Heiko Tietze wrote:

markg85 wrote:Something else you said about all the axis stuff made me think about some (i think it was mozilla?) future vision of file handling. They had some kind of cloud idea where files add/edited most recently where clearly visible. Files then are further away (in Z space) if their time is older or usage is older. I would have liked to share a link to that video, but i can't find it anymore
Edit:
Got it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYMA5W8b1zY

Nice. But isn't it still 1.5 dimensional, i.e. the semantic relation plus some kind of tag could? I'll try to make an example of my idea.

Note: that mozilla cloud idea is nice, but not what i initially described
In the mozilla way you basically use the Z axis as age for files. The older a file is, the further away it is on the Z axis.
My "idea" was still fairly "flat" where i would use the Z axis to display previously opened folders. But i think i like the idea more to use Z as age. However, that does give you a whole bunch of different problems since you can't work based on a folder hierarchy anymore. Each folder could have wildly different dates so you would completely lose a folder structure where Z represents age.

Aargh, this is difficult!

At this point i just don't know what would be the best way to represent files in a 3D space. There are a few options in this thread alone and with the right amount of fantasy you can probably think of dozen additional ways. I just hope some of you folks draft up "some" 3D inspired file browser and continue from there on.

markg85 wrote:Aargh, this is difficult!

Maybe you get inspired by 3D Scrabble: http://scrabble.sourceforge.net/wiki/ (if you want to try the 3D feature take Gtk2 and not Qt).

Ok, so here's my initial idea on this. I appreciate it might not be exactly what you were after, but I've thought of something that at least I'd be prepared to use. I've decided not to stray too far from the 2d world, as I think there's a reason we're not flying around our computers at the moment! I've merely added a 3d twist to the norm.

I hope that the initial diagram is fairly self explanatory really. Essentially you will be always either zooming in or out, and expanding on each selection, and then shuffling through its tabs (if necessary). I also feel it's quite extensible as well as you could have as many tabs as you'd like, perhaps even for things like 'open with'?



Any questions then hit me up!

Edit: the down arrow at bottom should be tilted upwards so it's more 3d and pointing at the user rather than at the floor.

Hmm, the more I think about it the more I feel this is the way to go, as the tabs can be further extended and made into their own 3d elements in their own right. Take for example tags. The picture below demonstrates how a tag cloud would look for the folder WhoCares. Essentially it would show all the tags of all the files in it in a kinda 3d cloud, or ball, or whatever you want really. The same could be done with filesize, or file types, etc etc. But it keeps it in a structured hierarchy that makes it very easy to keep track of where you are.



Please note that these are just very rough ideas I'm bringing to life with these extremely dodgy mockups. If you like the idea then these can be polished and thought through more.

davidwright wrote:Hmm, the more I think about it the more I feel this is the way to go, as the tabs can be further extended and made into their own 3d elements in their own right. Take for example tags. The picture below demonstrates how a tag cloud would look for the folder WhoCares. Essentially it would show all the tags of all the files in it in a kinda 3d cloud, or ball, or whatever you want really. The same could be done with filesize, or file types, etc etc. But it keeps it in a structured hierarchy that makes it very easy to keep track of where you are.



Please note that these are just very rough ideas I'm bringing to life with these extremely dodgy mockups. If you like the idea then these can be polished and thought through more.

That's starting to look like something cool

One thing i notice is the available free space around the "3D view". Can you think of any good use for that?

I've been thinking over past couple of days about an overview look for the file manager. 'Traditional' 3d filemanagers choose the use the file structure itself as the overview (see Glomp for a nice demo of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IuKR-cJVs8); however, no matter how nice looking it is there are fundamental problems with this approach when it comes to basic functionality, such a selecting multiple files. Hence why I've stuck with 2D for the actual file browsing, and used 3D to display the properties of the file.

So I thought to myself, what would benefit from an overview look? Then I looked at my six open dolphins, two of them in split view, and it struck me, the workflow would benefit most. So that's what's represented below. The stacked folders being ones where you've clicked through, and the ones either side and above where you've 'split the view'.

This needs a lot more thought put into it, but overall with this last piece of the puzzle I think I've nailed down the main elements for my vision of a 3D file manager.

markg85 wrote:
That's starting to look like something cool

Thanks. I like this tab approach because it gives flexibility. If the folder was say, a git clone one, you could have Git tab and show a 3d representation of the git history. Frankly though, if you were going to go down this road then making it so people can easily write their own tab plugins would be the way to go I would have thought.

markg85 wrote:One thing i notice is the available free space around the "3D view". Can you think of any good use for that?

Not yet, no.

There is still going to be need for search, places etc. So maybe some sort of floating panel on the left would do it? Not sure yet. I would envisage a lot of the stuff you see in the 'control' button of dolphin would be put in either a tab or just a general settings button on the folders themselves, as a lot of those settings are folder specific. I did think about maybe putting a fixed panel on the right hand side like glomp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IuKR-cJVs8 does with folder settings but I'm not 100% sold on the idea.

davidwright wrote:So I thought to myself, what would benefit from an overview look? Then I looked at my six open dolphins, two of them in split view, and it struck me, the workflow would benefit most. So that's what's represented below. The stacked folders being ones where you've clicked through, and the ones either side and above where you've 'split the view'.

This needs a lot more thought put into it, but overall with this last piece of the puzzle I think I've nailed down the main elements for my vision of a 3D file manager.

Oh, that looks and sounds like a great idea! It would surely take some getting used to, but after some familiarization, it may really help navigating through the folder hierarchy efficiently!