Some days ago I thought about how to improve a GUI in a new, handy way. I have to admit that my ideas are inspired by OSX and a I’ve seen in the creative design forum. Here’s what I think it should be:
The general idea is to have a vertical bar with bookmarks that is always shown on the screen. These bookmarks aren’t just websites, but also programs itself, documents like PDF-files, mails or chat logs and they are represented as thumbnails like in some file managers.
These thumbnails can be used in several ways. First you can open it and the appropriate program assigned to that file type opens so that you can directly use the file or website or whatever. The second way is to use it by drag and drop either to use the URI, the picture or the contents of that bookmark.
The third and perhaps difficult to understand way is as follows. Therefor I have to amplify:
I do most work in full screen windows to have the maximum space for the application. But there are some cases in which you need the data given by another application, i.e. file transfer from one window to another or data from a spreadsheet. Now you should be able to fade the needed data or application in the current screen.
I’ve done a crappy mockup to visualize the last idea (it’s done in a modded wxp):
What do you think about it? Maybe this idea already exists, I don’t know.
what do you mean with “lengths”? sorry, my english isn’t that good…
I skinned XP because I like the look but not the feel of OSX and also I can’t afford a Mac. Another thing is that I’m looking forward to Haiku and I need a recent version of Java for work and that’s why I can’t use R5 at the moment.
The difference is just that the contents of a file are shown to you when you browse a directory. I think that one can better identify a file by picture than by a (sometimes cryptic) filename.
The third way is kind of drag and drop but you have the ability to fade in only the necessary information. So you don’t have all the toolbars, menubars and other things that could be disturbing or use too much work space.
Another idea behind my concept is that a lot of programs are using tabs. I got tabs in my web browser, my text editor, my IDE, my messenger and so on and more or less “bookmarks” in every of those programs. It’s not that those tabs represent different functionality, but different documents. So why not move the tabs out of the programs itself to a system wide bookmark manager?
Maybe it’s a silly idea and I’m the only one who thinks that something like this would be practical.
Hey, that’s a lot like my mockup from awhile back…although, if I read you right, yours is different in that the thumbnails can represent programs/websites/documents that aren’t current open. Is that right? I have to think about it, but I think I like it.
Hmm I’m still not sure on the 3rd way - how do you select the “necessary information” without opening up the application?
I disagree that thumbnails are easier to identify - only for graphics and documents with large text. You could never tell the difference between 2 files containing source code from a thumbnail.
I guess my major problem with it is the limited space available. I’ve got far more than 5 or 6 “things” of importance in my computer - Over 20 bookmarks in firefox, tons of emails, dozens of programs, lots of files - it would end up being a waste of screen space for me I think.
Yeah Kev, you are right. That’s what it meant to be. My proposal is some what like an extension to yours.
@tb100: Hmmm… that’s something I didn’t think about. Maybe when selecting a thumbnail the corresponding program opens and you could select (in whatever manner) the data you need, for example certain rows of a more complex spreadsheet that would waste more screen space than needed. I understand your problem that you’ve got so many things that describing them by a thumbnail would need too much space so that this bookmark thingie would be very unpractial. Perhaps categorizing would be a way out. Another possibility would be to concentrate on the most relevant things. I personally work with half a dozent applications normally and got at most a dozent of bookmarks and documents I need for every day use. So maybe my thumbnail solution wouldn’t fit to everyone’s working usage.
OT: hey, Dude, your eDonkey is outdated (VERY outdated). Upgrade to get some speed.
Now to the topic. To be honest, you can only distinguish graphics by thumbnail, in a lot of cases not even video since it is either black or the scene is sh0t so you don’t see anything. A better idea would be a preview-on-demand for multimedia data I think. That means that when you hover a file, the browser either plays it (audio/video) or pops up a text dialog. Of course it can’t work for binaries until now.
For such a purpose a general preview framework would be useful.
An another possibility would be to run an index. Once you run a file for the first time the index picks a screenshot of the container of the file (the application). Then it will also work for binaries, but will flush your HDD space. And it can’t work really properly unless you specify only openable formats (yes, try to make a preview for a RAR file … without a RAR). So then the index is required to check whether the file has been loaded by an application. It makes so much work, eats a lot of resources, but has no proper use Just a suggestion.
I’ve always thought the simplest and best solution for representing movies by thumbnail is just to take the movie poster and use that. Of course, there’s no automatic way of doing that until they start including a standard thumbnail.jpg or something like that as part of movie file specs. Sounds like something the OGG container would excel at.
I guess a Be-like approach for saving thumbnails would be to save them as file attributes by BFS.
I (partially) agree that creating thumbnails is a performance and useness problem.
A non-bleeding-edge version of the thumbnail system could be to save user-given information about a file (an abstract, some notes about the content or something like this) as a file attribute. You could then also save a screenshot of - let’s say - a text editor with the file lodaded as a preview also associated to the file.
But the idea of having a preview framework that’s able to let you select partial data of a file to slide/fade it into the screen still sounds very interesting to me. Because I think that the program isn’t that important to me that handles a certain file type; it’s the information I want to work with and I don’t want to care about the program itself. Sure I have to care about the program when it comes to things like usability, functionality and so on, but the focus shouldn’t be on how to use a certain program. Using a computer should be more intuitiv and natural. In this context I also don’t want to care if a program is already loaded, initialized and ready to work. An idea that also already appeared in this forum was that a program (after it’s loaded once) will save its used RAM space in some kind of snapshot that is reloaded in RAM the next time it is called (like a hibernation mode, but only for a certain program). But maybe that goes too far :?
As far as screenshots\thumbnails go for non-images, take a look at the way that the new OpenOffice 2.0 does things. It uses the OpenDocument (I think that’s what it’s called) standard for it’s files; a saved “word processor file” is really a compressed archive that contains the actual file (represented as XML files for content, layout, and other info, as well as a DTD) as well as a screenshot of the document. When you open your documents folder in windows explorer, you see the screenshot of the first part of your document. The way they do ti works rather well for most documents, but as somebody mentioned, a folder full of source code would be very hard to tell apart… Anyway, just thought I’d mention that in case it gave someone some ideas.
Just a suggestion.