Snowfox: Actions & Contexts

Action

An "action" in Snowfox is the equivalent of a bookmarklet in Firefox. When clicked on an "action button" a batch file / shell script is launched. Browsing information of the current location (e.g. Selected File, Current Folder etc) are made available to the script as arguments. The resulting thing is an "action", a button that can bring any command-line goodness to the file-manager. New actions can be downloaded and also created by the user. Actions that need other arguments can make requests to Snowfox to ask the user for the values of arguments. Optionally, actions can also be made available as context sensitive right click menu items. Potentially, actions give users and developers the same flexibility as add-ons. Its even better for a developer because they can simply write a batch script instead of learning a custom scripting language.

Usage: Batch Rename, Upload files to Flickr, Batch Image Resize

Context

A "context" is a way of visually tagging a file/folder. But its not tagging just for the sake of tagging. A "context" gives a special context to the item to which it is applied to. For example, you have some actions that compile and execute code. But you only need that action to show up when you are browsing code folders. Well, add a "Programming" context to your code folders. Associate the compile and execute actions to this context. Voila, everytime you browse to a code folder, all the right tools are there in front of you. Not only that, you can associate file listing types, right-click menu items, even default applications with "Contexts". Basically, the whole Snowfox GUI will change to suit the needs of the context. To spice things up more, search can be "contextual" too. This means you are no longer confined to file names and extensions. For example, you can search for files with "Family Pictures" context even if the pictures are scattered all over your computer. Adding a context will be encouraged while bookmarking. You can obviously look at your recently "contextualized" items. And as a finishing touch to this amazing feature, users will be able to create their own contexts.

Uses: Image Upload, share actions with a "Pictures" context. Code compile, execute actions with a "Programming" context.

Special thanks to darkscript for brainstorming with me and providing such amazing ideas.

Windows Explorer ++

Windows Explorer pimped up with tabs and breadcrumbs.

Tabs: QTTabBar

Breadcrumbs: Minimalist

Unveiling Snowfox

Well, here it is. The proof of concept of Snowfox. Nothing fancy, extremely minimalistic and, hopefully, intuitive. As always, feel free to comment.

SimpleShare - As simple as it gets

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you need to take some of your files home from school, but you don't have a flash-memory. What do you do then? Mail it to yourself? Sounds logical. SimpleShare uses the same principle but does it in one single step:

 

Yes, that's as simple as it gets. Just drag and drop your file/folder on to the screen, and they are transferred to the root directory of your Andrew server space. Your AndrewID and password needs to entered only once. After then, every time just drag and drop.

Snowfox becomes portable

I've been scavenging the web recently for ways to open a file with its associated program on different OS's. In Windows it's pretty easy to do that. But I've been struggling with Linux and (ahem!) Macs. After a week of searching, I found it. Listed below are command line programs that do what I want:

Windows: cmd.exe /c start "path/file_name"

Linux::Gnome: gnome-open "file_name"

Linux::XFCE: exo-open "file_name"

MacOS: open "file_name"

I'm not sure about KDE yet. I've heard this command works for all versions of Linux:

xdg-open "file_name"

I haven't tried it out yet. Will post again, when I've done some tests of my own.

Can Snowfox disrupt the use of spatial memory?

Here's a excerpt from "Designing Interfaces", a book that I am currently reading.

Many people use the desktop background as a place to
put documents, frequently used applications, and
other such things. It turns out that people tend to
use spatial memory to find things on the desktop,
and it’s very effective. People devise their own
groupings, for instance, or recall that “the document
was at the top right over by such-and-such.”
(Naturally, there are real-world equivalents too.
Many people’s desks are “organized chaos,” an apparent
mess in which the office owner can find
anything instantly.

 

Do people actually remember the names of their important folders, or remember their spatial locations? What a tree-view of the system gives you is not just a hierarchy, but also a way of reaching your data through a sequence of spatially organized shortcuts.

Snowfox's address bar may make it hard for most users to find their stuff, because it does not let them use their spatial memory. In this case, tags might be useful. In extreme cases where desktops are overly cluttered to even recall where an item is, it might be useful to remember something like "work", "science project".

This gives me some food for thought to think about new ways of visually organizing files based on tags and bookmarks. Maybe this might turn out to be a major interface feature.

Snowfox Architecture