File Manager - Spatial File Manager

Spatial File Manager

Spatial file managers use a spatial metaphor to represent files and directories as if they were actual physical objects. A spatial file manager imitates the way people interact with physical objects.

Some ideas behind the concept of a spatial file manager are:

  1. A single window represents each opened directory
  2. Each window is unambiguously and irrevocably tied to a particular directory.
  3. Stability: files, directories, and windows go where the user moves them, stay where the user puts them ("preserve their spatial state"), and retain all their other "physical" characteristics (such as size, shape, color and location).
  4. The same item can only be viewed in one window at a time.

As in navigational file managers, when a directory is opened, the icon representing the directory changes—perhaps from an image showing a closed drawer to an opened one, perhaps the directory's icon turns into a silhouette filled with a pattern—and a new window is opened to represent that directory.

Read more about this topic:  File Manager

Famous quotes containing the words file and/or manager:

    While waiting to get married, several forms of employment were acceptable. Teaching kindergarten was for those girls who stayed in school four years. The rest were secretaries, typists, file clerks, or receptionists in insurance firms or banks, preferably those owned or run by the family, but respectable enough if the boss was an upstanding Christian member of the community.
    Barbara Howar (b. 1934)

    Nothing could his enemies do but it rebounded to his infinite advantage,—that is, to the advantage of his cause.... No theatrical manager could have arranged things so wisely to give effect to his behavior and words. And who, think you, was the manager? Who placed the slave-woman and her child, whom he stooped to kiss for a symbol, between his prison and the gallows?
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)