Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!ucbvax!MICA.BERKELEY.EDU!bowles
From: bowles@MICA.BERKELEY.EDU (Jeff A. Bowles)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: desktop of the future
Message-ID: <8901112041.AA14037@mica.berkeley.edu>
Date: 11 Jan 89 20:41:02 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 48

"Certain files could make distinctive noises...."

Look at the mailbox mechanisms some R&D sites have today: you send a
letter to George, and *YOUR* picture appears as an icon is his mailbox.

If I were editing music files, I'd want a couple of different handles
for the file:
	1. A representative grandstaff reduction of some recognizable
	   portion, i.e. the dit-dit-dit-dah for a transcription of
	   Beethoven's Fifth (1st movement);
	2. That recognizable portion, played on my MIDI interface.
Note that I'm not (NOT NOT NOT) talking about VIEWING the file, but
viewing the directory in which it resides - we're talking about the
handle for the file as it appears in a directory.

If I were viewing information on art work, perhaps I would have a folder
for each major artist, and the folder "name" would be a reduction of the
most well-known work he/she created. Why should it say "Rembrandt" in 
whatever typeface, when it can show me his self-portrait?

Note how the Mac has multiple ways to name a file - an icon coupled with
a name, a miniature icon coupled with the name (and other verbose info),
and so on. The practice is reasonable - certainly better than the 1960's
method of naming files things like
	X.OBJ    X.LOAD    X.LIB   X.FORT   X.PLI   X.ASM
although on Unix, we're much better than that - we use one-character
suffixes!

If files were, in fact, sets of observations (think about statistics
for a sec), perhaps the handles you used might be something else, but
the idea that you might view a directory KNOWN TO CONTAIN RELATED FILES
using something like "show the directory as a 2-D graph in which the
files are on the X-axis and the maximum data item from each file is its
Y-coordinate". I agree with whomever said that this sort of thing would
be a powerful tool.

Imagine someone else combining a couple of the above examples, and
saying "each file contains a score, let the handle for the file be
the highest note appearing in the tenor line and show me the directory."
It this a database query? Sorta kinda.

The only problem I see is how to make such a system extensible. You
can't imbed A-L-L the different ways to show a file, because as I indicate
in the above examples, you could come up with a lot of different TYPES
of files. Still, it's a good place to start: something that would be nice
to use, albeit not easy to implement....

	Jeff Bowles