Comment by mihaaly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mihaaly | Hacker News Reader

Dear Ben, what you wish to achieve is to turn upside down desktops for everyone based on the needs of a disorganized person, you.

Don't do that.

There are lots and lots of people using computers not for just tossing around casual fragmented piece of information but for coherent content creation, for products that need to be reliable and many many times inherently complex, made by organizations with reliable practices.

Shortly, there are other needs than what you are familiar with, try not to act for everyone based on isolated views.

Btw. the problem with today's desktops stem more like in the urge to make those work like handhelds made for the flow of fragmanted causal pieces of information. The UX of desktops is really poisoned with the limited concepts of handhelds, by the trends (I so hate this word representing appearences rather than thoughtful behaviour) of UX designers who go after coined concepts addressing some isolated views. If they do at all, sometimes just doing differently for the sake of difference, which is not too intelligent thing.

So much this. I spotted the problem as soon as he said he has 75 plus tabs opened, justifying like “humans use tabs as a todo list”. No, that’s how you use it.

Want to group by projects? Use tags or folder Don’t want to spend hours cleaning your download folder? Move every new file you download in the correct location

And at some point he said computers should automatically delete some files? WHAT

And last but not least, of course mobile systems handle informations better, they don’t store nearly as much information as someone that uses his desktop regularly.

A response article to this would be: “Just learn to use a computer”.

Or it could be: „Just get yourself organized“.

I don‘t know how many times I sat in a meeting or worked with somebody and the presenter/user could‘t find the document(s) they wanted to present because of the endless apps and tabs open at once or the endless stream of unorganized files on the desktop or working folders. Same goes for disorganized shared folders (like Sharepoint) or Confluence-spaces without clear organization. Then when information is required the people responsible for the mess start to search in said mess and can‘t find their stuff. And mostly it‘s not because there is no decent search, mostly it‘s because they never wrote down/ saved/ filed the information because they lost track of it or thought they could remember not to close a tab in between 100 others or simply can‘t figure out how to use the search in the first place.

75+ tabs are only feasible if you have an extension like Tree Tabs for Firefox. Of course, no more than ten (at the most) are ever loaded into memory at any one time.

The true shame is that trees of tabs aren’t natively implemented by the browsers because all the extensions that enable tree functionality have glitches caused by the native tab ordering.

I beg to differ. I have, in a vanilla firefox UI, about 100 tabs, in a single window. I group them (loosely) by their themes, in the bar. It's... manageable.

> A response article to this would be: “Just learn to use a computer”.

A rephrasing of his problem would be: "I'm too busy to learn how to become more efficient with a computer," and I've heard this excuse for 27 years now.

Classic case: At one company, I rewrote an engineering program that my dad had written years earlier as a command-line program in BASIC. The operator would have to use note cards and go through a whole series of menus to make it do its thing, like "A... 1... C... 3... 5..." I rewrote it in Visual Basic, and made the whole function take no more than 3 clicks, usually just 1. I came back later, and noticed the operator was still using my dad's program, and I asked why. He said my program was "too complicated." I started to protest, but knew it was futile. Other people were loving it, so I just dropped it.

I've never found a good way to redirect people who are defensive about learning new ways to use a computer to think about things differently. If anyone has had luck here, I'd love to hear about it.

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