Moving open files

[Dotan Cohen]

2008/7/8 Ed Greshko <Ed.Greshko at greshko.com>:
> Dotan Cohen wrote:
>
>> When a human moves a stapler from one drawer to another, he has no
>> reason to suspect that any modification to the stapler (such as
>> refilling it) would cause a duplicate stapler to appear in the old
>> drawer. Likewise with the movement of open files. This seems to be a
>> real 'gotcha' or trap that one could very easily fall into.
>
> Your analogy is askew.....
>

Let's see.

> Let's take a 3-ring binder with some document in it.  For the sake of ease,
> the document is a single page.  And we have 2 people, X and Y, and they
> never talk to each other.
>

Well, my user thinks that he is the only one handling the page. He
opens it, he moves it. Sure, there might be a technical reason to use
a two-person analogy, however, from the user's point of view he is the
only one who touches that binder.

> X opens the binder, takes out the doc, makes a copy at the copier and puts
> the original back in the binder leaving the binder open.  X goes off to his
> desk to make some modifications.
>

My user never made a copy at the copier and put the original back in
place. From a technical point of view that is a good analogy, but from
the user's point of view he took out the document and started working
on it directly. He did not make a copy, no matter how the program
works internally.

The rest of the analogy is flawed because it assumes a two-person
office. My user sees himself as the only person in the office.

> Y comes along, removes the doc from the binder, takes it to his office and
> places it in his filing cabinet.
>
> X is finished, goes back to the binder sees the original missing, says "what
> the heck...I was going to trash it anyway" and puts the modified document in
> the binder.
>
> The next day X asks Y for the document.  Y goes to his filing cabinet and
> hands it to X.  X says, "hold on a minute....".
>
> That's what they get for not talking to each other....but everyone knows, or
> should know, that X and Y don't talk.
>
> The same holds true if X puts a note on the binder saying please don't touch
> or move this document.  Y can just ignore it.
>
> And yes...if at some point Y goes back to the binder and finds the modified
> doc in the binder he may say..."We don't need 2 of these" and burns it then
> the modifications made by X are lost.
>
> Knowing that the above happens is why document management systems were
> written.  But, of course, using a document management system may be overkill
> in daily, informal use.
>

Dotan Cohen

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A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?