Talk:Inventory UI Design

I think the initial interface should not require the use of nested folders. I'd rather have a dialog that listed all my outfits and had buttons with the common operations to perform on each one. Creating nested folders is an advanced user operation.

Witness Microsoft and Apple's recent Save As... dialogs. Apple defaults you to selecting a name for the file and one item from a menu of recent destination directories, defaulting to the Documents folder.

James Linden 16:40, 12 March 2007 (PDT)

Open Discussion - UI Inventory Design

Here we can toss ideas around without having to edit the considerable work that has already gone into the article. Feel free to add your own comments below, but also please leave others alone so we can collect a variety of opinion. Also please keep individual posts brief and on the topic.

Submitted by Ronor Beck: Personally, I've worked with huge mesh, texture and script inventories for many years as a 3D modeler and Poser developer. We all go through phases where we get one bright idea after the other about how to manage the ever-growing inventories. In the end, it all comes down organizing folders, reasonable file naming and having a few simple tools to make the process as efficient as possible. It is a case of Simple Is Better in the long run for both experts and newcomers.

The tools I use constantly in managing my libraries are 1) Duplicate Finder 2) Smart Search (with filters and wildcards) 3) Batch Renamers - that's about it. No fancy database managers, gizmos or auto-this-and-that because even though we are lured into trying them, they just lack the flexibility and simplicity to use on a daily basis.

Translating this to Second Life should be fairly simple. Adding a good duplicate finder would be extremely helpful - especially one that could search UUIDs for duplicates as well as the file names. I know we all have several versions of the same object with different names that we would like to track down and group or delete. Second, a more powerful "Advanced Search" capability would also be tremendously helpful - even just to limit searches to specific folders and (optionally-at user discretion) sub-folders. Beyond that - the ability to add keywords to files would be a giant leap toward organization - folders alone don't do the job (which is why I use a Re-namer to append keywords to a file name that becomes searchable).

Above all, we should resist the temptation to implement any sort of imposed "default" structure on a user's files or any "auto-sort" processes. - let the user define his/her own priorities and structure because there is no common denominator and no two users have the same file requirements. I think the idea above is exactly the type of thing that sounds great on paper, but in the long run just becomes another limitation for which people will find a work-around.

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