In the new new files UI, the "modified" time for a file is given in both months and days (if there actually are months). This is problematic because (a) it takes up too much room and (b) it is more info than is necessary.
I expect that we opted for this type of information rather than dates because it was viewed as being more useful. I think that when something is very new, its age relative to now (e.g., yesterday, this week, 10 days ago) is meaningful. I don't think I agree that knowing something is "5 months and 23 days" old is more useful than knowing it is "5 months old", or even that it was last modified on 17 June (or whatever the date is).
I recommend that we rethink how this information is presented. If we stick with the relative dates, then I think we should round down (e.g., anything less than a month is reported in number of days, anything more than a month is reported in months only, so 5 months and 12 days becomes 5 months). Perhaps there is also a cut-off age when the absolute date becomes more useful. Or maybe even we only use absolute dates.
Assigning to John Lea for UX input.
I think that we should stick with the original idea of displaying the "Date modified" rather than "Time elapsed since modification".
"Date modified" is the standard method of viewing information related to file modification dates in both Nautilus and Windows Explorer. I feel any advantages of displaying "Time elapsed since modification" are outweighed by the disadvantages of creating a different solution from that provided by the file managers.
The original design agreed during the sprint stated the time for all files whose modification date is today and dates for all the others (see attached file).
A possible modification of this design could be to label all files modified today as “Today [time]” and all others “[date] [time]” e.g. Today 11:36 or 11/06/09 9:58. This is more congruous with Nautilus and Windows Explorer while also providing a easy at a glance view of files modified today or files modified previously.