The Reality of Semantic Desktops: Death To Tags, Labels and Folders

So, I recently saw some more updates on the Gnome Live wiki regarding the evolution of a ‘Semantic Desktop’. I have some bad news people: Its not going to happen. Now before everyone spends 20 minutes explaining all the ways it could, let me clarify my point. It’s a largely unattainable goal, which if it ever were to complete, would be a horrible user experience. I think somewhere between RDF, FoaF, and ObjectRank we lost sight of the original goal of a Semantic Desktop. We wanted to organize, present and store data in a fashion more congruent with the human mind. The general effort behind the Semantic Web and Desktop movements was to reduce the ‘multiplier effect’ of communication. (Take for example one e-mail sent to a mailing list, the file and data is now duplicated a hundred times over, and each receiver must filer or classify the e-mail with relationship to themselves). On the scale that communication takes place over the web, this effort is still crucial, but in the desktop world, where we operate on a billionth of the scale, that problem is not nearly as pervasive. No doubt the advances made in understanding and structuring the mass hysteria of the web will benefit desktop users, but I think forcing that structure onto the desktop is not only impossible, but counter-productive.

In my opinion the options are clearly laid out before us:
1) Move the desktop into the structured realm of a million and one tags/categories/color filters/labels/folders
- Or -
2) Get rid of it all. And just know what the user wants. (Ok, not really all of it, but instead of adding more hierarchies, we add more in-place understanding)

I know, its a bold statement, but somewhere between my tags, stars, labels, folders and emblems I realized that all these efforts we were making towards ease of use and understanding are just obfuscating things even further.  These elaborate systems that require users to squeeze into sub-par standards like iCal exacerbate the problem even more, and ignore the efficiency of simple systems, like a pad of paper. (Yes, props to Tomboy). The problem is, many times a blunt-simple interface requires significantly more work on the programmers side (to actually understand the data entered) than a more traditional tabs-and-forms approach. I think we are demanding too much from users, how many people actually keep their address book completely updated? Or tag all their photos, or keep every document in the right folder? Even those who are vigilant eventually fall behind, and that’s because users already know what the material they are filling is, but still have to spend time explaining to the computer which items are related and where they belong. Especially for users with large sets of desktop data (Few thousand docs,e-mails,photos, and songs) the time can add up. Instead of asking users to commit even more time for data integrity and organization with more tagging systems.

The way I see it, we can count on 2 skills from a Desktop user.
1) Searching ( ThankYou Google!! Most people are quite comfortable with search phrasing!) or more accurately, knowing what they are looking for
2) To use their computer even when they aren’t looking for something (ie content generation, surfing the web, chat etc.)

These are the common denominators that we should be reaching for. We shouldn’t be trying to make the user classify their relationship with each person in their address book, we should just always be there, identifying the relationship based upon their level of interaction. And on a higher level than traditional approaches have taken us. After working on the Beagle Project for some time, the incredible weight of maintaining the backends to communicate with each mail client, each rss reader and each chat client almost seems to drown out the gain from having the data in a central and unified place. I mean, each time it was just someone talking to someone else right? Why have we taken simple actions and tried to codify them, when the complexities of human behavior are so great any Psychologist would tell you its a guessing game anyways. I think we should start with the disorganized mess that is someones workday at a computer and ask for nothing else. Reverse the system, take all of our analytical energies and structure, and use it for ourselves, in the backend, and just have the users use computers.

The best example of this is the phenomenon of tagging. Basically associating like objects via keyword-phrases. The problem is tags restrict themselves, lets say I have created a blog post about web browsers, while the tags ‘html, web, mozilla, ie’ may indeed be the most accurate 4 words from my point of view, they in no way approach the whole set of meanings and connotations carried by all their synonyms, let alone the entire post. In the realm of multimedia, tags are more useful, as images and videos are harder to extract contextual value from, but there is a better way….

Lets be smart! Instead of trying to stem the tide of data to make it more manageable, we ride the wave! Data is very rarely stagnate on a machine, people send photos to friends, edit each others papers, and share music all the time, there is a wealth of information in the chat I have with a friend while he listens to the new song I sent him, we just need to grab it!

I have specifics and even a little bit of code for my next post, but until then, I want feedback, do people agree? I mean, yeah, a million and one more ways for me to catalog and store my data, but when I’m actually looking for something the tags never seem to help much. While tags and folders do help with the clutter problem, I want to propose the idea that we move completely beyond presenting the hierarchy to the user, and start determining how (from the most basic of usage data) we could better present/organize information. Is the ubiquitous search box the only UI system that fits? What about something like Dasher meets lowfat, powered by an incredible datastore, but for files?

Bazaar and its Rockage

So, I think most of the open source world has agreed that the DRCS model fits our working style better than the traditional model pushed by SVN and CVS etc. And in this DRCS world we have rallied around 3 main tools: Bzr, hg, and git. And in an even greater display of complacency we have given those 3 tools quick and general classifications that became obsolete almost a year ago. Bzr is user friendly but slow and technologically inferior, hg is the champion of the middle but with slow development and a lackluster community, git is wicked fast and ‘The Right Way’TM but a pain to use.

Really? Come on guys, those molds were cast almost a year and a half ago, isn’t it time we looked at things again? Git has an entirely new interface, hg has a slew of plugins/extensions, and bzr has a completely new repo format, and network protocol, resulting in a massive speedup. Now I’m not claiming to be some unbiased source, and comparing 3 incredibly robust tools is not my job, but given the amount of support that Git receives from its very vocal supporters makes me feel a need to give props to my favorite DRCS system: Bazaar.

That’s right, Bazaar (or bzr) is awesome. Sure, git is awesome too, and so is mercurial, but I have found myself loving bzr. I’m not going to attack other DRCS tools, I just want to extol the awesomeness that is bzr.

1) Bzr is Python-Tastic! – As a python hacker, being able to utilize a robust API and plugin system is a cool plus, this also generates lots of powerful and complete plugins, which leads me to the next point.
2) Bzr has a ton of plugins! – Plugins like bzr-avahi (allows the discovery of branches on a local network, great for sprints/hackfests), bzr-svn (makes working with upstream repositories easy as pie!), quilt and gtk tools.
3) Bzr works on Windows – Yeah, I’m not a huge fan of accommodating Windows users, but it makes collaboration easier, I don’t have to make my roommate boot into Ubuntu to lend a hand with some CSS bugs.
4) Bzr is easy to share – The ability to push branches to some central repo is a big component of distributed development. While patches work in some cases, most of the time, having access to a branch makes the whole system work better. Both Git and Hg require a bit of work to set up a new repo and push a branch, bzr supports a ton of protocols and can create the target directory/repo with one command. Sharing is easy!
5) Bzr is fast – Maybe others are faster, maybe it could be a million times faster, I dunno. What I do know is the only thing I seem to wait on is my net connection… I realize that many people need more than that. So here you go. http://bazaar-vcs.org/Benchmarks
6) Bzr is small – In my development model (a shared repo with branches inside of it) bzr is compact and aware of disk space, without repositories it might be huge, I dunno.
7) Bzr is clear about whats happening – I can follow what Bzr is trying to do with my code. A branch is a new directory, and I can always see my code. Not only is this comforting/reassuring, but I often utilize IDE’s like Wing, Eclipse, or Monodevelop when working on code, and while they can handle other systems, directories for branches translates to every editor and works well. Bzr is reliable – A massive suite of unit-tests and a commitment to their excellence offers some comfort that I won’t be left holding half of my code in one hand and an ugly binary blob in the other.
9) Most of all, its a feeling. Its hard to explain, but I don’t notice bzr. Its just there, and I just have my code. I rarely take notice of it, and don’t focus on it. I spend 99% of my time coding and every 30 min I enter a terminal for a few seconds to do all my DRCS stuff. Maybe its why people who use Bzr aren’t very vocal about it. Its not a revolution in revision control, and I don’t do a million cool things in it. I just write code, and bzr is there, doing whatever it does.

Utah Python Users Group

If your in the greater Salt Lake area and love python swing by the meeting this evening! We’re doing a python editor head-to-head, should be fun!

Mono GSOC Projects: Linq to SQLite

So I noticed that one of the accepted proposals for the Mono project is to create a LINQ provider for SQLite. Major props to this (its something I totally want to see!) and I’m glad to see that LINQ in Mono is going to be its own beast, I love it when the FOSS community just takes a technology and runs with it! Anyways, I wanted to try and get in touch with the mentor/student of this project and share my experience (as the author of the current LINQ to SQLite component ). But contact info seemed hard to come by, so I thought I would post what I had learned.

First, people really want this, and there are several half-complete implementations floating around, including mine (read only, no commit/update/delete support) and this one.

Second, support for just queries is quite easy. Support for complete CRUD, tedious but not to difficult (lots of examples already exist). Support for the generation/mapping/reflection of a database to real Linq objects, this is the tricky part (specifically the UI elements when unable to just piggyback the Visual Studio work).

Anyways, all the luck in the world to this GSOC project, I would really like to see a working implementation come from this!