Hi,

Some of you might know that i'm working on Accretion. The goal with accretion isn't particularly in the design area. It's more like the following:

• Prove that QML can be used for modern day applications. Right now there isn't much to prove anymore since others have done it by now. But when i started the Accretion project there where virtually no desktop QML based applications and attempting to do so was considered to be a mistake.
• A file browser that is has speed as it's main goal. Folders need to be loaded fast, sorting needs to be done insanely fast without a notable delay for the user.
• Test out my patches to KIO.

So it's basically just a big playground for my to test experiments in KIO and display them in QML. Thus far that's working really great for me.

In the design area i still have some ideas which i've never seen in any other file managers but would like to try to implement. I have the vision (which is down below) but i lack the inspiration to come up with mockups which in turn could be changed to real life code.

First things first, why 3D?
All file browsers I've seen thus far are flat. Even the ones with tons of "skeuomorphism". The actual "view" is always flat. A background with icons laying on top of that. That view apparently works very well since we've been using that for decades. I like to think a bit out of the box and with QML we have the power of OpenGL at our disposal (kind of), so why don't we make something more 3d-ish? If we use 3D we can represent data much more differently then we currently do. Also, with 3D i don't mean skeuomorphism, i actually mean 3D. As in using depth. I don't know if it's for better or worse, but it is probably worth a shot and see what we can come up with. If it fails, so be it. Nice experiment nevertheless.

Icon view 3D ideas
The best example i can think of here is Apple's time machine view:


My view is as follows. I want to represent every folder you open as a "layer" in a 3D world. The layer most in front is obviously your current layer and should be clearly visible. The folder you opened before that should be heavily blurred, a little zoomed out and be behind your current folder. Both views should be visible which means that the background of the current folder should be transparent. The thing that represents this best is the Apple Time Machine view. However, that isn't blurred and is slightly tilted. You should really see this as a stack where you're looking head on.

3D Context menu
If you use 3D there should be a neat visual way to visualize a right press on a given icon. How that should be visually represented, i don't know. Perhaps something like


although that can be tricky to represent each action as an icon. It might benefit of a more "textual" approach like this:


Mind you, these are just mockups i could find and look cool to me. They should be a bit more "3D-ish" in this context menu. In both of the two images above the center should be the actual icon/image you right click.


I think that would be complex enough as it is. I'm very curious to see some mockups from the VDG/artistic skilled people in this forum and see what kind of great mockups end up in this thread

Hehe, when I think of 3d filesystem viewers I always remember that scene from Jurassic Park. The funny thing is that was actually a real program! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn

markg85 wrote:All file browsers I've seen thus far are flat.

Then check this out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_manager (spacial and 3D file managers) .

And 3D is not necessarily skeuomorph, or in other words humans do not have a 1:1 representation of the outer world but 'process' visual information. Marr's concept of visual processing consists of a) the primal sketch with the constitutive information like shape or color, b) the 2.5D sketch that adds pseudo depth information by shading for instance, and c) a 3D model that integrates all into a continuous flow. We do neither 'see' nor 'process' visual information in 3D unless when time comes into play. So why should we support information processing by adding a 3rd dimension?

So, clicking on a folder will make it expand in front of the old one? How do you get back to the old one? If it's just a back button, that doesn't seem like it really makes it 3d beyond the visuals.

To use your words, the actual view is still flat. Or do you have something else in mind?

I was thinking about what I would expect from 3D. And that's a true different dimension. For example, you have some files of their size, the age, and a tag. Now imagine to create a xyz diagram with the axes x=size, y=age, z=tagging and plot the files into this diagram using the name as label. This leads to a xy view that consists of file size vs. file age, a xz view with file age vs. tagging, and yz with tagging vs. size.
The three dimensions could be assigned with data that makes more sense and the cube does not necessarily needs to show the data in 3D (this fake could be relevant for the hierarchy) but the basic idea should be clear. Or isn't it?

That is an awesome idea! Yes this is me officially geeking out like there is no tomorrow!

As for mockups - I think this deserves some rather heavy thinking and I think Heiko is on to something rather sweet. One of the issues with filemanagers is that they often lack information beyond placement of files meaning that all organisation you will naturally get is "which folder did I put that damn file?" and this is a rather neat way to visualize the different forms of tagging available.

Also +1 to Jurassic Park "this is Unix, I know Unix!"

I just tried out TDFSB (Can we teach that guy a lesson on memorable application names, please?), and I must say it's a rather cool experience to fly through your file system.
I think such an approach might even be useful, but it would have to be designed much better for that. TDFSB does not present the files or folders within a folder in a way that makes navigation easier than 2D, because it only uses sizes to convey information for some file types (archives and plaintext files, it seems), and the position of the objects in space appears "random".
Still interesting as a starting point for thinking about how 3D could be used in an actually practical way. You can try it out. It's in the Arch community repos, and presumable available in other distros as well.
EDIT: Oh and make sure you press h to get help, cause otherwise you'll have no idea what to do there

Heiko Tietze wrote:I was thinking about what I would expect from 3D. And that's a true different dimension. For example, you have some files of their size, the age, and a tag. Now imagine to create a xyz diagram with the axes x=size, y=age, z=tagging and plot the files into this diagram using the name as label. This leads to a xy view that consists of file size vs. file age, a xz view with file age vs. tagging, and yz with tagging vs. size.
The three dimensions could be assigned with data that makes more sense and the cube does not necessarily needs to show the data in 3D (this fake could be relevant for the hierarchy) but the basic idea should be clear. Or isn't it?

I think 3D is not beneficial for standard file system navigation, but rather for getting an overview or a "feeling" for what is there on a device. Like what you suggest there.

3D file manager cool.

when I was thinking about 3D navigation I was thinking about marble. So your Computer will be the earth. Other Network computers could be the sun, mars, ...

The structure on earh could be:
1. earch = home and media
2. continent = folders or tags
3. cities = subfolders

In the cities you have than images, text, zip, ....

when you use the files in the past the files are something highlightes (on top, bigger, with a frame, in the center of the city, ...)

colomar wrote:I think 3D is not beneficial for standard file system navigation, but rather for getting an overview or a "feeling" for what is there on a device. Like what you suggest there.

I think so to but it could be a realy benefit for something like Filelight. An additional view for filelight would be realy great. You can also implement there something like a historical view, 3D overview of your files, ...

andreas_k wrote:I think so to but it could be a realy benefit for something like Filelight. An additional view for filelight would be realy great. You can also implement there something like a historical view, 3D overview of your files, ...

Exactly! Filelight is one of those "get an overview" cases. You don't use Filelight if you want to open or move a certain file, but you use it to know where the heck the space on your disk went.

Another idea that I've seen thrown around involved clustering files (and folders?) by content/tags/other properties, so you start with a large-scale (galactic) overview, and can zoom into different clusters to try and find the files you want.

Granted this doesn't require a 3d perspective to accomplish, but since we're already on the subject of alternative browsing styles, I figured I might as well throw that in there.

Heiko Tietze wrote:

markg85 wrote:All file browsers I've seen thus far are flat.

Then check this out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_manager (spacial and 3D file managers) .

And 3D is not necessarily skeuomorph, or in other words humans do not have a 1:1 representation of the outer world but 'process' visual information. Marr's concept of visual processing consists of a) the primal sketch with the constitutive information like shape or color, b) the 2.5D sketch that adds pseudo depth information by shading for instance, and c) a 3D model that integrates all into a continuous flow. We do neither 'see' nor 'process' visual information in 3D unless when time comes into play. So why should we support information processing by adding a 3rd dimension?

As said before, to be able to display information in a entirely new way. But how to represent them in a totally cool stunning way is a bit difficult for me. I'm not very artistic (unlike you VDG folks).

Some of the "3d-ish" usecases that i can imagine:

• Imagine you have a folder open with images. You see all thumbnails of that folder (like you see now in any regular file browser). If you then click on one of those images you could actually "zoom in" in your file to see a bigger version of the image. By zooming in you get a real "depth" idea of your files.
• Imagine you have files with revisions (svn, git, ...). Clicking a file would then allow you to stack that file in multiple layers (like the apple time machine). The Z axis would then be time where you can go back to previous revisions of your file.

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

I'm still thinking about this. The problem I see is trying to make it so that you'd actually continue to want to use it, and not use it the once and think, 'oh that's cool' and then never use it again. Something like this could easily become a gimmick, which would be a shame.

The way I see it is that there is a lot of information that is currently displayed in the righthand column of dolphin and in the right-click options that could maybe displayed all at once by the depth that 3D would afford us. How to do it though is the interesting bit.

Something to think about on my lunch time power walks.

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.