[mdlug] Very early screenshots for my "first person filemanager"

[Ingles, Raymond]

> From: Robert Adkins

> 	Like instead of just files represented as boxes, there could be
> files represented with 3D Avatars of the user who owns the 
> file wearing some sort of uniform colored to match the group...

 Um, (a) this is my first 3D graphics program, and (b) I'm trying to
make this usable on older hardware - right now I'm getting 30fps, even
in a directory with hundreds of files, on a ~700MHz box with i810 graphics.
This looks a lot like a first-person shooter precisely *because* those can
run efficiently on commonly-available hardware.

 My goal is to try to stick with ideas that fit roughly with human intuitions.
We have hardware in our head for looking at objects and instantly judging their
size, shape, and composition; we have hardware for navigating around 3D worlds
with landmarks and such; I'm hoping to take advantage of that insofar as
possible.

 If you took a Mac user from 1984 and put them in front of a modern Gnome or
KDE interface, they'd be able to manage pretty well - there wouldn't be a
whole lot that was really new to them. But now we've got 3D hardware in
every computer sold, and we're not really taking advantage of it. I'm hoping
to find a new metaphor, like the 'desktop' was the metaphor of the new, 2D
graphical world in the 1980s. I won't get it all right; I may not get any of
it right. But I figure it's worth messing with.

 As an example of how *not* to do it, see tdfsb:

 http://www.determinate.net/webdata/seg/tdfsb.html

 The file size range is too broad, you can't find small files easily, you
wind up walking between 'buildings' of large files. Just looking at a file,
you can't tell much about it except size. A few file types have special
treatment but in a fun rather than useful way. (Don't get me wrong, I'm not
knocking his efforts - he's got something actually out there, and well before
me - but I think that's the wrong underlying metaphor.)

 All that being said, the source will be out there soon enough, and if you
want to add such things, feel free. :->

 Sincerely,

 Ray Ingles                                          (313) 227-2317
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