Monthly Archive for June, 2007

1. Isn’t this like pluginstaller, this plugin that allows installing more plugins?
   Ans: Yes, essentially it does the same thing, but pluginstaller does it by using shell commands, which are only for *nix based hosts. Also several hosts disable this because of security concerns. It also doesn’t install themes(though it’ll just take 10 mins to modify it to let it do so). There’s support for updating of plugins, but only if installed from wordpress.org. Deletion is not supported.
2. What about Matt Read’s old installer plugin.
   Ans: Matt Read’s moved over to habari development (I was working on habari for a while and I moved back to wordpress), but his plugin is lost now, and I have to contact him to try the plugin out for myself and see what it can do.
3. I can’t delete files from FTP that are created from the PHP due to sharing permissions or something.
   Ans: Delete anything and everything from the deletion system inside the plugin.
4. When will the next version be out?
   Ans: After I’ve sorted some academics out, in other words, in about three or four weeks.

I’m getting rather annoyed with the explorer file manager in XP these days. It’s a very primitive file manager, with very few advanced features whatsoever. MS thought they did something great with vista by removing the menu bar, the up button, and everything else, and integrated rarely used features like rating and in program id3 tag editing, but they can go f* themselves as far as I am concerned. The only helpful addition was breadcrumbs which has been present in gnome and kde for a while, and the favorites section, or the links, that nobody knows about again. There were some suggestions I made to the konqueror dev group and so on but nobody’d listen.

5. Breadcrumbs:

Importance: Low
Usability Impact: Medium
Applies to: Developers, people working with many folders

If you’re looking for something buried deep within several folders, and you need to get a good idea where you are and change where you are soon, breadcrumbs is the best option. Breadcrumb navigation has been around as far as navigation has been around, whenever structured, heirarchial information has been around. It’s one of the best ways to get around quick.

Though it’s implemented in vista, you can get it in XP too with a cool little app, and in linux, gnome’s file manager, and kde’s next file manager, dolphin, also has them in full feature.

Explorer Breadcrumbs: Adds breadcrumb navigation to XP’s file manager.
[Screenshot]
[Link]

4. Alternative File Views

Importance: Medium
Usability Impact: Varies
Applies to: Power users

Apart from the standard icon views, various file views are essential. Windows XP and vista for that matter, make the stupid mistake assuming if a folder has four image files and 3 mp3s, I wanna see it in filmstrip mode. Maybe so, but not always. Seeing my files in text only mode, or icon only modes are just a couple of ideas I thought of now, but data can be arranged in various other ways. An example is konqueror’s filesize view, which was later available as a seperate app in macs. There are various options here which lie unexplored.

Konqueror’s filesize view:
Documentation on the various views
[Screenshot of filesize view

3. Minimalism and Aesthetics

Importance: High
Usability Impact: Surprisingly High
Applies to: Everyone

I’ve tried nearly every file manager on the market, and am not happy with a single one of them. Mainly because they want to pack in a button on the taskbar for every single option out there. I have half a mind to tell them that people don’t want buttons to encrypt their files or something like that. Adding to that, the live previews, and the usage of the standard windows library just adds to the clutter. I don’t want to name names, but most programs that supposedly increase efficiency just can annoy you more, like it had to me.

The problem is that the developers do not take usability and aesthetics into consideration, and they just want to cram in features. The tiles view of windows explorer is not given enough credit. Look at a screenshot of Konqueror in action, or any other file browser and look at the clean airy look of a tile viewed file browser. You will definitely notice a difference.

2. Assigning colors and icons to files and folders.

Importance: High
Usability Impact: High
Applies to: Everyone

I have many folders and work with many files, and need to distinguish between them quickly. The human brain is specialized in looking for colors and images and icons to distinguish what it’s looking for. If I had all my important folders green, I could just open those ones, or label one for my study work and one for my web development work. Windows XP has the ability to change the icon of a folder but it’s painfully long and not worth the trouble. I love this one feature in nautilus called icons and emblems which you can drag and drop over any folder or file to give them a special status. If I could recolor or change the icons of folders easily, that I can give them some significance, me and everyone else would see a drastic increase in productivity. Have a look at emblems and icons for nautilus here (linux.about.com)

1. Intelligent iconsizes

Importance: Very high
Usability Impact: Very high
Applies to: Everyone

This is one of my best ideas ever. Essentially your file browser sees what files you more commonly access, and accordingly put your most important files and folders at top. After a while, it can start detecting trends in usage, and the more frequently used icons come up and they look bigger. So if you open My Documents, then your current project files are at top, while your old image files are at the bottom. Imagine the amount of time saved.

Why worry about file managers?

Most people spend a lot of time working between files, and finding the right one faster, without using a slow search, as microsoft is hoping is quite important and if you don’t spend too long browsing around, you have more time to do the things you love.

I was put in the most frustrating situation for a few hours now. I moved my site from one host to another, and so I had to change my DNS records. I am living in a university campus, so I can connect to the internet only by means of two proxies. I updated the DNS and reinstalled everything on the new host, and tweaked the theme to my liking, and once everything was done, I went to sleep.

The next morning, I realize that one proxy has been shut down, leaving only another one to do all my dirty work. Turns out the dnscache for this proxy hasn’t refreshed, and since I accessed my site so much, the old host ip is stuck in the cache. Quoting myself in an IM conversation,

Effectively, there’s no [expletive] way I can see my own website while the rest of the world can. It’s like being locked out of your own home.

And to make things better(or worse), weblogtoolscollection.com, a weblog that I read regularly and admire, links to the OneClick RC1 announcement, as a release and people pour in, and I can only helplessly watch in Google analytics as my unique visitors go up from around 20 to a 1000.

After spending most of the day in the library, getting further worried about the situation at hand, and the sysadmin telling me it might be upto a day before the caches refresh, I had to go for the only option available: tunneling. I got hold of YourFreedom, a tunneling client. Usually used for activities blocked by the firewall, I had to use this software to use global DNS caches and see my site, and there were so many comments. I was exhilarated.

So I left a little update saying that the plugin will be released tonight, as it shall be hoping the other proxy comes to life again. As for me, I’m just putting a few final touches on the plugin, and preparing a readme and I have some amazing ideas for the next version which I’ll also be publishing.

Now Playing: Queensryche – I don’t believe in love.

I hit a sudden spike of traffic, a taste of what I hope to come, and I realized I need better hosting, and with marc complaining that the site was down and I realized I sent everyone a plugin with no readme(shame on me) but a couple of people claimed it worked fine. So I decided to move my hosting. I was saving up to buy paid hosting but I didn’t have the patience to do so, and Gautham said I could piggyback on his hosting, and I was delighted. I began moving my stuff. I shifted my room a few nights back, and this was something similar. All I can say is that a five to six hour job of backing up databases and getting and installing the plugins were reduced to two hours of effort thanks to “OneClick”, my hero, and I really got a handson experience on how useful it is. Okay, I gotta go sleep. Big changes are coming up soon.