::scr saving

[Ash Argent-Katwala]

On Wed, 20 Feb 2002, Chris Devers wrote:
>I can't think of any significant jumps beyond the old assumptions on any
>desktop OS that I've worked with, be it Mac9/X, Windows3.1-XP,
>*nix/X-windows, or BeOS. Contradictions gladly accepted.

I never had the pleasure of using BeOS back in the old no-directories days,
but it certainly left a decent legacy when Dominic Giampaolo came to write
BFS, and supported all the various funky live queries in the old system.

Whether or not you call that a significant jump is up to you. I'd argue with
all the cool things it let you do with mail (essentially query-driven views
on all your mail, irrespective of where on the system it was living or which
mail app you were using at the time). That it could be made presentable in
the interface, and the indices could keep everything damn-fast makes 
it more than just a speed boost on doing Finds. 

Having query-folders is good, and changes the way you start doing things. I
can't really care a great deal about quite where stuff lives on my home box,
because I reach most things by a query (sometimes pleasantly within a
suitable app, sometimes by just jumping in with Tracker's 'Find').

I quite like the idea that all the folder structure could be thrown away -
but then folk do like to keep things in them (hence Be putting them back
with the new BFS).

Scot Hacker's usual example is something like 'play me all the music I have
that is tagged with the keyword 'dog' and was made after 1986'.

The biggest advantage is the liveness though - if you have a Tracker window
open looking at some folder and then mess around at a terminal with the
contents, it all updates immediately. Since all the file requesters are
specialised Tracker windows they behave the same way.

That folk are still caring about files is a separate one entirely though -
but I think you could build a decent system on top of a queryable filesystem
where folk don't care about the files, and only get to care about what it
all means.

-- 
ash
a-k
... Zen Master to hotdog vendor: "Make me one with everything."