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IDEA: Visual FileSystem

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Perry Mowbray:
After looking at http://labs.live.com/photosynth/ the other day and thinking about the various applications that are springing up around GoogleMaps, I started thinking of different ways to visualise the filesystem.

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/ does a neat job in doing that with words, but I wondered about visualising the filesystem based on different groupings than files and directories.

First Thought
Start menu could be graphically rendered to show the programmes... linking from the programmes could be the files that that programme reads/writes... hovering on the files could produce links like the windows context menu links (send to, etc).

WHY? FARR does a great job when you know something about the name of the file, Recent Documents does a good job for recent docs, the filesystem does not a bad job depending on how you file your stuff... I thought something like this could produce a web of relations (and maybe what relations that are used could be changed, so that maybe author, dates, etc could be used.

So I'm thinking it's like a dynamic search (based on file properties) in a graphical interface.

Another Thought
Then I wondered if something similar could be done with web pages, which would be like a dynamic link index I guess?

I guess I didn't know if it was just rehashing existing functionality (search, weblinks, etc) in a graphical format or it could be really useful? Sometimes expressing something in a visual framework can be quite intuitive.

Thoughts?

- Perry

Perry Mowbray:
Following VisualThesaurus through I found http://www.thinkmap.com/ which is the engine that drives it: amazing (and cheap at $5K)!

jgpaiva:
I see what you mean. Visual filesystems already exist. Not much time ago, i saw a 3d filesystem in which you navigated and used in a similar way to a video game.
I played with it for a while, and my current opinion about it is: DON'T GO 3D!!
It's awful. Slow, hard to use, confusing, etc, etc.

Improving in that kind of well-stabilished ideas isn't that easy, i think.

Rover:
Coming up with a 3D file viewer would be fairly trivial in some respects.

The big problem to me is coming up with a 3D metaphor.  What object/icon would you use to represent a file?  Would a Word Doc be different from a PDF or a DLL?

The next challenge is how do you contain those 3D objects?  We still need to establish some hierarchy or tree to organise the stuff.

Did you have something in mind?

Perry Mowbray:
Thanks for reminding me about those 3D Desktops (I'd forgotten, but it does explain why the idea seemed familiar): I played with them about a year ago I think. At the time I thought they may have been nifty, but not a lot of use (they seemed to be appearing in films a lot at the time).

I don't think I was actually thinking of 3D like render, but just the creation of a model that displayed links and groups that increased functionality and user experience.

Obviously the more dynamic the link creation is the better. It's just another view of what's already there on the harddrive, I was wondering if it would be a more functional view?

I think the answer is in how the links are created and how they can be used to adjust the display and any possible actions.

Say for example a view was created by the search term 'Work', I guess some of what could be displayed is files/folders that have work in their meta data somewhere, and they could be displayed in a net of files in their directory structure (I'm visualising the http://www.visualthesaurus.com/ example here). Clicking on different nodes creates a different view.

If 'Work' could be defined by subgroups of some sort (apart from the filesystem) by the meta data, maybe 'Work at home', 'Issues at work', etc then those subgroups become the nodes that redefine the search. Once in the subgroup, those files could be "selected" no matter where they are on the filesystem and acted upon in some way.

You're right Rover: the hierarchy and how to generate it, is the crux here.

- Perry

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