Re: [e-users] A more profound Enlightenment

[Arlo W. <arl...@gm...>]

In the first email I think I made the mistake of describing what I think 
this desktop idea will become in 10 or 20 years: a computer system like 
you read about in sci-fi books, that can understand everything and help 
you manipulate it intuitively.  To start I just want to explore the idea 
of organizing your files in different ways and associating things 
together through contexts, projects, or custom tags you create.  I 
really want to integrate email and im because it lets the system follow 
your communications and interactions with people.  Once you do this, you 
can tell your computer: "Show me files that Bob has sent me", or "Show 
me pictures of Bob" or "Show me pictures taken by Bob".  That's the 
first big step.

More comments inline...

Arigead wrote:
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> Arlo White wrote:
>   
>> I've been following the Enlightenment project for years, always 
>> impressed by the strength of vision and dedication of the developers.  
>> Every once in a while I take an inventory of the graphical toolkits out 
>> there and am always disappointed by the fact that the EFL is the most 
>> progressive desktop gui system out there and yet hasn't really broken 
>> into the mainstream.  All the other GUIs (QT, GTK, Windows) are built 
>> around boring components (boxes, pull-downs, radio, etc.)  The concepts 
>> behind these mainstream toolkits are decades old.
>>
>>     
>
> very interesting email, which I've cut to save me sending it all back at
> you. It got me to thinking but I finally decided that it wasn't a good
> idea. That's only my opinion and it is based on my own personal
> interface with a computer. I'm running a Linux Distribution and probably
> at least 50% of the people on this list are as well. Every one of us has
> probably got a very different "Setup". We could start a religious war on
> any number of subjects, best editor, best web browser, best Distro, best
> email client...
>   
This desktop I'm imagining would be customizable as well.  You could 
plugin different modules to change behavior, adjust preferences, etc.  
And it's going to integrate and work with applications, so if you don't 
use all of its features it doesn't really matter.  I'm not sure if you 
read my second email with the GNU tools/shell analogy, which I think 
represents my idea better.  This desktop will be exactly like working 
with GNU tools.  There are a lot of little tools that you can connect 
together to do useful things.  A lot of the time you just use less to 
view files, but when you need a real editor, you fire up vi/emacs (or 
whatever you use).  The same thing will happen here.  In this system you 
can rotate or add captions to pictures, but when you want to do some 
real editing, you fire of the GIMP.

I just think that certain concepts, such as email are integrated in our 
lives so deeply that they should have the same significance on your 
desktop.  Email is more of a communication point than a productive 
application.  I think being able to associate communications with the 
project and files you're working on will be very powerful.  So certain 
applications like email clients may need to be replaced, or at least 
augmented with plugins so they integrate with the desktop.
> You're idea is based on the fact that everybody is going to use their
> computer in exactly the same way. When I think about that given that
> there are a number of people in the world who buy a PC with Windows
> pre-installed and they never change a thing, except the wallpaper. Maybe
> you're correct.
>   
I do have the more typical non-technical user in mind for a lot of 
this.  Computers should be much more intuitive and simpler to use.  I 
look back at some of my work experience and wonder why computers can't 
just do those things.  For example, at one job we needed to batch 
convert a lot of tiffs to pngs, I wrote a little script to do this.  But 
really, you should be able to just search for and select the files you 
want to convert, and then be able to convert them to whatever format you 
want.  In another situation my boss wanted a listing of some folders in 
the file system, again I wrote a little script to spit out the names to 
a file.  But why can't you do this with the computer naturally.  It's 
these little tasks that people can't do currently without knowing how to 
program that need to be available to users in a more intuitive visual way.
> I'm still thinking of your idea though and trying to imagine it. If I
> selected a file then your computer has to know what it is and what that
> "is" means. If I select a picture there are any number of things that I
> can do with that picture, similarly with a music file. Perhaps I want to
> play it, perhaps I want to edit it, perhaps I want to email it to a
> friend, perhaps I want to add it to a play list. I select what I want to
> do with the file by selecting the Application that's relevant, to what I
> want to do. I can "invent" a brand new action to perform on a file by
> creating a brand new application. I could write an app that plays a
> music file backwards.
>
> I might be wrong but in your system it's a huge monolithic system if I
> select a file I'll get 100's of options to then select. Is there a
> fundamental different to right clicking on a music file and getting a
> list "Edit, Play, Add to Playlist, Email to Friend, Delete,,," and the
> current system of selecting the App I want. It seems to me to be a
> difference only in the selection mechanism, and who controls the code.
>   
These are good points and I've been thinking about these issues.  As you 
add more and more tools that can be used on some file how do you expose 
them without overwhelming the user?  I've thought about having 
categories for tools and if there are lots of tools associated with a 
file they get broken up into categories.  You could also have a 
"More..." button or just search for a tool by name.  It is functionally 
the same as a context-menu, but in the end it will probably look and 
behave very differently.  A picture, or in this case, an EDJE prototype 
is probably worth a thousand words...so I'll try to work on that soon.
> I personally like the old unix ideal of having a smaller app that does
> something well, then having everything and the kitchen sink all built
> in together. Sounds like you'd be almost combining the functionality of
> the Linux kernel, the X Windows System, All the Apps that have ever been
> invented into one build that spits out uImage. You'll need a big build
> server ;-) My mom don't use too much functionality that people on this
> list would use. I'm afraid a more profound Enlightenment would not
> interest her but I'll ask the next time I see her ;-)
>   
I think here is where I may have misrepresented my idea.  It isn't a 
single code base.  It's a set of modular core components that supply the 
main user-interface, and a collection of tool or mini-applications that 
have some standard metadata.  When you install a new tool it will be 
added to an internal database where the computer can ask "what tools can 
this file be manipulated with?".  It's not replacing the kernel or X, 
it's built on top of libraries that are on top of these layers, just 
like other Linux applications.  I agree that a monolithic single 
code-base wouldn't work.

The key is that those core tools will have to be very clever.  The 
context menu will have to adjust to any number of tools being associated 
with what you clicked on.  The desktop will have to adjust to holding 
any number of files.  I think this can be done, I guess my first step is 
to start writing some of these core tools to prove that.
> Thanks for the email though got me thinking.
>
> John
>
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