Trip Report: GNOME UI Hackfest

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 9:40 PM, C. Scott Ananian <cscott at laptop.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 3:28 PM, Chris Ball <cjb at laptop.org> wrote:
>> (I don't think this says negative things about OLPC at all; children
>> don't resist learning in this way.)
>
> Yet those Largo workers did somehow avoid learning about files and
> folders when *they* were young, despite almost certainly being
> exposed, nay *surrounded* by them.  I don't think they "forgot" as
> they grew up.  I'm not sure "resisted learning" is the right
> explanation, either.

I guess my opinion on this isn't very valuable, as I'm a known
believer in the benefits of a journal-like UI, but anyway. My
observations are that the troubles described by Federico's
presentation linked above by Scott are the norm in users that haven't
been strongly motivated to maintain a strong hierarchical organization
of their files (coders in a shared repository, for example). I've been
in the position of giving technical support to family members,
university professors, misc office workers, etc and the "where are my
files" problem is one of the most time consuming.

I think the general sw industry has recognized this need and people
have pushed this idea with acts (rather than with just words). Does
this give a bit of credibility to our desire of giving kids a content
addressable data repository?

But I don't see nothing wrong with giving an alternative view on the
raw filesystem. We just have to choose our priorities because we
cannot work on everything we'd like to.

Regards,

Tomeu