6 ms·

"Create a thing here" is a really powerful interaction. You often start the process of creation by navigating near the relevant bit (path in the file system, mo

by feifan 5y ago

"Create a thing here" is a really powerful interaction. You often start the process of creation by navigating near the relevant bit (path in the file system, module in the codebase, etc), and then realize that you need a new file/class/method/whatever in the specific place you're looking. A consistently-available "New" menu seems like a good primitive in the computing experience.

anigbrowl 5y ago
Key insight. One annoying thing in many workflows is different programs and file environments (GUI or CLI) bein gout of sync with the patterns of the work I'm doing; why (I ask myself) am I having to traverse the same routes around my directory tree like a squirrel carrying nuts and and berries back and forth? There's no flow between the OS and application UI in most instances.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  I'm really loving the image of a 3D GUI for navigating your file hierarchy as a squirrel climbing branches of a tree, thanks for that.
  - anigbrowl 5y ago
    You're welcome, I'm sure. I'm lucky enough to have a decent size yard and I spend a lot of time trying to see things from the perspective of the animal and plant life that inhabits it. A lot of our information problems (imho) come from too much detail of specificity at the wrong scale. You don't look at a tree as a collection of leaves, or draw one by cataloguing all their sizes. Likewise a tree rarely grows as a pure function of its DNA-encoded phyllotaxis patterns, but rather a combination of those and the variations of its environment - soil composition,w ater, other roots, helper fungi, sunlight, prevailing winds, and local animal life. It's truly amazing to watch the interactions between different plants and trees over a period of years. I think because we're so used being able to catalog, measure, categorize and sort our various files and directory structures, manipulate them programmatically, have our browsers or operating systems identify a particular leaf by reference or just by searching for some of the micro-structure within it (usually words) etc. etc. we tend to overlook the organicess of how a data collection grows and opt instead of producing analytics measuring it. It'd be like trying to describe a tree with tables of vector statistics about the angle and length of branch sections - it's valid in certain ways, but doesn't give you a good sense of the tree's shape or structure. It's as if we've developed a sort of techno-myopia towards the shape of our own output and activities, and approach everything by dissecting it into slices and then ranking them by various criteria.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    That goal has been stated and sought repeatedly, usually with poor results. Microsoft Bob is probably the most infamous example. An early-dot-com-era roommate worked at Xerox PARC which had its own spatial 3D file manager / management interface. There were three principle problems: - It severely taxed the limits of available consumer hardware at the time. - It was confusing as hell. - It didn't solve any real-world problem(s), and made numerous others worse. Though in fairness it did somewhat resember Doom / Castle Wolfenstein.... File or document management shouldn't be the most intensive process your computer does, it should be one of the least intensive, saving processing power for Real Work, and not being resource-starved when you actually need to use it. The organisation(s) that seem most useful are lists, lists of lists (hierarchies), tag-based systems, or search-based systems. (The fact that file-based search remains primitive in most system is its own small wonder of modern computing, though yes, the situation is slightly improved over, say, 30 years ago.)
    - anigbrowl 5y ago
      Oh yes, I remember being impressed by its awfulness. by comparison Clippy was...not terrible. I think part of what made 3d and other very visual file managers so bad (or at best, very slow like Treemappers) is the effort to render everything accurately at once, which is bound to be slow across terabyte scales. Maybe we would be better off exploring Voronoi/blob/fisheye network diagrams for representing context, with the size indicating the number of files nested within. The Carrot2 search engine implements a variation of this idea which is sometimes very useful for topic exploration.
      - dredmorbius 5y ago
        Render lag and lossyness is part of it, but there's more. I've had a fair bit of experience with large book archives (university libraries), and have a pretty good sense of what "a million books" looks like (a large on-campus multi-storey building might house 1--5 million books). There's a physical progression, from the words on a page (~250 typewritten, about 500 typeset), to pages in a chapter, chapters in a book, books on a shelf, bookcase, aisle, library floor, building, campus, etc. A well-organised library gives structure to navigating that space, logically, metaphorically, and literally. And there's a lot of hard work that goes into that organisation. Simply tossing a 3-D overlay onto a file manager ... isn't that. And most of the projects I've encountered either don't realise that, or don't give that fact its due. For that matter, the concepts of search and locality (as in, works near each other) have entirely different manifestations online and in a physical archive. Shelf-reading is still one of my favourite pastimes.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  That's one reason I REALLY liked the "recent folders" quicklaunch shortcut under Windows 7. I used that all the time.
  - anigbrowl 5y ago
    I've gone to a very document-heavy workflow over the last few years. I still program but a lot of what I do is about collecting and curating documents and data on people and organizations and then synthesizing that information in various ways, sorta like business intelligence. So I have maybe 20-30k documents/media and maybe ~100 top- and second-level folders that I access regularly. Luckily I have the kind of memory to put things somewhere and then know where to look a year or more later, but in the last year or two I've noticed that I'm using the quick access (ie your 20 or 30 most recent files) in a very similar matter to a stack in assembler. Also a lot of my busiest folders are sorted by date rather than filename because I depend heavily on the contextual memory when I learned things.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  What you really want a lot of the time is New for Project (...based on template, or based on copy) with support for projects built into the OS and applications. So - for example - instead of folders you'd see the same list of popular/recent/alphabetised projects in every app. And you could link project collections into super-projects with links and/or copies of specific data and working environments. The nested filing cabinet + aliases metaphor is old and never really worked all that well anyway, but we're stuck with it because it was easy to implement back when all of this was first designed and computers were a thousand times slower.
  - beowulfey 5y ago
    The thing is, computers have been moving away from that nested filing cabinet idea for some time now, and many of us miss it terribly. Saving a file in Excel now is a huge hassle. They WANT me to save to one location in my OneDrive folder, but I hardly ever want it there.
    - feifan 5y ago
      Is the "nested filing cabinet idea" just referring to the file system and explorer? Or are there other aspects to that idea as well?
      - beowulfey 5y ago
        Sort of… it is the idea of having a bunch of files that are multiple types located in an organized space. E.g. in your home office you may have papers, but also notebooks, envelopes, cds, etc; whatever you find is useful for storing information. You have them organized on your desk in a way that works well for you. If you need a tool to read one (like a cd will need a cd player) you bring the item to the tool in order to use it. Modern computers are trying to move away from the concept of a “desktop” or filesystem, and instead you open up the file you want from within the program that you use to open it. It would be like you have all your cds in a big jukebox that you can select from, or all your documents in a big binder, or something like that. They become isolated within the devices you use to read them. It may be better for some people, but that is not how I like to organize things. Particularly when I want to move something from one device to another.
- ComodoHacker 5y ago
  >There's no flow between the OS and application UI in most instances. You can copy and paste paths between file manager and Open/Save file dialog in most instances.
  - anigbrowl 5y ago
    Sure, it's just a pity there's no kind of shared context, such that if the last 8 or 10 operations were in a particular folder, a new operation with a similar document type might default to looking there.
    - ComodoHacker 5y ago
      On Windows, there is a shortcut to recent folders on the left panel. Also, in most open/save dialogs the file name field has a history pop-up list with full paths. You pick one, delete just file name, hit Enter and jump to it's folder.
- jpeloquin 5y ago
  > There's no flow between the OS and application UI in most instances. Directory Opus (a file manager for Windows) somehow extends most Windows file pickers so Ctrl+G moves the file picker to whatever folder Directory Opus has open. I still feel a twinge of satisfaction every time this lets me skip re-traversing my file tree. I don't think it does anything for a Qt file picker though.
  - anigbrowl 5y ago
    Looks cool, I'll check it out.
mjevans 5y ago
It also promotes being able to hit Ctrl+S to save state as soon as any work is entered. Also PLEASE standardize on ONE for each keyboard language!; For English that's Ctrl+S.
- noizejoy 5y ago
  Some modern apps don't even need a Ctrl-S to save the current state - even without a file name.
  - joshspankit 5y ago
    Not sure if this is what you’re saying, but macOS no longer needs you to choose to save in order to retain your work. Rebooting after having 50 unsaved documents open means you get the same 50 windows. Most likely with the very last letter you typed still there (other than that: maybe a word or two needs to be retyped)
arexxbifs 5y ago
Yes. I used to use it for this all the time, though less so nowadays with so much more in Windows happening on the command line anyway.
seltzered_ 5y ago
Composability. also applies to launcher apps like quicksilver and kupfer : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_WOPkT-9EI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_WOPkT-9EI
User23 5y ago
Touch is the purest old school Unix way to say this.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Right. I'll often use touch just that way, in part because I can also apply standard features / functions in the process, particularly a datestamp: touch <mnemonic-$(datestamp)> Where datestamp is a bash function: datestamp () { date +%Y%m%d; } In several scripts / tools, the title (and other metadata) are automatically generated and added, with sanity checks for characters, casing (lowercase preferred), and tokenisation (usually '-' between words, '_' between elements, and '--' between repeated elements, e.g., multiple authors. The results can be longish, but descriptive, filenames. With a low collision probability.
gorgoiler 5y ago
It’s like plonking a shovel in the ground and saying this is the spot. Metaphors for everyday actions don’t need to be about forcing the real world into the computer world. A lot of the ways of thinking feel like they are one and the same. Another example, for me, off the top of my head: rummaging with find and grep but then scanning the output with less feels identical to hunting for red 4x1 Lego blocks or M8 nylon locking nuts.
- darkwater 5y ago
  why? It's basically a poor man's fuzzy search. You do remember some part of the name you are looking for so you filter your data set with what you know for sure and then visually scan the rest.
- feifan 5y ago
  IMO browsing to the location first, and then creating the thing in that spot, is fuzzy search. The equivalent to "plonking a shovel" would be knowing exactly where a file should go in the hierarchy and touching/creating it with a single invocation from the top-level.
laurent92 5y ago
The status of a non-saved document in all software is always a bit strange too. In Confluence it’s a draft-before-creation, as opposed to a draft of an existing page. To me, working in a new unsaved document feels uncomfortable. The idea that your Word window would already have an underlying file in the correct folder is reassuring. You can smash Ctrl+S all you need.
prawn 5y ago
I use that method or copying an existing item also because I dislike the save process otherwise. Saving something I have open is an instant and silent process. Saving something that's been created new is a pain. I prefer to pick the location via Finder than whatever methods the application has decided might suit me.
millzlane 5y ago
There is much redundancy in windows. But it's redundancy that things about edge cases like these. One could even edit it if one wanted to. It'd be nice if Microsoft had a nice and easy front end for it. https://thegeekpage.com/how-to-edit-right-click-new-menu-in-windows-10/ https://thegeekpage.com/how-to-edit-right-click-new-menu-in-...
CryingSofa 5y ago
Definitely, and not just for creating things. Continuing here allows you to keep your train of thought without a distraction. The button I use most in my file manager is 'Open in Terminal' and I love it because I don't have to re-navigate through the tree.

by feifan 5y ago

anigbrowl 5y ago

Key insight. One annoying thing in many workflows is different programs and file environments (GUI or CLI) bein gout of sync with the patterns of the work I'm doing; why (I ask myself) am I having to traverse the same routes around my directory tree like a squirrel carrying nuts and and berries back and forth? There's no flow between the OS and application UI in most instances.

jazzyjackson 5y ago
I'm really loving the image of a 3D GUI for navigating your file hierarchy as a squirrel climbing branches of a tree, thanks for that.
- anigbrowl 5y ago
  You're welcome, I'm sure. I'm lucky enough to have a decent size yard and I spend a lot of time trying to see things from the perspective of the animal and plant life that inhabits it. A lot of our information problems (imho) come from too much detail of specificity at the wrong scale. You don't look at a tree as a collection of leaves, or draw one by cataloguing all their sizes. Likewise a tree rarely grows as a pure function of its DNA-encoded phyllotaxis patterns, but rather a combination of those and the variations of its environment - soil composition,w ater, other roots, helper fungi, sunlight, prevailing winds, and local animal life. It's truly amazing to watch the interactions between different plants and trees over a period of years. I think because we're so used being able to catalog, measure, categorize and sort our various files and directory structures, manipulate them programmatically, have our browsers or operating systems identify a particular leaf by reference or just by searching for some of the micro-structure within it (usually words) etc. etc. we tend to overlook the organicess of how a data collection grows and opt instead of producing analytics measuring it. It'd be like trying to describe a tree with tables of vector statistics about the angle and length of branch sections - it's valid in certain ways, but doesn't give you a good sense of the tree's shape or structure. It's as if we've developed a sort of techno-myopia towards the shape of our own output and activities, and approach everything by dissecting it into slices and then ranking them by various criteria.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  That goal has been stated and sought repeatedly, usually with poor results. Microsoft Bob is probably the most infamous example. An early-dot-com-era roommate worked at Xerox PARC which had its own spatial 3D file manager / management interface. There were three principle problems: - It severely taxed the limits of available consumer hardware at the time. - It was confusing as hell. - It didn't solve any real-world problem(s), and made numerous others worse. Though in fairness it did somewhat resember Doom / Castle Wolfenstein.... File or document management shouldn't be the most intensive process your computer does, it should be one of the least intensive, saving processing power for Real Work, and not being resource-starved when you actually need to use it. The organisation(s) that seem most useful are lists, lists of lists (hierarchies), tag-based systems, or search-based systems. (The fact that file-based search remains primitive in most system is its own small wonder of modern computing, though yes, the situation is slightly improved over, say, 30 years ago.)
  - anigbrowl 5y ago
    Oh yes, I remember being impressed by its awfulness. by comparison Clippy was...not terrible. I think part of what made 3d and other very visual file managers so bad (or at best, very slow like Treemappers) is the effort to render everything accurately at once, which is bound to be slow across terabyte scales. Maybe we would be better off exploring Voronoi/blob/fisheye network diagrams for representing context, with the size indicating the number of files nested within. The Carrot2 search engine implements a variation of this idea which is sometimes very useful for topic exploration.
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      Render lag and lossyness is part of it, but there's more. I've had a fair bit of experience with large book archives (university libraries), and have a pretty good sense of what "a million books" looks like (a large on-campus multi-storey building might house 1--5 million books). There's a physical progression, from the words on a page (~250 typewritten, about 500 typeset), to pages in a chapter, chapters in a book, books on a shelf, bookcase, aisle, library floor, building, campus, etc. A well-organised library gives structure to navigating that space, logically, metaphorically, and literally. And there's a lot of hard work that goes into that organisation. Simply tossing a 3-D overlay onto a file manager ... isn't that. And most of the projects I've encountered either don't realise that, or don't give that fact its due. For that matter, the concepts of search and locality (as in, works near each other) have entirely different manifestations online and in a physical archive. Shelf-reading is still one of my favourite pastimes.
Robotbeat 5y ago
That's one reason I REALLY liked the "recent folders" quicklaunch shortcut under Windows 7. I used that all the time.
- anigbrowl 5y ago
  I've gone to a very document-heavy workflow over the last few years. I still program but a lot of what I do is about collecting and curating documents and data on people and organizations and then synthesizing that information in various ways, sorta like business intelligence. So I have maybe 20-30k documents/media and maybe ~100 top- and second-level folders that I access regularly. Luckily I have the kind of memory to put things somewhere and then know where to look a year or more later, but in the last year or two I've noticed that I'm using the quick access (ie your 20 or 30 most recent files) in a very similar matter to a stack in assembler. Also a lot of my busiest folders are sorted by date rather than filename because I depend heavily on the contextual memory when I learned things.
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
What you really want a lot of the time is New for Project (...based on template, or based on copy) with support for projects built into the OS and applications. So - for example - instead of folders you'd see the same list of popular/recent/alphabetised projects in every app. And you could link project collections into super-projects with links and/or copies of specific data and working environments. The nested filing cabinet + aliases metaphor is old and never really worked all that well anyway, but we're stuck with it because it was easy to implement back when all of this was first designed and computers were a thousand times slower.
- beowulfey 5y ago
  The thing is, computers have been moving away from that nested filing cabinet idea for some time now, and many of us miss it terribly. Saving a file in Excel now is a huge hassle. They WANT me to save to one location in my OneDrive folder, but I hardly ever want it there.
  - feifan 5y ago
    Is the "nested filing cabinet idea" just referring to the file system and explorer? Or are there other aspects to that idea as well?
    - beowulfey 5y ago
      Sort of… it is the idea of having a bunch of files that are multiple types located in an organized space. E.g. in your home office you may have papers, but also notebooks, envelopes, cds, etc; whatever you find is useful for storing information. You have them organized on your desk in a way that works well for you. If you need a tool to read one (like a cd will need a cd player) you bring the item to the tool in order to use it. Modern computers are trying to move away from the concept of a “desktop” or filesystem, and instead you open up the file you want from within the program that you use to open it. It would be like you have all your cds in a big jukebox that you can select from, or all your documents in a big binder, or something like that. They become isolated within the devices you use to read them. It may be better for some people, but that is not how I like to organize things. Particularly when I want to move something from one device to another.
ComodoHacker 5y ago
>There's no flow between the OS and application UI in most instances. You can copy and paste paths between file manager and Open/Save file dialog in most instances.
- anigbrowl 5y ago
  Sure, it's just a pity there's no kind of shared context, such that if the last 8 or 10 operations were in a particular folder, a new operation with a similar document type might default to looking there.
  - ComodoHacker 5y ago
    On Windows, there is a shortcut to recent folders on the left panel. Also, in most open/save dialogs the file name field has a history pop-up list with full paths. You pick one, delete just file name, hit Enter and jump to it's folder.
jpeloquin 5y ago
> There's no flow between the OS and application UI in most instances. Directory Opus (a file manager for Windows) somehow extends most Windows file pickers so Ctrl+G moves the file picker to whatever folder Directory Opus has open. I still feel a twinge of satisfaction every time this lets me skip re-traversing my file tree. I don't think it does anything for a Qt file picker though.
- anigbrowl 5y ago
  Looks cool, I'll check it out.

mjevans 5y ago

It also promotes being able to hit Ctrl+S to save state as soon as any work is entered. Also PLEASE standardize on ONE for each keyboard language!; For English that's Ctrl+S.

noizejoy 5y ago
Some modern apps don't even need a Ctrl-S to save the current state - even without a file name.
- joshspankit 5y ago
  Not sure if this is what you’re saying, but macOS no longer needs you to choose to save in order to retain your work. Rebooting after having 50 unsaved documents open means you get the same 50 windows. Most likely with the very last letter you typed still there (other than that: maybe a word or two needs to be retyped)

arexxbifs 5y ago

Yes. I used to use it for this all the time, though less so nowadays with so much more in Windows happening on the command line anyway.

seltzered_ 5y ago

Composability. also applies to launcher apps like quicksilver and kupfer : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_WOPkT-9EI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_WOPkT-9EI

User23 5y ago

Touch is the purest old school Unix way to say this.

dredmorbius 5y ago
Right. I'll often use touch just that way, in part because I can also apply standard features / functions in the process, particularly a datestamp: touch <mnemonic-$(datestamp)> Where datestamp is a bash function: datestamp () { date +%Y%m%d; } In several scripts / tools, the title (and other metadata) are automatically generated and added, with sanity checks for characters, casing (lowercase preferred), and tokenisation (usually '-' between words, '_' between elements, and '--' between repeated elements, e.g., multiple authors. The results can be longish, but descriptive, filenames. With a low collision probability.

gorgoiler 5y ago

It’s like plonking a shovel in the ground and saying this is the spot. Metaphors for everyday actions don’t need to be about forcing the real world into the computer world. A lot of the ways of thinking feel like they are one and the same. Another example, for me, off the top of my head: rummaging with find and grep but then scanning the output with less feels identical to hunting for red 4x1 Lego blocks or M8 nylon locking nuts.

darkwater 5y ago
why? It's basically a poor man's fuzzy search. You do remember some part of the name you are looking for so you filter your data set with what you know for sure and then visually scan the rest.
feifan 5y ago
IMO browsing to the location first, and then creating the thing in that spot, is fuzzy search. The equivalent to "plonking a shovel" would be knowing exactly where a file should go in the hierarchy and touching/creating it with a single invocation from the top-level.

laurent92 5y ago

The status of a non-saved document in all software is always a bit strange too. In Confluence it’s a draft-before-creation, as opposed to a draft of an existing page. To me, working in a new unsaved document feels uncomfortable. The idea that your Word window would already have an underlying file in the correct folder is reassuring. You can smash Ctrl+S all you need.

prawn 5y ago

I use that method or copying an existing item also because I dislike the save process otherwise. Saving something I have open is an instant and silent process. Saving something that's been created new is a pain. I prefer to pick the location via Finder than whatever methods the application has decided might suit me.

millzlane 5y ago

There is much redundancy in windows. But it's redundancy that things about edge cases like these. One could even edit it if one wanted to. It'd be nice if Microsoft had a nice and easy front end for it. https://thegeekpage.com/how-to-edit-right-click-new-menu-in-windows-10/ https://thegeekpage.com/how-to-edit-right-click-new-menu-in-...

CryingSofa 5y ago

Definitely, and not just for creating things. Continuing here allows you to keep your train of thought without a distraction. The button I use most in my file manager is 'Open in Terminal' and I love it because I don't have to re-navigate through the tree.