Desktop Metaphors

I’m thinking of a desktop metaphor; See if you can guess it. I’ll bet you can’t, because it’s not the kind of thing you usually see or hear about. How about I just tell you anyway.

Hot folders. We see this kind of things on web siter and forums all the time: a “hot topic” usually turns red, or gets progressively redder the more popular it becomes. Why can’t we have this in the Gnome desktop?

Today I was having catastrophic troubles keeping track of the massive hierarchy of work and personal data on my laptop and the plethora of network servers. I was performing mostly the same tasks, but each time I’d have to navigate through up to seven levels of metaphors. Menu, server, location, location, location; over and over.

You’d think that someone would start to remember after a while, but the point of an interface isn’t to force an user to think harder; it’s to guide an user doing what they want to do. If every time I went into a folder it “heated up”, soon enough I’d have a clear path to the locations I most frequently used.

In today’s example, I’d have my project’s documents in my home directory, and the actual project on the server emblazoned in burning red; outfitted with a little flame icon. I’d also have burned a path to “corporate branding”, and “web site notes” that wouldn’t have warmed up so far, but still easy enough to recognize from the plethora of other folders in my browser.

The problem as it stands is that it’s really mind-intensive, performing some of these overly repetitive tasks. There’s no readily accessibly bookmarks or semantically rich history for recently visited folders. I’d personally love a “tag cloud” for recently accessed files on my desktop.

Is anyone working on this kind of accessibility?