Show HN: New UI pattern for file manager type apps

I admit that I haven't read everything, but that's because I got stuck on the first paragraph of the README:

> New UI pattern for file manager type apps. It makes moving and reordering files much easier and more intuitive than traditional UI patterns.

You should go into more detail who the target audience is here. Casual users don't care about moving and reordering files into place meticulously. They just want to find stuff quickly and are will prefer a better search box over a better filing system.

I'm sitting on the other end of the scale. I do obsess over file ordering to a certain extent, but then again doing any of this ordering on any sort of phone UI drives me crazy because of the form factor. I'm much better served by something that lets me do this on the big screen. Right now I use KDE Connect which has a feature for mounting the phone's FS on the PC via sshfs. Then I can use big-boy file managers (or heck, just a terminal and good ol' coreutils).

I'm not saying that there is no place for your UI design, but a good design starts from which users have which needs, and your pitch (i.e. the README) should reflect that.

I have a hard time understanding what you've built (and don't have an Android device handy to test). The GIFs are jerky, and it's always hard to tell what is going on with touch interactions on screen recordings alone.

From what I can tell, this shows a few interactions for a multitouch file manager, where there is an explicit "selection mode" to reorder/move files; selection is preserved when navigating away from the current view. Additionally, interstitial affordances are revealed to facilitate rearrangement.

My main point of feedback would be to focus on the presentation - it is very hard to tell what is going on, and all I wrote I feel like I had to speculate to interpret. Explain clearly what problem you are solving, and why the current approaches haven't worked for you.

Btw I'm not sure what the claim of newness is; I have seen these interactions in other software in the past (but perhaps I am missing something).

The "move here" thing for me was confusing.

When showing near the folders, was the "move here" between folder 1 and folder 2 supposed to mean move the files into folder 1, folder 2, or literally just display the selected between the two folders? It was not clear to me.

I think this could benefit from tweaking the "move here" thing to be closer to the thing that it relates to (classic UX issue/design approach)

The Moodle learning management system [1] uses a very similar UI for moving items (links, documents, etc.) [2]. It supports drag and drop, which is more convenient for small moves, but this method is better for big moves or moving between sections (~folders). I think Moodle can only move one item at a time, though.

I think the pattern probably works better for this kind of thing than for files, as files aren't often manually ordered.

[1] https://moodle.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moodle

[2] https://www.umass.edu/it/support/moodle/reorder-sections-or-...

This seems to be highly tied to the challenge of moving things around on a mobile phone (multi-touch device). While I do think there's benefits for accessibility in this sort of UI, I think most users would prefer if a multi-touch drag/drop reordering UI would be... multi-touch. I should be able to drag with one finger and scroll with another. I find this to be almost nonexistent in practice though :-(

EDIT: On a desktop you have a mouse wheel that very much serves this purpose at least in a single-view scenario. Again, accessibility is a whole extra layer to the topic

This is a really cool concept, thanks for sharing.

I like the idea, but I'm not too keen on the way that once you select an item, the additional "Move Here" UI pops up for every single item in that view - I can imagine for longer lists, this could alter your frame of view significantly as you get towards the bottom of the list. I didn't clone the repo, though - do you had any considerations about this concern? I wonder what an alternative UI would look like for that piece - I guess a simple, more traditional checkbox wouldn't do the trick because it doesn't signal where you want to move something.

Expanding all those 'move here' regions sure is disorienting and janky/slow. I suggest a floating element with an arrow pointing to the seam between the list items, that way you don't have to relayout anything.

Anyone remember Tera Copy?

It (was?) is a Windows file copy/move utility that was fantastic! It support multiple file copying, and drag/drop operations to queue files and add to an existing running operation.

I think the creativity here should be applauded, it's an interesting novel improvement to an existing pattern. I think it'd be very interesting to do a bit of a formal usability study on this: set some metrics for common tasks and ask people to do them versus a control group and see how well it performs. I think sometimes we get all caught up with the hype of UX, but a good old study like we did back when we called the field HCI would be enlightening here. You could even get a published paper out of it!

I'm interested... but puzzled about what is it about from reading the Readme and seeing the anima-gifs

This is the case of when a picture is in a need of more words; not a thousand, but maybe enough to word the principle and contrast the novelty.

Still interested.

I like the idea over drag and drop, but the interface itself in the demo is too low-information to use.

It reminds me of all the problems with Apple Podcasts compared to other podcasts apps. Too many screens, too little information on each screen, and the thumbnails are way too big.

I would be good to edit the title to say this is mobile specific.

Nice idea, but not good enough. The long press is undiscoverable - put it on more Have a menu appear under the item on more with simple icon actions - move, rename, delete, copy. When an action is selected, change the state of items in the list to "Editing" and have each folder have a "Move here".

Or, you can also do drag and drop that everyone understands.

I think the best concept for file management ever invented is the one used by the orthodox file managers (Double Commander, Midnight Commander, FAR etc. etc).

It reminds me of a bookmarking pattern. You bookmark several items and later on perform actions on the bookmarked collections. Very interesting concept worth investigating further .

I like this. On desktop the "move here" could be on hover, maybe, to prevent so many added elements.

It kind of reminds me of spreadsheet functionality in terms of inserting x rows above or below.

> "New UI pattern for file manager type apps"

Needs the word "mobile" in the heading somewhere, as it's nothing to do with standard (eg desktop) apps.

Amazing idea, scrolling unidimensional UIs for the hand need more innovation like this