code to increase my comfort (as opposed to developing new tools) because the discomfort of having to acquire competence with yet another syntax vastly outweighs the likely aesthetic improvement. It would make perfect sense if I was a working designer but I'm not and don't want to be. Invitations to code something oneself are implicit failures to understand the problem, confusing the cup with its content. I submit that part of the problem is that designers and developers are hopelessly constricted by their own axiomatic metaphors. Take bookmarks; I still use physical bookmarks occasionally, and they're essentially nodes for a particular marker in a one-dimensional linked list (the sequence of paper pages in the book). The browser allowed us to take a collection of such one-dimensional markers and structure them in a binary tree form. That's nice, but by now we should be up to using quaternions to explore 4-dimensional slices in n-dimensional semantic space. Frankly, if I were dictator of the internet my first rule would be that you can provide content or rendering but not both at the same time unless you want to be in an art museum. UI paradigms are like vessels into which content is poured; the web is the equivalent of having to buy drinks only in single-serving cans or bottles and then telling people to be happy with the huge variety of packaging options, with no regard to the time and cognitive overhead of trying to find what you want behind 500 layers of branding. Economists refer to this as the paradox of choice: little, no, or even negative value is being delivered to the consumer, while vast resources are being spent on trying to slightly expand market share through product differentiation. In some cases, far more economic resources than required for the manufacture and delivery of the underlying product and with significantly higher negative externalities in terms of energy and anxiety.