“I think that piles will match my work and organizational styles pretty well. Certainly I’d like to see them to play with them. Not a big fan of the name…”stacks” is definitely the way to go,” writes ‘Scott’ in response to our original article entitled, “Preview shows the promise of rumored Mac OS X Panther ‘Piles'” reprinted here:
“Piles are a rumored new feature of the forthcoming the Mac OS X Panther release. ‘Piles are kind of like super spring-loaded folders, without the folder. Advantages are: you can tell just by looking at a Pile what’s in it, and have easy one-click access to all files contained in it. Piles can be various sizes, and you can see at a glance how big one Pile is compared to another,'” writes Piles Preview creator Richard Das who has created a small Flash demo of his impression of how the rumored feature ‘Piles’ would work.” (see link below)
MacRumors.com explains, “The patent was filed in 1994, but has gained interest with recent rumors that the next major revision of Mac OS X (Panther) will utilize this design. The function of a pile is, of course, the grouping of documents. For those interested, the Patent description provides more details on the actual implementation and also describes advanced sorting/searching functions, including:
– analysis of the content of a document in a pile
– automatically filing new documents according to criteria (date, content, etc.)
– piles looking neat or disheavled per user preferences
– create/sort into subpiles based on criteria (date, content, etc.)
– script based sorting of documents”
According to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, the word “Piles” can mean “hemorrhoids.” We’ll let you look that one up yourself, if you’re still not with us.
MacDailyNews Reader ‘Paul’ asks, “Piles?” And then suggests, “I think you can buy a cream for that at the drug store.” ‘David’ writes, “Anything that lets you look into a bunch of files (a folder, pile, whatever) and quickly determine the contents is a plus in my book. They must come up with another name though, a ‘pile’ of something often carries a negative connotation.” And ‘Levon River’ wonders, “Do we really need a panther with piles?”
Richard Das writes, “…nobody else will ever be able to implement Piles in their OS… they are heavily graphically intensive… Unless you’ve got Quartz pushing it, you’re gonna be out of luck! Rock on, Apple!”
Check out what “Piles,” errr, “Stacks” might look like and how they could work here.
The only way i would like this feature is if you could turn it off and on. I agree with the rest of them, change the name to something else.
Probably, Piles would ship as a view option, turned off, or something to that effect – off by default, so that those who’d like to use Piles/Stacks could and those that don’t or aren’t aware of the option wouldn’t have to go that route.
Perhaps we should change the name of “Panther” to “Witch Hazel” and keep “Piles” instead. Whaddya think?
Piles seem to most aptly named. I’d use them as I would on a real desktop, documents that needed to be worked on or needing to be organized, stacked in the corner gathering dust. I need it badly, I’m always hemmoraging more docs.
I don’t know about you, but the picture I get when I say “Panther Piles” is a little stinky.
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Well, I find it laughable that nobody else could implement it becuase it’s so graphics intensive. FOR PETE”S SAKE, IT’S BEEN PROTOTYPED IN FLASH! THINK, PEOPLE, it doesn’t require a supercomputer to do it, and M$ could rip it off in a heartbeat, and probably will if it is well received.
cute, but better?
i’d rather have colum view with various sorting options
MS cant rip it off it has been patented… well they could rip it off. actually go ahead and do it MS will be in court for years afterwards.
Looks like a gussied-up Hyper Card. Anybody remember that?
A pile is nothing more than a collapsed list. Although with a list I can easily see everything. Piles have been around since copland and if you ever read asktog you are sure to be aware of them.
I don’t mind adding new interface elements for the advancement of the OS. I just wish the ones that were already there worked better.
I was at apple when Piles were developed in the ATG’s (advanced technology group) human interface team. I loved them. I still have a copy of the final report from the project somewhere I think – because I thought they were such a good idea. The “auto sorting” feature was my favorite, which used Sherlock’s back end indexing engine to find similarities between documents in a pile and then make smaller piles sorted by topic – all automatically. sweet idea.
Anyway, as I understand it the reason they were never implemented was because they user tested poorly. Some good ideas came out of the project, but that specific implementation and design seemed to give users trouble. That might have changed in the last nine years, users change. But I’ll be pleasantly surprised if Panther includes an interface like this.
Microsoft could implement it if they wanted to, btw, because about five years ago Apple and Microsoft executed a patent swap. This patent is old enough that it was included in that swap.
Piles? Stacks? (Are stack overflow errors eliminated in Mac OS X? I never hear about them anymore…so maybe there’d be no confusion?…)
How about logs? messes? brickettes?
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Piles, stacks seam nothig rearly new to me. What rearly woul need is a direct integration of IMAP (mail) into the Desktop like it is done with WebDAV and FTP. Mails would then be like the Apple applications
(i.e special folders), containing content as attachments and the mail
as an RDF document. Then one could put mail etc. in and out of an folder directly, search etc. Naturally one could create links (aliases)
to this and more. The dream interface for IMAP.
If somebody likes the idea and wants to start a project, please
contact me.
Rainer
I’m glad someone else noted that if you can implement it in Flash, it doesn’t require substantial horsepower. This ‘MacOSX UI is so CPU intensive that no one but Apple can do it’ rubbish is starting to wear thin.
It’s true that Aqua IS very CPU intensive, but that doesn’t mean it has to be, or that Intel processors couldn’t handle it. GDI+ in Windows has tons of translucency features – in fact in VS.NET, you can set the transparency of form windows at run time. It’s something everyone plays with for a bit, then abandons because it’s silly.
As for ‘piles’, it’s cute, but what happens when you get a lot of documents in a pile? I think I like Window’s briefcase metaphor better.
I don’t agree with the “it’s not graphics-intensive because they did it in Flash” argument. There’s a big defference between a simple animated picture and an animated OS feature. In Flash you’re just animating some little static pictures with text, and that’s it. In the actual OS, the system would have to expand the stack on the fly (one of any number of stacks with any number of files in them), find the info for each file, draw everything else on the screen, etc. Flash isn’t Quartz.
In case people have forgotten…
OSX is supposed to get away from having to get to the desktop to get at icons. Piles should be done in the dock. Now the name makes sense right???
Ok, so what happens if you have 20,000 files in a pile?
Who cares about the name?! Let’s talk about whether it is functional or not – It’s the feature & usefullness that is important, and I think it sounds like a great idea. I know I’d personally take advantage of it. A folder is called a folder because it holds stuff… just like a real folder in a real filing cabinet in real life. A pile or stack of papers on your real desk is just that – a pile or stack. So something implemented on the computer doing the same thing would logically be named the same.
To continue with the docking metaphor, they should be pylons! But I agree with the person that emphasized that with OS X, cluttering the desktop is discouraged. Frankly, I hate putting much on the desktop because I rarely look at the desktop: I always have windows open and don’t want to move them around to get at my files. i would want (perhaps) this functionality in the finder. and who puts 20,000 files in one folder? as a friend recently asked me (note the sarcasm), are folders precious commodities to be doled out stingily? make enough folders to manage your files and file system efficiently!
20,000 files…. MP3’s, photos, etc.
Author here – Just like folder/list/column view, certain people would use this feature, and some others not. I think it would bring more organisation to icon views (ie. give you the benefit of list-view while in icon mode).
What I meant about the “nobody else would be able to implement it” comment was that although in the Flash demo, it is just objects moving vertically with certain set behaviours, Quartz Extreme renders every object on your screen as a 3D layer (which is why you get real-time transparency of movies playing behind semi-transparent menus, etc.). This would increase, at an order of magnatude, the number of elements on the screen the OS would have to calculate. I don’t know if anyone noticed, but even in the Flash demo I did, each object casts a shadow on the item below it. This shadow is dynamic to the distance between objects (the further apart the files, the more light gets let in, so the shadow fades away). Look at the stack when it’s collapsed, documents underneath appear darker as they are shadowed. As the stack opens up, the rotation of the documents also changes so that they are all in-line and evenly spaced, etc.
You’d need a graphics layer like Quartz Extreme to handle all this calculation, which Windows simply doesn’t have. Windows does not render your screen as composited 3D elements. So while you could get a similar effect, you would not be able to implement semi-transparent shading, ghosting or smooth rotation (let alone zoomable vector graphics). So while it might look similar, it would just never look “as cool”. And it would certainly put a greater performance hit on a Windows machine than on an OSX Machine.
Notice I said Windows, not Intel, as no matter what chip you’re running, it’s the OS that is giving the orders.
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