Suggestion to attract new users

[SanskritFritz]

2JohnFredC

What does *rotfl* mean?

"Rolling on the floor laughing".

[Sheepdog]

1. What does *rotfl* mean?

Although SanskritFritz has already explained the meaning you may be interested to bookmark this
thread.

sheepdog

[JohnFredC]

My goodness... how did I miss that thread?

*rotfl*

[Sam_Zen]

people (that's non-TC-users) find TC to be ugly and a "nerd-tool", and go back to Explorer.
Sadly but true... I know you apparently can't see this, but that's my personal experience, so there you go

Apparently Never said that this is an easy job. My efforts to convince people also sometimes dramatically failed.
Maybe the most difficult aspect is not so much about the qualities of TC, but more to convince people to give it some
time, to experience it on the longer term. In stead of a quick judging of the surface, and give it a yes or no.
Nothing bad about looking forward to v7. I'm sure you have good intentions by this. But I just wanted to emphasize the fact, that you're not the only one on this board about this, questions, suggestions, requests, etc. and the Author has to read them all.

The other thing is (and that has been talked about before AFAIK) that an interested user can only see that official screenshot which could even deter a major TC-fan.

Just had a look and I must agree on this, but maybe for different reasons. To present this to a newcomer, it has to be very simple and straightforward, so imo the bar with the drives should be disabled, and choosing a snapshot during a FTP-session is not very handy either, because this is something for advanced users.

2. Perhaps system administrators will always have the most interest in file locations, resource allocations, etc. That's certainly understandable.
But many of the rest of us use computers for stuff not related to computers per se... and, except for backups, the file metadata is more important than file location.

This suggests that 'file location' is something already only for the experts, so becoming some mystic technical thing.
I am not a system administrator, but I us my pc professionally for audio, graphics and webpages, and I certainly need to have survey about where my files are, are to be saved, categorized as backup, etc.

Just because it's promoted by MS doesn't automatically mean it's useless/worthless/whatever, heretical as that may seem.

To me it does on forehand (just the result of history), unless proven profoundly otherwise.
So I admit to have grown a certain allergy to terms like 'meta', 'multi', 'auto', 'easy', or 'all-in-one'. Claims to attract people who don't want to put any effort in learning something new. But TC is a serious tool, not some fancy-looking chat-program which you should be able to use, one hour after you bought you first pc.

2 Sheepdog
Cheers. Missed that too. Very nice list by Raymond there.

[JohnFredC]

This suggests that 'file location' is something already only for the experts

Not really. It just means that the traditional folder hierarchy is only one of many "slices" or "dimensions" that have importance to users. There are many other characteristics of our data files that cannot be captured efficiently by folder and filename... such as image dimensions, or mp3 bitrate, or genre, or artist, or project, or version, or status... more dimensions than can be expressed by a simple hierarchy composed of linear lists of named items.

If you have ever used TC's "branch view" with a filter (such as *.jpg), then you have already stepped into the world of metadata by suppressing file location info in favor of another paradigm.

Useful, wasn't it?

[jb]

My offer: create official "improved" distribution of TC which will involve more users. No plugins additions - only standard adjustments changes to more convenient.
Certainly, the old distribution should be left.

Three years ago I suggested something similar in thread "Show TC's beauty & power by default – Config Schemes".

[B@rndH]

1. What does *rotfl* mean?

Although I'm not Sir_Silva I'd like to point to your interest at pages like http://ffm.junetz.de/akronyme/en/ or http://www.acronymfinder.com/af-query.asp?acronym=rotfl which give a short list of often used acronyms.
To save you the search: rofl or rotfl = "Rolling on the floor and laughing"

[frenky]

Although SanskritFritz has already explained the meaning you may be interested to bookmark this
thread.

Small correction:
2B or not 2B To Be Or Not To Be

Code: Select all

2B | !2B

[SanskritFritz]

2frenky
Even more correct:

Code: Select all

2b|!2b

pressing shift and space unnecessary?

[Sven]

2b || !2b

It's a logical OR.

[SQUIRE]

Unfortunately, these nuggets are so deeply hidden that only a very interested person will click himself through to the FAQ (if he is still interested then!?) and then further on to the wiki which in itself is a concept not known to many people out there on the internet.

This plea for TC to present a prettier face to the world goes back simply years and I've often wondered why Ghisler hasn't bothered. He could have easily done it with one eye closed, hopping on one leg and with a rose clenched between his teeth - if he'd really wanted to. Has anyone ever considered that he has thought it through and actually does NOT want to attract clueless dudes and is quite content to confine his custom to a growing subset of IT-savvy people who understand the difference between substance over presentation? Kinda makes sense to me now. Are casual users likely to want to pay for it? Nope, but they'll surely create a huge volume of support queries and a large headache with no financial return in sight. Bad marketing move. OTOH, knowledgeable users have no problems tweaking the look and feel to meet their particular needs, and will in turn spead the good word to their like-minded buddies. They're also far more likely to value and pay for the program once they've grown to appreciate its usefulness. Advertising by word-of-mouth, contrarian plan, smart move! Or are they coming to take me away, ha-ha, ha-ha?

However, Windows Vista (specifically WinFS) will change the file manager landscape. All of the dual pane filers are going to have to adapt or probably, in the long term, die.
Soon, it will be 90% about the metadata and only 10% about the filing.

What a cheerful prognosis! I certainly hope you're wrong.

[1] To implement WinFS sensibly, it'll have to consist of 2 parts, an SQL-like database and the file system proper since a single RDBS combining both parts and growing and shrinking would be horribly inefficient. If you look at the space already consumed by NTFS metadata, things can only get worse. Sure, HDs are getting cheaper by the day so that may not matter, but do I want every file operation to always trigger some DB activity by definition? No thanks. It might not matter for a couple of files but there would inevitably be a performance price to pay when you deal with several hundred files at a time.

[2] WinFS suits Vista's eye-candy approach right down to the ground - pretty pop-up menus based on content, virtual panels, and so forth. Home users will be thrilled. But I've yet to read anything but marketing puffery on the number of users dying to sort their files by arcane criteria. Are there really millions wanting to sort mp3s by ID3 data or photos by EXIF info? We can already do that now. And an RDBS is next to useless if the data file does not contain any useful info e.g. binary executables.

[3] It's yet another proprietary file system, like NTFS (specifications still tightly held, AFAIK) and not open source - and that's a BAD thing. It hasn't escaped your attention, I hope, that MS has fought a long court battle over patent rights to the FAT file system? Given its demonstrated take-no-prisoners track record, I think people are rightly wary of handing MS yet another stick to beat them with. It's a monopoly - like IBM (with the PC) before it - and I can't think of one that hasn't abused its privileged position, can you? I can still recall all PC clone manufacturers hanging desperately on to every one of Big Blue's moves and scrambling to respond to the new AT keyboard and PS/2 connector! All it takes is a little tweak to winFS and any successful competitive product can be thrown 3-6 months out of whack while it plays catch-up.

[4] If it rules the roost eventually, how long do you think it will be before winFS is tied to some form of highly-restrictive DRM system (aka 'your ass is mine')?

[5] IMHO, Vista/winFS will have far more trouble replacing XP than XP had replacing flaky Win98 platforms. Of the 200 million+ PCs out there, more than half have embedded graphics quite incapable of showing off Vista's bells and whistles like Aero Glass transparency, etc. Upgrade to at least 2 GB RAM for decent performance and a DirectX 9 graphics card? Hmmm. Corporate users aren't too keen about replacing their stable XP systems with a brand-new platform with brand-new bugs either, even if it's allegedly more secure. So there's not about to be a headlong rush to upgrade by any means.

Conclusion: I may be wrong, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for TC and other file managers to die anytime soon!

*rotfl* thats what MS and Adobe wanna make YOU belive *rotfl*

Sir SiLvA's being (unusually for him) polite here! Majkinator or sheepdog would probably have said roflmao!

[JohnFredC]

2Squire
Great post! Thanks for it...

Basically what I hear you say is that when WinFS gets here, you won't use it, and you don't want TC to develop toward using it, either.

I'm not holding my breath waiting for TC and other file managers to die anytime soon!

Well me neither! (rotflmao) ...but if you think that, I didn't state my case very clearly.

What I meant was that soon there will be new paradigms available for searching, arranging, summarizing, associating, and other "ings" our files. These new paradigms will be supported by MS at the core of Windows via an API. File location management will not "go away"... it will just move aside to make room for other simultaneous approaches.

What I have been trying to do is get a dialog going about how TC could be modified to creatively and productively incorporate WinFS features, specifically custom metadata. Photo and other media managers already do a similar sort of thing. Some work well (MediaMonkey's folder tree) and some don't work quite as well (Picassa's folder tree) and some are abysmal (iTunes). I want similar functionality in TC and want to influence the design.

Asset management for game developers is one area of enormous opportunity for the WinFS paradigm. I'm sure you can think of others.

[Sam_Zen]

2 JohnFredC
Of course I use content plugins like Audio- and Image Info, so if that's metadata, fine by me. But I prefer it to be an option, when I need it, not as a replacement for the present file-structure.

As I understand, the average users of XP don't see the file-extension anymore, which is a big mistake by M$ IMO.
Such policies and more did make me decide not to upgrade the OS anymore at the introduction of XP, and stick to 2K. And while now reading things here about Vista, I most probably will ignore that too.

If, in the future, TC was forced to change its behaviour into the direction of abandoning the two-panel concept, I would decide in the same way, that the previous version of TC will be my final one.

But I'm afraid I'm an exception about this here.

[Balderstrom]

Tc almost suffers from Firefoxism (extensions needed even to do simple Option changes) - Except even without any plugins TC is extremely powerful. The problem is there are too many plugins - many that duplicate behaviour or that don't play well together.

If handling of MetaData || Virtual Folders || WinFS is left to the plugin-archetechure it can only mean bad news.