Ubuntu Wiki

The idea is to organize the files, documents, etc of a common user. This idea is based on a couple of issues i think are very important to "dummy" users:

Multiple ways of displaying, searching and accessing information

There is some inconsistent concepts on how to organize different kind of information. Lets analyze very quick this kind of documents: pictures, text documents and mails. To access the first one, an user normally use the file system browser or an photo organization software like f-spot. Now, both approaches have advantages and disadvantages that i will analyze later. The second kind of file is a text document, here we have no choice but to look the file browsing or searching the file system. There is no tool (i think) like f-spot for text documents. The last one are mails, no one ever thinks on looking for an email on the file system! You just open your mail client and your mails are there.

I believe that the file system browser is great, but only if you know how to use it, and what it means. I see, very often, lots of unexperienced people getting lost on konqueror, nautilus, explorer, etc.. trying to find where is the file that they where looking. Often the dont know where they save it, they just press save and give the doc a name. They dont look the place where it is being saved.

What i propose is not no eliminate the file system browser, but to provide an alternative. I think that mimic Google Docs, Picasa, etc. would be nice. When you want a text document, you open google docs, you dont have to browse a filesystem to do it. The same with spreadsheets. When you want a photo, you open picasa, and your photos are there. I am not saying that we should integrate with the web or something like this, just copy the mail client, photo organizer, google doc concept. We could start by defining what documents we want to manage.

• Mails (already there, just a mail client)
• Pictures (Almost there, F-Spot)
• Audio files (Almost there, rhythmbox, banshee, etc...)
• Video files (Nothing here)
• Text documents (nothing here)
• Spreadsheets (nothing here)
• Presentations (nothing here)

Random ideas

• This new tool could benefit from the search and indexing engines already here (tracker, beagle, strigi, etc...)
• This tool could be just a window with tabs for the files groups (text, spreadsheets, etc..) and the lists with associated actions on each element. (Like google docs, but better)
• "Hide" the file system browser.

More crazy ideas

• Integration with OpenOffice? KOffice?