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From: freeman@spar.SPAR.SLB.COM (Jay Freeman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: 'Virtual' Folders - good idea!!  (This reply 100 lines)
Message-ID: <1503@spar.SPAR.SLB.COM>
Date: 28 Jun 88 21:32:34 GMT
References: <46100167@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> <1437@spar.SPAR.SLB.COM> <5282@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> <2044@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <443@esquire.UUCP>
Reply-To: freeman@spar.UUCP (Jay Freeman)
Distribution: na
Organization: SPAR - Schlumberger Palo Alto Research
Lines: 61

In article <443@esquire.UUCP> sbb@esquire.UUCP (Stephen B. Baumgarten) writes:
>In article <2044@pt.cs.cmu.edu> dtw@f.gp.cs.cmu.edu (Duane Williams) writes:

>>I certainly hope that Apple has the good sense to ignore all this nonsense
>>about reincarnating "virtual folders" or creating "clipped together"
>>documents and that they will instead enhance the "poor man's search path."

>This is all true, although I don't really know why everyone has problems
>with the current "solution" (i.e., just throw everything in the System
>Folder in a big jumble).  I agree it makes things hard to organize, but
>what exactly are you organizing, anyway?

>                          Anyway, is this more of an aesthetic issue, or
>am I missing something?


I suggest that the issue is certainly wider than the system folder -- the
various schemes proposed would all apply to iconic displays in any folder,
or on the desktop.

I think that it is precisely an aesthetic issue.  I would find iconic
displays more appealing and useful if I could pile icons one on top of
another and then manipulate them as one, with some systematic hint to remind
me that the front one is hiding others behind it.

I like the ability to tell at a glance, from the icon, what kind of document
I am looking at, but I find a folder or desktop with lots of icons to be
confusing.  I find myself making little heaps of the icons I am not
presently interested in, and putting them off in one corner of the folder,
or whatever.  But such a heap looks messy in its own right, and if I neaten
everything up squarely then a maximium-sized icon with a long name will hide
everything behind it, and perhaps "help" me forget that the others are
there.  And of course, whenever I do "option clean-up", the finder will
unstack my pile of icons, so I have to stack them up again, and then
rearrange all the other icons more compactly.

Sure, I could put things in extra folders, but often I would rather not.
After all, it isn't the software that minds looking through lots of icons,
it's me!  It seems silly to have to create a folder, and perhaps (in an
optimistic future) change a search path or (presently) change path-names
embedded in "make" files, just because I want a visual display that I
personally find more useful or appealing.  Besides, my choices as to what's
stacked and what isn't vary from day to day, sometimes from minute to
minute.  Perhaps I have everything stacked up except for a few files that I
am presently working on.  Perhaps I have a desktop pile of unrelated things
to be worked on, from which I peel documents one at a time.  In the latter
case I specifically do not want to put the documents in a separate folder,
because I intend to "put away" each one when I am done with it, and I do not
want it to forget the identity of the folder in which it originally resided.

I think the issue is completely orthogonal to that of search path -- I agree
in any case that Apple's search-path convention is not as powerful as it
should be.  But whether they fix the search-path mechanism or not, I would
also like to be able systematically to display and manipulate icons in
groups that are minimal in extent on the screen, that retain identity when
selected or dragged, and that do not spread apart when the rest of the
desktop or folder is reorganized.

					-- Jay Freeman