NY Times Circuits: New Windows Sneak Peak Column from David Pogue. Received in e-mail 5/19/05. (free reg. req.)

The idea of 'stacks' has been kicking around system-software seminars for years, but it looks like Longhorn will bring them to the masses. It's another icon view, in which your documents look like they're piled up in literal piles of paper; the taller the stack, the more stuff is in there.
Thanks to a radically different set of sorting criteria, you can define how your stuff is sorted into stacks: chronologically, by author, by keyword, and so on. (Note to the technical: In other words, Windows is about to go metadata-crazy. You can apply keywords to your documents right in a folder window, using a collapsible list of keywords at the left side. And you can edit other kinds of metadata — date, author, keyword, music genre, and so on — in a panel at the bottom of the window.)

(emphasis mine)

Way cool. One of the things I learned from KFTF researcher William Jones at the PIM class at ASIST last year is that some people do better at keeping found things found by using piles instead of filing. Sometimes we think that we need to binge organize and put everything away (a place for everything and everything in its place). For some people this really doesn't work -- they do better with more visual arrays of documents or physical piles. So stacks, huh? Cool!

Another thing from the quote above... metadata? We'll be able to tag our documents for retrieval? And from elsewhere in the review, better desktop search!

Usually many of the ideas in the prototypes don't make it through to the final versions so don't get too excited. Oh, too late, I'm excited!

updated with typos removed  ¶ 4:35 PM| |cites (technorati) |