[Design] File Management

[Philip Trauring]

I agree wholeheartedly with this idea. I've been using Eudora (on Mac 
and Windows) for the past 9 years or so and it certainly does not 
handle attachments optimally. The one thing it does do well is that 
you can have a filter move attachments to a specific directory. I use 
that feature to group attachments in specific folders (like from a 
specific company). I've played with mail.app on OS X and it does 
something interesting with attachments - it builds a folder hierarchy 
for attachments that matches the mailbox hierarchy, and stores files 
in each mailbox's corresponding finder. This seems fairly helpful, 
although I think some combination of the two approaches might be 
useful.

I would also love to see some integration of version control into a 
PIM. I have been searching for a personal version control system for 
my work. There are some commercial products (like VOODOO Personal) 
which are relatively easy to use and freeware products (like CVS) 
which are difficult to use. Nothing is optimized for personal use on 
OS X.

Right now I organize my e-mail in it's own hierarchy and my documents 
in another folder hierarchy, and do version control manually. I would 
love to be able to do true version control from within my PIM, having 
access to e-mails and documents in the same place. Although viewing 
documents in-line would be nice, that wouldn't be necessary.

I'd love to see a simple and consistent directory hierarchy for all 
the components used in the PIM, maybe something like:

Mail/
IM/
Documents/
Calendar/

Of perhaps something more subject-specific, where each of these 
folders would reside within the hierarchy created within the PIM. 
That way, each project one is working on could have a directory that 
organized all the related mail, IM logs, documents and calendar 
information in one place. What would really make this powerful is the 
ability to have content in multiple locations, specified both 
automatically via filters and manually by the user (so the user could 
either move content, or duplicate content (mv vs. cp). Obviously it 
would be nice to have content in multiple locations without 
increasing the space taken up by the content, but aliases can be a 
problem. If aliases are used I would suggest that a simple method was 
introduced for backing up data, inserting the actual content instead 
of the aliases.

Philip Trauring

At 10:33 AM -0700 10/21/02, Neal L. Lester wrote:
>The things a PIM usually manages, activities, projects, e-mails all 
>have files associated with them.  File management (attachment 
>management) has been a weakness of every PIM I've ever used. 
>Really, a PIM should take on the role of file manager ala Raskin's 
>The Humane Interface.
>
>What are some key features for PIM file management:
>
>Simple Version Control.
>
>All files (and previous versions) should be stored in one place. 
>References to a file (even in e-mail attachments) should be 
>short-cuts to the one original file, not copies of the original 
>file.  Creating a copy should require some extra effort by the user. 
>This would not only save tremendously on storage resources, but 
>would end many a confusion over which version you are using.
>
>Simple backup which captures both the PIM data and associated files 
>(attachments).