[Appeal] tag-based desktop

[Rainer Klein]

Hello Kai,

I like your ideas very much and want to second them. What you are asking for 
has been pretty much implemented by the KimDaBa for photo management and 
comes down to the following ideas:

	- Files are not identified by a file name 
	- and not organized by a folder/directory hierarchy 

instead filed have a free number of associated categories/classes allowing a a 
flexible searching, sorting and grouping. 

This comes down very much to object relational linking and indexing.

From the user perspective, multiple path ways to assign such categories or 
annotation should be available, such as:

	Drag & Drop
	Property/Tag  Editing
	Group assignments

And for text/document files, automatic text indexing should allow easy 
searching / filtering for any given words.

With regards,

Rainer Klein

 
On Sun, 9 Oct 2005 10:22 am, Kai Becker wrote:
> Hi Appeal team,
>
> the following is just an idea I had in my mind for the last few weeks. So I
> finally sat down and refined the strong points of it. I don't know if my
> ideas are doable from a technical view, so please feel free to tell me.
>
> Motivation
> ----------
> My motivation comes from the fact that I'm rather poor at organising files
> while creating them and I have to spend a lot of time organising them
> afterwards. One reason is of course my laziness, others are the missing
> flexbility of a directory hierarchy and the huge number of files that just
> come from everywhere.
> Instead of creating revolutionary ideas myself, I wondered where else do we
> have to cope with large amount of "files/data/whatever".
> Emails came to my mind. The traditional email client has folders, too, but
> it also has filters (we come to those later).  Google went a step further
> with their labels, making it possible to have one message in multiple
> contexts. Search folders/virtual folders in desktop mail clients serve the
> same purpose. You could still use folders, but actually I don't see a point
> in that anymore. Tags (Google calls them labels) replace them.
>
> Interface
> ---------
> I don't know if I want to keep folders or not, but at first folders and
> tags could live side by side. But the access to the tags would be
> different. I imagine a hierarchical "tag bar" on the right side of the
> screen showing all top level tags by name (they could also have a specific
> colour/icon/etc). Example:
> -holiday
>   - by date
> 	- 2004
> 	- 2005
>   - by location
> 	- europe
> 	- asia
> 	- america
> and so on.
> Single Click opens the list for that tag.
> Right Click gives you edit options.
> If you hover over a tag it shows you a different button which opens a
> window with all items carrying that tag.
>
> How to tag items:
> -----------------
>
> Method A
> Probably technically impossible:
> Every KDE app features a "TagIt menu" where you can enable or disable the
> tags. Pro:
> You can tag right out of the application
> Contra:
> Probably impossible
> I like Method B better (don't know why)
>
> Method B
> Drag'n'Drop
> * Drag the Tag from the TagBar on any item
> * Drag an item into an open tag window
> * Drag an item onto the TagBar
> When you single click on a Tag on the TagBar, the cursor should change and
> you can draw a "select rectangle" around items which are then tagged. You
> can also drop the tag onto an application. The file that is open right now
> in that application is tagged.
>
>
> Advanced Ideas
> --------------
> Remember the filters? It would be nice if there could be some autotagging.
> Examples:
> *Received files via different communication channels (email, im, irc) could
> be tagged (tags based on file extension, name of the sender in the
> adressbook, date, ...)
> *Manual defined filters: All files downloaded from kde-apps.org are tagged
> as "source code". You might even add certain actions to it (unpack, change
> into the directory, ./configure && make). This could become a powerful
> feature!
>
>
> Taggable (what a word ..) should be everything:
> kio-slave adresses (files, urls, ..), applications, settings
> You could have task centered desktops, for example you activate the tag
> projects/foobar for your virtual desktop and you have the needed apps for
> that project in your kicker and other settings are activated (close im app,
> change network settings, whatever you can think of).
>
>
> This are just the thoughts of a plain vanilla user, maybe you find
> something useful/inspiring in it.
>
> Kai Becker
> (i'm german, so I hope you had at least some fun reading my english *G*)
>
>
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