[Tfug] More "pie in the sky"... :-/

[Bexley Hall]

Hi, Ron,

--- On Thu, 9/18/08, Ronald Sutherland <ronald.sutherland at gmail.com> wrote:

> > My question, then, is how can you organize information in a way
> > that makes it easier for people to *remember* where it is and/or
> > *find* when they forget it's "location" (i.e., name)?
>
> An off the wall thought, our brains may be geared to group stuff
> around things we have done (our history).

Yes.  Ignoring how a "thing" comes into being -- for the
time being -- all *future* thoughts about that thing, IMO,
are simply references to that original instance (though
in potentially different contexts).

I.e., when I am looking for a receipt for a purchased item
for which I need to obtain warranty service, I figure out
what *type* of a purchase it was.  E.g., if it was business
related, then I go digging through my tax records; if it was
a personal purchase, then I look in one of N other folders
based on the *type* of device it is (HiFi, home appliance,
automotive, etc.)

> The problem is those things
> are probably different for each person. If a file browser
> made unused
> folders translucent and the ones used increasingly solid in
> proportion
> to my use, then I would be clued about the importance of
> the stuff, I

There isn;t much dynamic range in that sort of presentation.  :>
Though I suspect you really wouldn't need much -- a logarithmic
scale would probably work fine ("unused" vs. "really unused" vs.
really REALLY unused" need not be distinguishable, probably)

> guess the file browser would have to keep a huge history of
> what I was
> doing, so I'm not sure I like the idea. Probably the
> age of usege
> could be a factor also, to set color filters, thus blue or
> green tint
> for old usage, red for fresh (I may be using my windows SVN
> client a
> little to much). Does Vista or Mac do this cause, I have no
> clue?
> 
> I know that's no help, but it would look cool.

But this just deals with usage rates.  It lets you find things
that you use often/less often but it doesn;'t help you locate
things based on other criteria.

I.e., it suffers from the same "1 dimensional" organization
structure of a classic hierarchical name space.

I think you need to be able to key into that "name space"
along any/many of several different "axes" -- since each
criteria may have different relative merit based on
the type of item and its usage.