Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 16, 2012 9:36 UTC (Tue) by aseigo (guest, #18394)
In reply to: Plasma Active Three released by callegar
Parent article: Plasma Active Three released

Indeed, the names of the applications are imlementation details. For example, we don't expose Okular at all in the interface. When you launch Books, which is just Files listing files that match our concept of "book" (epub, pdf, etc), and then open one of the documents, the touch version of Okular opens .. but the person in front of the tablet will just see that they've found and opened that novel by Orwell they've been meaning to get to (or whatever).

This is true for most of the applications shipped as part of Plasma Active, because as you noted, those names just aren't critical to the use experience.

I know you were probably be facetious, but .. well .. you were right all the same ;)

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 18, 2012 10:22 UTC (Thu) by callegar (guest, #16148) [Link] (3 responses)

OK, seriously now.

The reason why I am suspicious of the tag approach and the reason why I have so far systematically disabled nepomuk on all my systems (in spite of being a long time kde user), it that I really feel that this approach is 'imprisoning' some of my data, taking control of it away from me.

1) This tag approach appears to be completely unstandardized and unportable between desktop environments. If I spend time tagging my stuff and one day later I decide that I like gnome/ubuntu/xfce better than kde, all this effort is lost.

2) Looks like there is no possibility to sanely export or share this metadata. If I have a bunch of photos and I organize it by means of sensible path names (e.g. Photos/2011/Summer), and I decide to share them with a friend, simply zipping the folder and sharing the zip file will give to the receiver not just the content, but also the organization. If I put all my photos in Photos and I rely on tags for the organization, there is not tool capable of making a container file (zip like) with both the content and the organization.

3) Looks like there is no possibility to rapidly control what gets tagged and how, particularly if one relies on automatic tools to generate the tags, like indexers. For instance, if some password file of mine gets indexed by nepomuk, I would like to assure that such data is immediately removed from the indexes, but there is no way to do it.

4) There is almost no control on the amount of resources that is used for the tagging, particularly when the tags rely on automatic tools like indexing for their generation. With nepomuk, if I disable automatic indexing for a directory, I do not see the space taken by the database immediately decrease. The database seems to only augment in space over time, which is even more worrying for tablet like devices.

5) There is no way to automate operations on tags. Say that I have a bunch of photos, and that I have organized them by paths. Say "Photos/2011/Summer". Then I realize that this is wrong, and that they should have been "Photos/2010/Summer". Fixing this is as simple as a directory rename. How do I tell a tag based system something like "Please select all Photos that have the "Summer" tag as well as the "2011" tag and change the "2011" tag into "2010"? I have the same problem with gmail labels. Not that the thing cannot be done, but is extremely more demanding in terms of time than a directory rename.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 18, 2012 15:25 UTC (Thu) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link] (2 responses)

1a) Tag the files, not the directory entries. Works well for photos and music.
1b) OR put the tags in a plaintext file along the file (the .nfo approach). Works well for videos.

2) problem solved with [1a/1b] above.

3) I use nepomuk; excluding some file or directory from the index excludes its tags from the index... I couldn't see the problem.

4) Never looked at it; will study this better.

5) Works OK for me in Digikam, doing [1a] above...

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 18, 2012 15:27 UTC (Thu) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

Ah, and...

5/Gmail comment) Select all mail in a label, re-label them, remove the old label; trivial.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 21, 2012 11:13 UTC (Sun) by callegar (guest, #16148) [Link]

1) You seem to be confirming my statement. There is no standard and every kind of file needs its own type of tagging. By the way, the idea that the tags should go inside the file (a la id3) is interesting, but the file paradigm seems to be completely inadequate for it. When you change a tag, the sha of the whole file changes (which is not nice at all). Furthermore, if you have your files remotely, to read the tags you need to transfer the whole file. Which means CO2 and drying up your internet forfait. Furthermore, nepomuk seems not to follow the paradigm of tagging the stuff by adding a nfo file to every dir, but to put everything in its own inexplorable database of ontologies.

2) Maybe just for photos and music if you do not use nepomuk approach to tagging which puts stuff in its own db.

3) Apart from the fact that using nepomuk your 1b does not appear all that natural, my point is this. Say that you use nepomuk and automatic indexing and that you index all your home. Say that (by mistake, during a file transfer, whatever) for 5 minutes a text file full of very secrete passwords enters your home dir. Can you guarantee me that after you erase that file, your secret passwords are not captured for an arbitrarily long time in some index file?

4) When I was administering machines, this was a nightmare. Having users ending up their quotas all the time.

5) Ok, now try to rescale all those images to 800x600. Or say that you messed a few years, so that for every year you want to do year=year+1. The fact is that if you go tags currently you loose scripting and automation. Furthermore, if the tags are in the files (like for photos, music), rewriting tags currently means rewriting an arbitrary large number of huge files to update the tags.

So, I am not saying that tags are necessarily bad. I am saying that they are extremely immature and that trying to /force/ people to use something that is immature (or even giving it as a default) often backfires. Like the gmail labels that no-one I know uses (google is anyway quite good at searching inside messages) or the crazy management of photos on android phones, where everything is shown together even if it comes from 4 different cameras and is copied in 4 different dirs.