RFE: User-Understandable Default folders in Home Directory

[Stewart Smith]

a bit like what OSX has, i've been thinking that a set of default
folders (with some cool icons) could help users a bit.

I've put this up at :
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=129564

simply so it's kinda 1/2 officially tracked, and in the future, people
with the same idea can (easily) find some track of discussion....

I propose adding the following to the /etc/skel for new users, with
funky icons on the folders to help increasing the clarity of where
things are and some hints on helping them organise things.

Note that with the introduction of things like ~/Contacts/, ~/Mail/
and ~/Settings, this gives the user a clear picture of where things
are, and what things are important to back up (if they so choose).

Some users may just see their mail as important, and not care about
contacts or music. Others may see Contacts, Mail, Settings and
Documents as important and can just (easily! with nautilus-cd-burner)
write these to CD for backup.

~/Contacts - where evolution stores contacts, with human-readable file
names (e.g. "Firstname Lastname.vcf" or something).
~/Desktop - same as it is now, the contents of the users desktop.
~/Documents - a suggested location for documents (and the default save
location for applications such as OpenOffice)
~/Mail - where Evolution stores it's mail.
~/Movies - for the kick-ass iMovie type thing that we so need.
~/Music - Music Player's place to put music!
~/Photos - Gthumb's place to go, and the digital camera tool!
~/Web Pages - ==public_html (and shared by apache, if installed).

I have no real expectation taht this will make Core3 in any complete
way, but is a good talking point and UI suggestion. This will make it
easier for users.
-- 
Stewart Smith (stewart(a)flamingspork.com)
http://www.flamingspork.com/

[Sindre Pedersen Bjordal]

tir, 10.08.2004 kl. 16.57 skrev Stewart Smith:
>  a bit like what OSX has, i've been thinking that a set of
> default
>  folders (with some cool icons) could help users a bit.
>  
>  I've put this up at :
>  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=129564
>  
>  simply so it's kinda 1/2 officially tracked, and in the future, people
>  with the same idea can (easily) find some track of discussion....
>  
>  I propose adding the following to the /etc/skel for new users, with
>  funky icons on the folders to help increasing the clarity of where
>  things are and some hints on helping them organise things.
>  
>  Note that with the introduction of things like ~/Contacts/, ~/Mail/
>  and ~/Settings, this gives the user a clear picture of where things
>  are, and what things are important to back up (if they so choose).
>  
>  Some users may just see their mail as important, and not care about
>  contacts or music. Others may see Contacts, Mail, Settings and
>  Documents as important and can just (easily! with nautilus-cd-burner)
>  write these to CD for backup.
>  
>  ~/Contacts - where evolution stores contacts, with human-readable file
>  names (e.g. "Firstname Lastname.vcf" or something).
>  ~/Desktop - same as it is now, the contents of the users desktop.
>  ~/Documents - a suggested location for documents (and the default save
>  location for applications such as OpenOffice)
>  ~/Mail - where Evolution stores it's mail.
>  ~/Movies - for the kick-ass iMovie type thing that we so need.
>  ~/Music - Music Player's place to put music!
>  ~/Photos - Gthumb's place to go, and the digital camera tool!
>  ~/Web Pages - ==public_html (and shared by apache, if installed).
>  
>  I have no real expectation taht this will make Core3 in any complete
>  way, but is a good talking point and UI suggestion. This will make it
>  easier for users. 
I love this idea. It was proposed for in an article I read somewhere
some time ago, but I can't locate it. What struck me then, and strikes
me now is: What about the non-english users? Sure, having the names of
the the folder internationalized shouldn't prove that difficult, but how
do we make rhythmbox or Evolution look in the internationalized folders?

-- 
Sindre Pedersen Bjordal <foolish(a)fedoraforum.org&gt;
www.fedoraforum.org

[Dan Williams]

On Wed, 2004-08-11 at 12:17 +0200, Sindre Pedersen Bjordal wrote:
>  I love this idea. It was proposed for in an article I read somewhere
>  some time ago, but I can't locate it. What struck me then, and strikes
>  me now is: What about the non-english users? Sure, having the names of
>  the the folder internationalized shouldn't prove that difficult, but how
>  do we make rhythmbox or Evolution look in the internationalized folders? 
Hi,

The way Apple has done it for the past 15 years is a system call
FindFolder(), into which you pass some constants, and get back a folder
reference number:

enum {
   kSystemFolderType = 'macs',
   kDesktopFolderType = 'desk',
   kSystemDesktopFolderType = 'sdsk',
   kTrashFolderType = 'trsh',
   kSystemTrashFolderType = 'strs',
...
   kExtensionFolderType = 'extn',
   kFontsFolderType = 'font',
   kPreferencesFolderType = 'pref',
   kSystemPreferencesFolderType = 'sprf',
   kTemporaryFolderType = 'temp'
};

I would imagine that on Linux you would, of course, get back the name of
that folder using the current system encoding.  It would have to be a
base-level library, not tied to GNOME or KDE, since other programs could
conceivably use it as well.  Hence, maybe its a good idea for a
freedesktop.org project with a small library or something.  I don't
think it's a bad idea at all.

So, perhaps:

char *user_doc_folder_name = fl_get_folder_name (USER_DOCUMENTS_FOLDER);
if (user_doc_folder_name)
{
	<concatenate "/home/bob/" with user_doc_folder_name>
	<do something with folder path>
	free (user_doc_folder_name);
}

Dan

[Mark Drago]

>  > ~/Contacts - where evolution stores contacts, with
> human-readable file
>  > names (e.g. "Firstname Lastname.vcf" or something).
>  > ~/Desktop - same as it is now, the contents of the users desktop.
>  > ~/Documents - a suggested location for documents (and the default save
>  > location for applications such as OpenOffice)
>  > ~/Mail - where Evolution stores it's mail.
>  > ~/Movies - for the kick-ass iMovie type thing that we so need.
>  > ~/Music - Music Player's place to put music!
>  > ~/Photos - Gthumb's place to go, and the digital camera tool!
>  > ~/Web Pages - ==public_html (and shared by apache, if installed). 
>  I love this idea. It was proposed for in an article I read somewhere
>  some time ago, but I can't locate it. What struck me then, and strikes
>  me now is: What about the non-english users? Sure, having the names of
>  the the folder internationalized shouldn't prove that difficult, but how
>  do we make rhythmbox or Evolution look in the internationalized folders? 
The location of these folders could be stored in gconf.  That way we can
internationalize the real names of the folders and also allow an
advanced user to store their music, photos, and whatever else wherever
they want.  I tend to store all of my music in ~/data/Music, and it
would be nice to relocate the folder that way.

--Mark Drago

[Ian Robertson]

On Wed, 2004-08-11 at 14:29, Mark Drago wrote:
>  > > ~/Contacts - where evolution stores contacts, with
> human-readable file
>  > > names (e.g. "Firstname Lastname.vcf" or something).
>  > > ~/Desktop - same as it is now, the contents of the users desktop.
>  > > ~/Documents - a suggested location for documents (and the default save
>  > > location for applications such as OpenOffice)
>  > > ~/Mail - where Evolution stores it's mail.
>  > > ~/Movies - for the kick-ass iMovie type thing that we so need.
>  > > ~/Music - Music Player's place to put music!
>  > > ~/Photos - Gthumb's place to go, and the digital camera tool!
>  > > ~/Web Pages - ==public_html (and shared by apache, if installed).
>  
>  > I love this idea. It was proposed for in an article I read somewhere
>  > some time ago, but I can't locate it. What struck me then, and strikes
>  > me now is: What about the non-english users? Sure, having the names of
>  > the the folder internationalized shouldn't prove that difficult, but how
>  > do we make rhythmbox or Evolution look in the internationalized folders?
>  
>  The location of these folders could be stored in gconf.  That way we can
>  internationalize the real names of the folders and also allow an
>  advanced user to store their music, photos, and whatever else wherever
>  they want.  I tend to store all of my music in ~/data/Music, and it
>  would be nice to relocate the folder that way.
>  
>  --Mark Drago
>  
>  ______________________________________________________________________
>  -- 
>  Fedora-desktop-list mailing list
>  Fedora-desktop-list(a)redhat.com
>  http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-desktop-list 
Hello

Does anyone know how the standard evolution receives its pop mail.  I
want to use mailscanner to review the incoming mail and hopefully run
virus checking as well.  It does not seem to use the default unix mail
directories for incoming mail? The machine conects via a firewall to the
Isp for mail collection via POP3

-- 
Ian Robertson
Specialist Skating
Tel [phone] 
Tel/Fax [phone]

[David Malcolm]

On Wed, 2004-08-11 at 00:57 +1000, Stewart Smith wrote:
>  a bit like what OSX has, i've been thinking that a set of
> default
>  folders (with some cool icons) could help users a bit. 
I do something like this on my own folders at home, using emblems.

I broadly like your idea (with some caveats concerning Evolution, see
below), though in the blue-sky future perhaps we'll all be using Storage
to organise our stuff, rather than this 20th century directory-based
technology :-)
(see http://www.gnome.org/~seth/storage/ )


>  I've put this up at :
>  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=129564
>  
>  simply so it's kinda 1/2 officially tracked, and in the future, people
>  with the same idea can (easily) find some track of discussion....
>  
>  I propose adding the following to the /etc/skel for new users, with
>  funky icons on the folders to help increasing the clarity of where
>  things are and some hints on helping them organise things.
>  
>  Note that with the introduction of things like ~/Contacts/, ~/Mail/
>  and ~/Settings, this gives the user a clear picture of where things
>  are, and what things are important to back up (if they so choose).
>  
>  Some users may just see their mail as important, and not care about
>  contacts or music. Others may see Contacts, Mail, Settings and
>  Documents as important and can just (easily! with nautilus-cd-burner)
>  write these to CD for backup.
>  
>  ~/Contacts - where evolution stores contacts, with human-readable file
>  names (e.g. "Firstname Lastname.vcf" or something). 
Currently Evolution 1.5.* stores its data (contacts, calendar, email
etc) below the ~/.evolution directory and in GConf, and makes various
assumptions about the layout of the ~/.evolution directory.  Evolution
could be changed to follow this proposal for "local contacts" (as
opposed to contacts found on e.g. a shared corporate LDAP database), but
it'd be non-trivial.

A better way of accessing the contact information might be to use
evolution-data-server API; this should handle nasty details such as file
locking for you.

If what you're really looking for is a sane way for home users to backup
this data, I think a specialised tool could be written that knows about
the various kinds of data that are stored on your computer
(configuration settings, contents of home directory etc) and can display
them in a good UI, tell you how big the backup is going to be etc, and
maybe create ISO files ready to be burned to CD for you.

>  ~/Desktop - same as it is now, the contents of the users desktop.
>  ~/Documents - a suggested location for documents (and the default save
>  location for applications such as OpenOffice)
>  ~/Mail - where Evolution stores it's mail. 
Again, Evolution makes all kinds of assumptions about the layout of its
mail directory; it's not something I'd want to expose to end users.
Thankfully with Evo 1.5.* this is now in ~/.evolution, rather than
~/evolution as it used to be before, so it's not quite as in-your-face
as before.

>  ~/Movies - for the kick-ass iMovie type thing that we so need.
Yes please!

>  ~/Music - Music Player's place to put music! 
Good idea IMHO

>  ~/Photos - Gthumb's place to go, and the digital camera tool!
Also a good idea IMHO

>  ~/Web Pages - ==public_html (and shared by apache, if installed).
Nice idea.  Though you'd have to have some extra control panel applets
to do things like turning apache on/off etc and punch through the
firewall, or people could get confused.

>  
>  I have no real expectation taht this will make Core3 in any complete
>  way, but is a good talking point and UI suggestion. This will make it
>  easier for users.

[Jef Spaleta]

On Wed, 11 Aug 2004 12:50:09 -0400, David Malcolm <dmalcolm(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:
>  On Wed, 2004-08-11 at 00:57 +1000, Stewart Smith wrote:
>  > a bit like what OSX has, i've been thinking that a set of default
>  > folders (with some cool icons) could help users a bit.
>  
>  I do something like this on my own folders at home, using emblems. 
I personally would like to see the emblems concept expanded to fill the 'funky'
icon role for default speciality folders. So create special default
folders like photos and movies and documents... and attach the
associated emblem by default. The current set of emblems would have to
be expanded a little or perhaps rethought a bit more.

But I would also find it interesting to expand the concept of emblem
so that users can tag other folders as 'document' or 'movie' folders
or whatever in such a way that you can easily search for documents and
movies in all the folders tagged with the associated emblem, in a
pre-Storage enabled world. Expand that even further so you can have
systemwide tagged 'music' folders so users can query their userspace
Music emblem tagged folders as well as systemwide folders tagged as
Music.

-jef