gnome and kde usability

Warning: you are about to read a bit of a ramble…

Slashdot has a discussion about an interview of several folks from the kde usability and gnome usability projects.

While all of this was not very interesting in and of itself it did lead me to spend some time thinking about file system metadata (see question six in the interview). Most of the projects that I have seen trying to do interesting things with file system metadata have had horrible user-interfaces. The two applications that I currently use that make excellent use of metadata are Microsoft’s Outlook and Real’s RealOne Player.

• both make adding information trivial
• both allow quick browsing based on the metadata
• both make it easy to change and create metadata (RealOne via CDDB and Outlook via drag and drop)
• both allow easy scanning and previewing of files
• both maintain their own metadata databases (although RealOne does write metadata into mp3 files)

I would like to see both of these merge some of the concepts from the flamenco project into their browsing interfaces.

I am pretty well organized on my computer… I like to keep everything in nice little hierarchies. But I often get into trouble when when my hierarchies don’t fit anymore (if I start working on three significant — worthy of nodes — subprojects). It is always a chore to decide the best way to classify things. Of course, this is likely more of a problem for me because I am lazy and a perfectionist.

Both of the above are applications designed for a specific tasks. They are able to more easily add interesting features (and in fact have to add features to survive). But I have never used an OS with extensive metadata facilities built into the file system (or somewhere near the file system level). I have seen a few projects to add such features but they are always scary because the limit data portability.

The gnome usability page led me to the list of references which reminded me of the humane interface project. The concepts sounded nice in the book but sound less appealing when I consider actually using the software.