Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 16, 2012 9:50 UTC (Tue) by aseigo (guest, #18394)
In reply to: Plasma Active Three released by Tara_Li
Parent article: Plasma Active Three released

What we haven't done yet, though I'd like to eventually get there, is to be able to take files that have been organized via filesystem hierarchy and ensure that gets reflected in the semantic data. We've story boarded some of this already while designing these parts of the UI, so it should be possible.

However, most use cases on tablets don't have that use pattern at all. More common is slapping in the SD card from a camera and viewing pictures, perhaps organizing them as you go. Downloading files (e.g. books) from the network is also common and this also leaves you without structure by default. These are the common use cases on mobile device which "organize it yourself in the file system" as an idea really sucks for. Semantic organization turns out to be far more powerful there.

But that's the use case for devices. In Plasma Desktop we have these same features (it's the same code under the hood, after all) but we still present a file system centered view by default because the Desktop use scenarios are different from mobile, and often follow the kind of thing you noted.

In future, I really do want to be able to go in both directions, however: sort your pictures by tags and then be able to sync to, say, owncloud with pictures sorted into folders by tag sets so that you can load them on any desktop / laptop PC with your structure intact; or go from a file system sorted file set and be able to identify those as tags that co-exist with metadata.

Anyways, key here is to keep in mind the use case of the target devices. They differ because of how we (humans) work in different contexts, and we tend to choose different device form factors for different contexts. (Tablets being frustrating to use at a desk at work, while it's inconvenient to drag your laptop with you to the park just so you can see a map of how to get there.)

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 16, 2012 12:36 UTC (Tue) by Priscus (guest, #72409) [Link]

About the directory/tag transition...

I did it a few years back for a personnal project (bookmarks management, but I had finished making it a generic library by the time real life caught up to me).
It worked forwards _and_ backwards (I was mostly interested in the backwards part, actually).

One of the lessons it taught me was how much my directory organisation sucked.
Besides the homonyms and synonyms, the structure was unequally precise, depending on how many elements I had to organise. Sometimes, the same information was implicit, and sometimes explicit.

The tagged result suffers from these directory-based approximations.

For exampl, you may not have needed an implicit tag/directory level in some places of your directory tree, but if it does exist elsewhere, it will also be present in your tags. Elements where this information was implicit will not have it explicitly, which can be a bother.

To avoid this, you have to either rebalance your directories or create some rules to deal with "implicit" information, which opens up another can of worm.

If you are interested, feel free to contact me: I still have the code (some bit-rot) and I remember most of my reasoning and useful optimisations strategies.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 16, 2012 16:26 UTC (Tue) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] (1 responses)

Funny you mention slapping in an SD card and viewing pictures. Because the thing I hate about most picture-viewing apps in Android right now is that they don't pay attention to the directory hierarchy. So instead of just giving me everything under /DCIM/ (which may in turn be usefully organized by different camera apps), I get all JPEGs on the filesystem, therefore lots of album art cluttering my photos.

I think this came about when Google moved away from a hierarchy-based view of local files, toward a semantic-based view.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 16, 2012 16:40 UTC (Tue) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

.... Which is not to say that I'm against the semntic stuff, just that I'm wary of dropping/hiding the hierarchical filesystem in favor of it. As a desktop KDE user, I'm actually very interested in trying out Plasma Active at some point, probably either on my Nexus 7 or on a future laptop that was built for Win8.

Plasma Active Three released

Posted Oct 19, 2012 7:23 UTC (Fri) by steveriley (guest, #83540) [Link]

"desktop use scenarios are different from mobile"

An stupendously obvious position that so many other UI designers appear to be completely, astonishingly ignorant of. Aaron, thank you. I look forward to installing Plasma Active Three on my Samsung 700t (yeah, the one that came with Windows 8 from //build/) this weekend.