Plasma Active Three released
Plasma Active Three released
Posted Oct 16, 2012 9:57 UTC (Tue) by aseigo (guest, #18394)In reply to: Plasma Active Three released by ncm
Parent article: Plasma Active Three released
Instead of dragging things into specific folders, drag them into specific tags. Same deal.
And then within each tag (you can view all files that have a specific tag, or set of tags; this is what the UI makes dead simple and fast to do) we can sort however we want.
The functional distinction between a folder name and a tag is really non-existent, except that tags have a lot of additional potential features such as: files can be in multiple tags; tag sets can be used to related data; tags can be applied to non-file data (e.g. people, or rather their contact / identity information), etc.
You mention the Dewey decimal system. You could apply such a system to your files using tags .. in fact, that's precisly what the Dewey system does: it's a simple tagging where everything goes in precisely one tag. This is completely doable with the system presented in Plasma Active .. you just aren't confined to it.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 13:39 UTC (Tue)
by renox (guest, #23785)
[Link] (5 responses)
This isn't a very good example as with links files can be in multiple directories.
>[cut]tags can be applied to non-file data (e.g. people, or rather their contact / identity information), etc.
In a "Plan9" like organisation, everything is a file so the difference between tags and directory&links would be smaller..
I'm nitpicking, but anyway kudos for using tags! I think that this is a bold move which can be great for the users and I hope that it will succeed, I'm only a bit worried about the performance cost of using tags instead of directories (directories have already a big cost when using HDD as they "hide" the block's position on the disk: http://simula.no/research/nd/publications/Simula.ND.399/s... )
Posted Oct 16, 2012 19:31 UTC (Tue)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link] (4 responses)
Tags are better here. Given a file with multiple links, asking "what other paths point to this inode?" is harder than "what other tags does this file have?".
Posted Oct 16, 2012 20:42 UTC (Tue)
by renox (guest, #23785)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Oct 16, 2012 21:21 UTC (Tue)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Oct 17, 2012 10:32 UTC (Wed)
by etienne (guest, #25256)
[Link]
Maybe also most files in the filesystem could be tagged with the name of the rpm/deb package it comes from...
Posted Oct 18, 2012 7:16 UTC (Thu)
by spaetz (guest, #32870)
[Link]
Yes, tags might be better and fulfil all needs that filepaths can do, but most tagging systems I know work only within the application you use.
Switch from f-spot to shotwell (or digikam), boom all information is lost. While if it's in the folder 2012/07/Boston/ I have at least some information to reconstruct where the picture was taken. This is why I don't want to give up file hierarchy based locations even if I like tagging.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 20:26 UTC (Tue)
by ncm (guest, #165)
[Link]
You write about sorting within a tag, or set of tags. That's not a total ordering, that's a local ordering, and not a stable ordering. Yes, you could model the Dewey system as tags, but such a model would miss most of its value, and anyway would be way too much work for an already otherwise-busy person.
A total ordering is necessarily arbitrary, but it has the virtue of repeatability. A human-animal brain can map its native geographical skills to a repeated presentation, providing an effortless organization that tagging cannot approach. "It was somewhere around here" might mean "perhaps in a folder next to" a known one. What I'm looking for doesn't have tag X; it just showed up in the list a little before something that had tag X.
If tags had natural, and optionally imposed, relationships, that could provide a stable total order. That would correspond, organizationally, to putting folders in other folders. If almost everything that was X was also Y, then those that are X but not Y could automatically be grouped without my asking for "X but not Y".
I would feel a lot more confident about your approach if I saw evidence that you were thinking along these lines. What I'm getting, instead, is that these concepts are totally foreign. Are you old enough to remember when Artificial Intelligence based on Formal Logic was right around the corner? When the Japanese national initiative in support of Logic Programming would rocket Japan ahead of us shlubs? When teaching set theory to pre-schoolers would make arithmetic and algebra, when encountered, intuitively obvious to them all?
Plasma Active Three released
Plasma Active Three released
Implementation detail
This is not the usual way to do it, but I don't see a special difficulty in having the 'link' commands registering the source in an attribute of the destination, in which case you can answer 'what other tags does this file have?' quite easily.
Another way to do it would be to have a separated database which would register such things.
A find command would work too, even if the answer would be much slower.
Implementation detail
Implementation detail
Plasma Active Three released
Aaron, I'm afraid you have so totally missed the point as to have shot off your own foot. I hope it was a result of haste, and not a failure of insight. I was inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt because as you note, you-all are very far from stupid. Tags have proven really useful in organizing photos and e-mail. It's reasonable to speculate that they might serve as well as an overall organizing method for files of all kinds. It's perfectly sensible to knock up a proof-of-concept organizer based on the idea, and publish it so people can try it out.
Plasma Active Three released