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August 06, 2003

Data Representation

It happens at least once or twice every year. A piece of junk mail arrives at my parents house, destined for my father, who inevitably believes it is more important for me to know of it's existence than throw it away. The mail in question though is often an announcement for a presentation on data representation, and how it effects our understanding, a rather interesting discussion to say the least. Working with computers, this becomes an essential area of concern for myself. How can I increase my productivity levels? How do I process what's on the screen? How can I fully understand what data is being fed to me?

It's not something I directly correlate back to my computer use regularly. I have become rather ingrained in my ways, working while subconsciously shifting through the data I've deemed useless. It was only recently that I realized just how bad current operating systems represent applications and other data. Being a CLI type of person, I spend a lot of time typing, and using the least efficient means of visualizing data. This has been a personal trade off for me in many ways, I find less time spent utilizing the mouse directly translates back to more time to stay focused on the task at hand. But take a look at the GUI format for representing applications.

Under Microsoft Windows, it was the Windows-95 release that changed everything. Among it's many changes, the biggest visual impact was the introduction of the Start menu. No longer did a user have to search through billions of small files looking for the .exe, they could easily jump on the Start menu and go. Unfortunately this idea didn't extend any further in the operating system. Try copying an application from one drive to another, or using the command line tool to discover the ugly joy of the application parts. Even today in Windows XP you'll find the same thinking in use, only now there is a protective "are you sure you want to see the ugly parts of your computer?" warning before you can play. Open this up, and you discover that there are hundreds of tiny little files that comprise this application and just make life typically annoying. That oh so nifty Start menu is just a link to the executable in another area, and doesn't necessarily represent everything on your computer.

The current offerings of desktops for UNIX haven't gotten much better. For the most part they're still emulating other services, rather than trying to innovate a new system. I would argue that application layout for UNIX systems is typically even worse than those found on Windows operating systems, but thats for another day.

Apple's current Mac OS X has a really interesting change, one that I don't believe I've fully appreciated until I needed to explain to my father how to copy an application from one drive to another. Under the Aqua GUI, an application appears to be a single icon that contains most (if not all) the necessary files to run the executable. It is easy enough to copy this application from one location to another (just drag it around), or even to share the application across the network. This is all fine and dandy, but what about those of us who are CLI users? Under the command line, you'll discover that each application is actually a directory, postfixed with a .app, that contains a series of directories that define the behavior of the application (resources, versions, etc).

While you can argue that just moving up a directory level would accomplish the same thing in the other windowing systems, you would be missing the elegance that is found here. As far the Apple GUI is concerned, this directory IS the application. The mixture of the two functionalities provides an ease of use that so far has been unparalleled. On the flip side, often times the computer illiterate are not aware that copying an application will require more than one file. This mistake is typically made only once, but is there any reason for it to even exist? Now to see if I can enable such visual representation in the EROS system, but no promises.

Posted by Dan at August 6, 2003 08:19 AM

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Comments

Posted by: Matthew at August 15, 2003 06:44 AM