Comments on: Stacks and Piles

By: Tag Clouds and the SearchMe Widget

Tag Clouds and the SearchMe Widget — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 02:20:37 +0000

[...] previews for the web are here! I can’t help but wish for more — but most of the best ideas of HCI over the last 20 years are yet to be deployed to the masses. Hats off to the folks at [...]

By: Högar « false messiah

Högar « false messiah — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:21:23 +0000

[...] på Adaptive Path studerade “piles” för sin masters-tes, och han har åtskilligt med kritiska synpunkter på Apples lösning: Looking over the new Stacks feature, I find few of these design principles being used. Granted, no [...]

By: Jill

Jill — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 16:17:58 +0000

I would like to be able to cycle through stacks/messes and a plain background with a key command. Right now I use a background utility to blank out my desktop. The key is I would want the stacks to be on my desktop, scattered where I placed them. This is the key reason I use Yahoo Widgets (Konfabulator) as opposed to the Mac widgets. I love to have them available and interspersed with my most important, time sensitive stacks.

By: udanium

udanium — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 06:02:21 +0000

oops, mistyped the link… sorry!

http://www.udanium.com/udanium2003/html/hyperpiles.html

By: udanium

udanium — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 06:00:21 +0000

yep, i immediately thought of your project, Dan, as well as mine from CMU graduate studio

ttp://www.udanium.com/udanium2003/html/hyperpiles.html

stacks, piles, streams–perennial concepts that won’t go away as constant attempts to enhance the traditional desktop UI. (as i gaze upon the literal piles of unread books and magazines and old bills stagnating on the floor of my bedroom…) it’ll be intersting to see how this pans out with Leopard in the final build–and then how fans will modify it via plug-ins and shareware utilities

By: Extenuating Circumstances – links for 2007-06-12

Extenuating Circumstances – links for 2007-06-12 — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 10:25:09 +0000

[...] adaptive path » blog » blog archive » Stacks and Piles Via Jones (tags: via:blackbeltjones stacks adaptivepath piles hci ui osx 10.5 leopard) [...]

By: Steve Ivy

Steve Ivy — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 22:14:21 +0000

Hi Dan,

You make some good points, though to be fair we have not seen enough of Apple’s implementation to know if there are modes like you describe in their stacks. It seems to me that the visual implementation we’ve seen would easily support in-stack re-ordering and drag-to-trash from the stack.

On, the other hand, I don’t see how Stack-size or last-accessed time could be communicated in Apple’s stacks – a pity, as you’re right about this information being very useful. I’m curious to play with it myself.

On a related note, is it just me, or is Apple readying us for a touch-screen UI? “Finderflow”, Stacks, Time Machine, and Spaces all seem to be made more for fingers than for mice.

By: Dan

Dan — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 21:05:29 +0000

Piling is only done by some people–most people–but not all. It’s an option that wouldn’t be used by everyone. Stacks will probably only get used as a percentage of people. Don’t fall into the trap of “If I don’t use it, no one else will/should.”

I wasn’t suggesting a one-to-one translation of analog to digital–in my system a pile can be instantly sorted alphabetically or by date added or most viewed–all things you couldn’t do physically very easily.

By: Alexa

Alexa — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 20:57:58 +0000

Honestly, I look at both concepts and think I’d never use either. I do group my files on my desktop, but visibly — so they’re all spread out on the desktop so that I can see what’s there at a glance. I don’t WANT to have to click into something to expand a pile of files and have to rummage through and reorganize them. And it’s hard for me to see how it’s that different than having files in folders on my desktop or on my dock.

But that’s kind of beside your point — that Apple should pay attention to people’s behavior and design for that, which I think is a good one. They definitely failed us with the widgets.

But, I do wonder if we need to be careful when translating an understanding of physical-world behavior into computer behavior, because it’s certainly possible to take real world metaphors too far and force an organization onto things that isn’t necessarily ideal. Like Merlin and others point out at http://www.43folders.com/2006/06/23/bumptop/
— A computer can make it possible to organize things in better ways than real life — tagging, quicksilver fast searches, etc.