I'm not using GWorkspace at present, since I've not had time to set up any
machine that isn't 100% necessary for my everyday use since I moved last fall.
Anything with GNUstep installed is still sitting down in my garage. However, I
can say that the spatial finder view is useful in a few specific contexts.
I think Apple made a train wreck out of merging the Workspace Manager and Finder in Mac OS X. The amalgam of the two
is less than the original sum of either part. But that is more due to a fundamental lack of understanding of *either*
interface (in my opinion) on the part of the implementors than any particular incompatibility in concept. The
browser-style interface of NeXT works incredibly well for deep directory hierarchies (something most of us encounter in
everyday use) for the most part, but is crippled in OS X by (in my opinion) lack of the browser shelf and the nastiness
of right-hand scrollbars; necessitating having to hop back-and-forth with the mouse while scrolling around and
clicking, instead of working smoothly from left-to-right. I know there are people who claim this is just a matter of
getting used to it, but in 10 years I still haven't "gotten used to it". I also *hate* not having the shelf
to drop something onto temporarily, it requires me, quite often, to have to have multiple windows open to move or copy
things when only one would have been necessary on the NeXT. From the Finder viewpoint, up until very recently it was
just insanely buggy, the "spatial" part of things was barely evident, the Finder would forget the position I
had placed things in at random times, and it is often *much* slower than Classic Mac OS ever was when opening a new
window, since Classic Mac OS didn't go the Windows route of determining file types from extensions and such, choosing
instead to store that information in resources along with the particular icon to use. I experience this kind of thing
every time I drag something to the folder I store scans of my daughter's artwork in -- those scans average around 220
MB compressed, and when you drag across a spring-loaded folder and it opens and then tries to generate thumbnails for
those things on-the-fly, the "spring loaded" feel, the "smooth" feel, goes completely
out-of-the-window (so to speak). These are all aspects of poor design choices and implementation, though.
The spatial style view is certainly useful for those of us who have very "spatial" memories. I certainly do.
I probably keep a couple hundred WindowMaker terminal windows open at any given time, spread across one or at most two
virtual desktops (I'll open a second one for short-term tasks, making it easier to throw away all of the windows
related to that task when done). I keep the WindowMaker "Windows" menu parked in the lower-right of my
screen, and I just drop the mouse down there to get it to scroll onto the screen. All of the windows are named the
same (I log into too many different machines as too many different users to bother with naming terminals). I remember
which window is which by position in that list, and I often don't even need to look at it, I can judge when to click
intuitively by the length of time it takes for things to scroll up. That's spatial memory. It freaks a lot of people
out when they see my desktop, because I don't minimize anything, and i don't have a taskbar or any of that other
nonsense. It is just clutter to me; I want as much unmolested screen real-estate as possible. However, on my Mac,
where I tend to keep a lot of folders and a *ton* of files, I tend to use the browser-style view in the Finder,
*except* for the leaf folders. There, depending on the folder type, I will use either the detail listing (usually
sorted by file type or date) or the spatial view, depending on context. If it is a code directory, it will be one of
the former, if it is something like a folder full of artwork or design layouts, it will be the spatial view. Each of
those views will have an intuitive (to me) layout that isn't going to come out of sorting by some file attribute. I
also tend to organize PDF's this way. (By the way, for those of you who have ever seen "Delicious Library",
I've always thought it would be truly useful to have a "Library" view style, since that's what I'm really
trying to accomplish when organizing my PDF's).
While I say I have a spatial memory, in reality I am probably somewhere in the very middle, and most other
techies are probably in the other corner all together. When I was in college, one of my professors gave us
one of those left brain/right brain tests. This being an engineering school, almost everyone in the class
came down solidly in the left brain category. I scored exactly the same for left and right. She claimed she
had never seen that happen in all the time she had been teaching. It didn't surprise me at all; I was a
self-taught artist, and had been doing commercial art on a small scale since I was age twelve. I had been
writing software since age ten. I was undecided whether I was going into an engineering school or an art
school until late in my senior year of high school, so applied and was accepted to both. Campus visits
settled the question; this straight-laced Indiana country boy was not comfortable at all with the
"artsy" crowd, though I certainly could have held my own there creativity and skill-wise. So I
opted for engineering. But, I married a graphic designer, and both of our daughters are artistic. The older
one intends to study art, and is quite accomplished already. We just returned Friday from the Congressional
High School Art Competition, where she was the winner for our congressional district. I believe she was the
youngest participant (she is a year ahead in school, and was a freshman (first year) in high school). At any
rate, both daughters and my wife use Macs, and not one of them *ever* uses anything other than the spatial
view of the Finder, except on the very rare occasion that they are looking for something by date. This is
despite the fact that I have repeatedly shown them the advantages of the browser view. When I use one of
their machines, I will often put large directories in browser view (like the Applications folder, so that I
can find/navigate to the Utilities folder) and I inevitably find it set back to spatial view the next time I
am on the machine. Obviously, they find using it that way to be more comfortable than I do. Dorothy, the
older daughter, has been using a Mac since she was two years old (she is fourteen now), and my wife has been
using one since I met her and started training her on a Mac II in 1989. I've been using one longer than
either of them. My daughter gets along OK with a PC, since she has to use them at school, but my wife has
never been able to tolerate using one, not since trying to train her to use XyWrite and Ventura Publisher
(under DOS/GEM) in the early 1990's. Even where the software was substantially the same (Aldus PageMaker was
a great port and almost identical across platforms, as was FrameMaker until Adobe butchered it), the file
manager completely frustrates her; she simply *cannot* deal with using it. On the rare occasions she's had
to do stuff on the PC, I've found poor imitations of the Finder to install to help her out, but that's been a
long time. I find the way she uses things to be very interesting. She has created something similar to
"templates" for just about everything she uses, whether Illustrator or whatnot, that has all of the
drudgery for a particular layout pre-done. She sets up page sizes, margins, page and printer preferences,
guide positions, default text block positions and typography settings, etc., in an otherwise blank document
and then saves them in a "Builders" folder. That folder is organized spatially, though I couldn't
tell you what that arrangement is really. She knows right where to scroll to in order to find a particular
Builder though. And that is really what the spatial view is about…letting you organize things in a way that
suits your mental paradigm, whatever it is, and keeping it that way when you return to it, just like the top
of your desk. Despite the fact that I know more about most of the software that she uses than she does, I
can't come close to matching her in speed when she is working. She's amazing. Anything that slows her down
or gets in her way is met with frustration and loathing. If GNUstep ever wants to be useful to users like
her, it needs to be capable of providing the same kinds of workflow that people like her find useful. I am
not equipped to evaluate how or why certain things work better for her than they do for me, but the empirical
evidence is enough for me to know there is a real difference.