Ric Moore wrote:
>
> As Rahul mentioned, newbs don't care about extensions. In fact, if
> they have been running Windows, they have been conditioned to not know
> that extensions even *exist* since Windows hides them by default (one
> of my big pet peeves) and finding the dialog to enable them is not
> newbie friendly.
>
> I know where you are coming from but I don't think that this will be
> traumatizing for newbs and may be somewhat simplifying since they just
> have to know that it is media ... not audio media or video media and
> have to find the right player.
Mplayer does that nicely, regardless of the extension. I think quite of
few of us are showing DOS roots here. If all I need to do is click and
it works, that's a step up, IMHO. As Rahul mentioned, the desktop icon
will reveal what the file is, regardless of extension.
Itunes really has the best interface model here: interact only with the
internal name for an item and don't ever make the user even know about
an underlying file and its name or location. If you do have a reason to
need access to the file, let the interface do it for you by interacting
with the visible name. For example, itunes will let you use any/all of
its playlist selection tools to get a set of names in a list - and if
you want to do something with the files you can just select some names
and drag them off to another location like a folder or USB connected
drive. You don't need to know anything about the underlying filenames,
extensions or storage locations to do this.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell(a)gmail.com