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@xxxxxxxxx
