Eagle Mode File Manager (2011) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Eagle Mode File Manager (2011) [video]

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48 pointsekianjo17 comments

The title needs (2011) on it.

This is similar to Microsoft's work in 2007: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seadragon_Software ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKwTurQgiak

The video is older, but Eagle Mode 0.94.0 was released on the 23rd of December 2018.

http://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/

Quick tip: you can zoom in on the toolbar, too (I assumed it was "made for 4k monitors" or something until I figured that out)

Zoomable interface is an old concept: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface

Jef Raskin was a proponent, and Aza continued his work. The Archy software implemented this along with other ideas: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy

I've been building something very similar to this ...but also quite different. The details (around usability) have proven very difficult to get right, but I'm really excited by how it's turning out. If you like the core idea as well and would be interested in taking part in a private beta, please send me an email (contact details in my profile). I expect it to be ready for others to try in maybe a few months.

Finally we can 'zoom and enhance' anything! It will be great for tv shows and movies.

Better productivity? Man my eyes die a bit each time I zoom in on EDAs. I can't imagine editing docs this way...

I'm impressed. It's an intriguing paradigm for a navigation interface - and the implementation looks surprisingly fast. I wonder how it might work as a web browser..

Web doesn't have a tree structure, so the idea might not transfer.

Web also doesn't have a linear structure, but the forward/back buttons work well enough.

True, I suppose the web isn't structurally similar to a file system - at least until it gets to the website level. Maybe the navigator could show networks of nodes, grouped by themes/topics, with scaling proportional to popularity..

Interestingly, I just searched for "visualization of the world wide web", and most hits were articles from the 2000's - perhaps related to the image of "cyberspace", a term that's since fallen out of fashion.

Your browsing history does, though.

Imagine what kind of structure would be visualized after being lost in Wikipedia for a few hours. It'd be neat to see it clustered by time, and you can jump back and forth to different parts of your history graph.

This was first featured in Jurassic Park [1], from IRIX's FSV which is open source [2].

I'm wondering if the file permissions could be visualized better.

[1] https://mrlithium.blogspot.com/2017/07/fsv-filesystem-naviga...

[2] https://github.com/mcuelenaere/fsv

I find the ZUI style navigation works particularly well for finding large files and folders- this requires weighing larger folders with a bigger size, rather than just representing each file in a static grid.

My favorite example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZvzW4eitdo

There's also baobab for Linux, but I find that less intuitive.

ZUIs have been long tried, and long failed. It’s a fun concept but is terrible in practice. We as humans don’t enter rooms by scaling down to a door’s keyhole to then go inside... it has a giant cognitive dissonance as a metaphor and is difficult to process. It’s far better to keep things at the same scale and manipulate as such.

I find this an interesting approach to the desktop metaphor, potentially one that can eliminate a lot of workflow issues related to the constrained screen space that I think has made spacial-oriented concepts a problematic.

I'm curious about the resource requirements and how it works with applications not in focus.

This reminds me a lot of fsn[1] (the file manager shown in Jurassic park in the classic "It's a UNIX system" scene). There is also a clone for more modern systems called fsv[2].

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn_(file_manager)

2 - http://fsv.sourceforge.net/

I remember trying this back in the day. It was a lot of fun. I remember being surprised that it worked so well. Back then not everything on sourceforge worked...

Yeah, I remember trying it out too. I forget exactly how I stumbled upon it (serendipitously, it may have been StumbleUpon).

I also remember there being a good few little easter eggs and such scattered throughout it...

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