Sounds like a great idea to me. I'd love a feature like that. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how possible OCR part would be. Has there been much advance in that field in the last few years?
folders are not dying as a methafor (it just groups files belong to eachother for some reason), they are just changing in a technical sense (saved Spotlight search-results) which make them more versitle.
You cant't just throw folders away; how are you going to upload your website to a Linux server then, eh?
I think that Apple will only keep the smart folders. Imagine if you move photos into a folder called "Holiday in Spain". Spotlight will then add the keyword/value: folder="Holiday in Spain". This keyword is then is used by the OS to build the hierarchy in Finder, but it would probably be just as easy to do it by "photocamera aperture" or something.
the idea of doing away with folders was something i first read on here. as i think about it more and more it makes more and more sense and seems more attractive...
it's probably not necessary to totally discard folders as an element of file organisation, but i am all for generally hiding them from the user for most tasks. after all, the new mindset would take some adjustment. i can see a version of os x with some kind of option to "hide folders", allowing established users to try the never structure.
this would be a bit like how MS did away with dos. start by featuring (but sidelining) it, then do away with it altogether in time.
Microsoft have been promising to do away with folders for over a decade. In 1992, when Windows NT 4.0 ("Cairo") was under development, Microsoft promised an "Object File System" that would make folders irrelevant, since you would be able to search by file content and easily find files, no matter where they were stored. This was eventually scrapped, as they could not manage to implement it successfully.
In 2002 (ten years later) Microsoft tried again. They announced that Windows Longhorn would do do away with folders by introducing WinFS, which would flatten the filesystem, and allow you to access your files by metadata rather than by filename. In late 2004, they announced that WinFS would not ship with Longhorn. They have now announced that it will ship in 2007 as a free addon to Vista, but it is now looking more like Spotlight (from an end-user perspective) than a revolutionary way of organising files.
So, the idea of getting rid of folders is nothing new. They've been "on the way out" and "soon to be deprecated" since 1992.
What's really amusing is that we're actually converging back on something like the original Mac had in 1984, and was universally panned for.
The current filesystem is HFS+. The H stands for "Hierarchical". As in folders. Now since this seems like an obvious part of a filesystem, why name it that way? Because the predecessor that shipping in Macs until, oh, 1987, was MFS - Macintosh File System, and it had no folders.
Yup, no folders. Everything was on floppy at that time, so it was kind of hard to lose your file in only 1.44MB of space. Instead, files were expected to be tagged with multiple types of metadata to help you recognize them, organize them, etc, but on a flat disk structure.
Unfortunately, they never really got the metadata thing nailed down right, and then hard drives gave people *PLENTY* of space (a whole 10MB!) to lose their files in, and folders were introduced in HFS. Metadata took a back seat, and now twenty years later, everyone's rushing to return to essentially MFS+.
maybe I'm just old fashioned, but I still use folders out the wazoo, and I'm having a hard time understanding how anyone could just go without them. My documents folder is the most used, here's my folders
now how am i supposed to browse all the stuff in those folders, and subfolders, without a hierarchy of folders? I mean, look at iTunes, everybody was thrilled when they finally allowed folders in the source column! People don't want all their stuff in one directory, it doesn't make sense. I can't imagine that any of you would want that either, so could someone please explain to me how on Earth you can manage files without a folder hierarchy? \
Edit: There's not enought meta data for one file for the computer to know that I want my "lecture 1" file from school to be under the "School > 05-06 Spring > Network & SysAdmin > Lectures" directory.
Look, when you put a file in a folder, you are essentially adding metadata to the file that says "you belong to container X" where X is your folder. The problem with this is you only get to give it one container at a time.
So instead, let's say you can toss that file into a folder that you've named Books. Great! Now, it shows up in your Books folder. Let's say, however, that you also want it to show up in another folder based on your work, say it's part of research for a piece you're writing. Oops. Can't have one file in multiple places, it only gets one container. So what do you do? Well, the old way would be to make an alias. A stub pointer that says "I'm not really here, but I'm supposed to act just like that guy over there in that other container."
Well, that works, but it's not really what you want, is it? You want the same file to appear in multiple places, ie, folders, based on how you organized it.
Imagine instead that these folders are really smart folders, and instead of just saying "you belong to container X", you can say "you have metadata X associated with you", where now X is the folder. Cool, you can add as many of these as you want now.
So, you could have a Books folder, and any file you drop in it appears in there. Just like before. And you can have a Work/Research/Project A/ folder, and any file you drop in there appears in there. Just like before.
But now you can drop the same file into both places, and have it appear, without having to resort to work arounds like aliases.
Want to remove the metadata? Take it out of the folder.
Want to add other metadata? Put it in another folder.
It'll work *just like before*, except that now you can do neat stuff like:
- Make a folder with search parameters like "All Books downloaded after July 10, 2004, not associated with Project B, but associated with Project A"
The computer can pull a lot of information about a file out, like the download date, and use that along with what you provide as metadata based on where you put the file, and now you have a rich soup of information to mine for info.
Sure, you can do this now with Spotlight, but adding all that metadata is a pain. Using folders as a UI to add/delete metadata is seamless, easy, and intuitive. Heck, we already all know how to do it, we've been doing it all along.
Folders aren't going to go away - how we use them, and what they represent, is changing, and quickly.
Take your lecture example - you're right, the computer doesn't know that information, but you did. Now, the computer knows that if you do a search for any of the items named in the folder hierarchy list, it should return that file as part of the results. You did the metadata tagging, just not in a way that the computer currently uses. Rich metadata opens up whole new worlds of file organization.
Want to remove the metadata? Take it out of the folder.
Want to add other metadata? Put it in another folder.
It'll work *just like before*, except that now you can do neat stuff like:
- Make a folder with search parameters like "All Books downloaded after July 10, 2004, not associated with Project B, but associated with Project A"
Ok, I can perfectly understand what you're saying there. My iTunes library is very much sorted in this way, all I use are smart folders pretty much. For example I have an playlist that's called "5 star fresh" where my Rating is 5 stars, Play count is less than 10, podcast is false, kind does not contain movie. (They should put in a parameter for the smar playlists that lets you specify the source to be Music, Audiobooks, Podcasts, Videos, or Booklets, like the libray is)
Anyway, the point being, is that I was able to set up all that data on the music file by getting info on it, and specifying all sorts of meta data like, album, genr, rating, etc. And from there I can use metadata very effectively. I don't see how this is the case with files on finder. The only place I can find to add meta data is through the "Spotlight Comments" field of the info.
I'm also confused as to how you are adding metadata to the file by putting it in the folder. When I create a new smart folder, I can't specify the name of a particular folder, all I can do is work with metadata like Kind, last opened, color label, etc. If I could ADD my own meta data to the file like I did with my iTunes song, then I could start doing something.
Okay, ignore how Smart Folders work right now, and think of just regular folders. By placing a file in that folder, you're creating an association between that file, and that folder, right? And you got to name that folder, correct?
You are, in essence, creating metadata on that file the same as the folder name - and the folder name it is contained in, and so on, all the way back up to the hard drive level.
Think of it this way - when you place a picture in /Users/deepeajay/Pictures/Family/Vacations/Honolulu, you've said that it is a Picture that belongs to Userdeepeajay, and it is of a FamilyVacation to Honolulu. It's not just about Honolulu, but it's associated with everything down to that point. That's, what, six pieces of metadata? You just didn't realize it.
Folders that are manually created are a way of tagging files with metadata, but right now we only get a partial view of that.
Do a Spotlight search for 'Vacation' on the above mythical file system, and you won't get the pictures in 'Honolulu', as it currently stands. If folders were treated as a way for the user to add hierarchical metadata, you would. Because, really, that's what the picture is - a vacation photo. 'Honolulu' just refines that metadata to be just vacation photos of Honolulu.
Imagine being able to use folders to add the metadata, just like you do now to organize your files. The folders are the user's way of manually adding or deleting metadata in a natural way.
Of course, there are other ways to do this, like the iTunes Info panel - but you'll notice that if you have your music organized by iTunes on the drive, it places them into artist/album hierarchies that look suspiciously like what I've discussed above...
Traditional folders become the manual tagging method, while smart folders become a method to flexibly view the files in new ways. Make more sense?
(And, it offers a slick upgrade path this way - you don't have to force users to add a bunch of metadata to make the system really useful, like you do now. Instead, just scan their folder structures, and every file in a folder gets tagged with the folder name as metadata. A one-time pass, and voila - rich soup of metadata to play with.)
Another, more technical way of looking at it, is that Smart Folders are regex-capable read-only views on the metadata database, while manual folders are single-element (but hierarchically organized) read/write controllers of the metadata database.
Apple seriously needs to implement boolean logic into their spotlight interface as well. Having everything ANDed together is stupid, and not very robust.
Kickaha has given some good technical explanations. Just try to remember that folders don't actually exist. They are simply the convention that the computer is given to us. The concept is to make it familiar to people. Everyone here should know that it is simply to duplicate the file folder draw metaphor. It's difficult to get people to think in ways they aren't brought up to think.
The organization of data in a "sea", where it floats around, until some part of it is caught by a query "hook" is the concept behind metadata. It was also the concept behine the original idea for the Newton, way back when. But, it can be confusing to most people, because metadata isn't usually the way they would organize their files. We are too used to a,b,c..., or 1,2,3..., names, etc.
Metadata basically regards all data as having the same value, until it is called up. There is no real hierarchy. A hierarchy is an artificial concept that we make up to organize files in the one or two ways that we can easily remember them.
The computer remembers everything with equal facility, so it doesn't need that artificial ordering.
The difficulty is in the interface. It can be far more powerful than the concept of folders, but far more confusing, because people have to learn a different way of thinking about their data, as opposed to thinking about files. There will be overlap, but not always. In the beginning, Apple has tried to make it simple, with the KISS rule, but that can, and often has, resulted in chaos. simple extensions to the interface, such as allowing results only after a "return" is hit, can help there, but still, the power of the search is not being utilized. Something new needs to be done.
But, that is where the problem begins. I suspect that the interface is one of the major problems that MS has had with "Cairo" over the many years they have been working on it. It must feel natural, while, at the same time, giving people the power it promises.
The first company to do that will have a major victory.
It's funny... I used the word 'soup' a couple of time, own a Newton, etc, but it still didn't hit me until you mentioned it.
Yup, we're coming back around to that little wee green beastie. (I still say that Aqua is geared to be pen-input capable right away... Dock, single-click requirement... it all makes for a truly pennable UI. Add in a soup, and yeah, we're getting back to what the Newton promised.)
Then there could be a demo of the concept - a 3D world, a massive universe of information (camera floating around millions of icons in black space). Then there's sound of keyboard keys clicking.
A few of those millions of icons suddenly light up, and others fade away. The user is then presented with just the icons he/she is looking for.
Just to quote myself there from the previous post. This is what Spotlight already does, and it's worked for me.
Those familiar with Opera's M2 email client know how convenient smart folders are. All messages are in the Inbox, and the same message can be in many smart folders. An AppleInsider Forum reply notification could be in the "Notifications" folder, and on the "Mac-Related" folder. I never had problems.
Again, it's not about doing away with folders. It's about coming up with an alternative, and moving on.
For websites, app development, widgets... or anything else that depends on folders (there's tonnes! I realize), they will still be there. Finder can still exist.
But imagine not needing it. Throw in your latest camera roll into OS X, and data such as image date, dimensions, resolutions, shutter speed are all registered. Tag the roll, as Kickaha illustrated "Honalulu" (just as you would a folder), and instead of finding the folder and clicking on the files, you just type in Honalulu.
Or create a smart folder called Honalulu.
Or create a normal folder (like a normal iTunes playlist) if you like.
But the idea of a folderless OS is just... wow.
Add: melgross, really like your post and the hook imagery. Most users are adapted to the folder system of organizing things - me included. So it can't really be outdone (and shouldn't), no fear there. But wow. Again.
Aaaaaaaa! Mass hysteria! Dogs and cats, living together! The endtimes!
A folderless file system isn't that big a stretch, but a filesystem without any method for organizing is.
I just think that the current GUI/folder approach is so well ingrained that it will take a lot to usurp it. And besides, it has a place in the New File Order... as a controller approach. Still a good widget for that.
What smart folders get us is better *views* on the data, and that's really what organization is ultimately about.
To date, we've had either good control, but limited views (traditional folders) or lousy control but decent views (Spotlight). The approach I outlined above gives good control, and good views. Bada bing.
To give some idea of just how hard this problem really is, remember Jef Raskin (you all know who he was, right?), his "Humane Interface", which he had put foward as a replacement for all other GUI's, is really a disaster. He seems to be the only person who thought it is really easy and sensible.
To give some idea of just how hard this problem really is, remember Jef Raskin (you all know who he was, right?), his "Humane Interface", which he had put foward as a replacement for all other GUI's, is really a disaster. He seems to be the only person who thought it is really easy and sensible.
I wish there was more time/space for responding to several interesting points in this thread.
Quote:
Originally posted by melgross
Just try to remember that folders don't actually exist. They are simply the convention that the computer is given to us.
A hierarchy is an artificial concept that we make up to organize files in the one or two ways that we can easily remember them.
That convention/concept is primarily reenforced by hierarchical filesystems, creating the illusion of files/folders having fixed locations for interfaces to fundamentally rely on. Using those interfaces (e.g. Finder) relentlessly insists we choose (explicitly or implicitly) where particular files "belong" (when saving) or "are" (when opening) within hierarchical folder structures, Then we copy/move/link/delete those files/folders, attempting to create useful relationships between them, a.k.a. file management.
Foo, people are replying faster than I can keep up ...
Quote:
Originally posted by Kickaha
A folderless file system isn't that big a stretch, but a filesystem without any method for organizing is.
I was getting to that.
Some of the explanations (especially from you and Mel) already cover most of it anyway.
Comments
Originally posted by livatlantis
This image shocks:
Sounds like a great idea to me. I'd love a feature like that. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how possible OCR part would be. Has there been much advance in that field in the last few years?
You cant't just throw folders away; how are you going to upload your website to a Linux server then, eh?
I think that Apple will only keep the smart folders. Imagine if you move photos into a folder called "Holiday in Spain". Spotlight will then add the keyword/value: folder="Holiday in Spain". This keyword is then is used by the OS to build the hierarchy in Finder, but it would probably be just as easy to do it by "photocamera aperture" or something.
it's probably not necessary to totally discard folders as an element of file organisation, but i am all for generally hiding them from the user for most tasks. after all, the new mindset would take some adjustment. i can see a version of os x with some kind of option to "hide folders", allowing established users to try the never structure.
this would be a bit like how MS did away with dos. start by featuring (but sidelining) it, then do away with it altogether in time.
In 2002 (ten years later) Microsoft tried again. They announced that Windows Longhorn would do do away with folders by introducing WinFS, which would flatten the filesystem, and allow you to access your files by metadata rather than by filename. In late 2004, they announced that WinFS would not ship with Longhorn. They have now announced that it will ship in 2007 as a free addon to Vista, but it is now looking more like Spotlight (from an end-user perspective) than a revolutionary way of organising files.
So, the idea of getting rid of folders is nothing new. They've been "on the way out" and "soon to be deprecated" since 1992.
The current filesystem is HFS+. The H stands for "Hierarchical". As in folders. Now since this seems like an obvious part of a filesystem, why name it that way? Because the predecessor that shipping in Macs until, oh, 1987, was MFS - Macintosh File System, and it had no folders.
Yup, no folders. Everything was on floppy at that time, so it was kind of hard to lose your file in only 1.44MB of space. Instead, files were expected to be tagged with multiple types of metadata to help you recognize them, organize them, etc, but on a flat disk structure.
Unfortunately, they never really got the metadata thing nailed down right, and then hard drives gave people *PLENTY* of space (a whole 10MB!) to lose their files in, and folders were introduced in HFS. Metadata took a back seat, and now twenty years later, everyone's rushing to return to essentially MFS+.
I love cycles.
Archive, Books, Financial records, Icons, Magazines, Miscellaneous, Quizzing, Recipes, School, WebSites, Papers, etc.
now how am i supposed to browse all the stuff in those folders, and subfolders, without a hierarchy of folders? I mean, look at iTunes, everybody was thrilled when they finally allowed folders in the source column! People don't want all their stuff in one directory, it doesn't make sense. I can't imagine that any of you would want that either, so could someone please explain to me how on Earth you can manage files without a folder hierarchy?
Edit: There's not enought meta data for one file for the computer to know that I want my "lecture 1" file from school to be under the "School > 05-06 Spring > Network & SysAdmin > Lectures" directory.
I'm really confused, and its frustrating!
Look, when you put a file in a folder, you are essentially adding metadata to the file that says "you belong to container X" where X is your folder. The problem with this is you only get to give it one container at a time.
So instead, let's say you can toss that file into a folder that you've named Books. Great! Now, it shows up in your Books folder. Let's say, however, that you also want it to show up in another folder based on your work, say it's part of research for a piece you're writing. Oops. Can't have one file in multiple places, it only gets one container. So what do you do? Well, the old way would be to make an alias. A stub pointer that says "I'm not really here, but I'm supposed to act just like that guy over there in that other container."
Well, that works, but it's not really what you want, is it? You want the same file to appear in multiple places, ie, folders, based on how you organized it.
Imagine instead that these folders are really smart folders, and instead of just saying "you belong to container X", you can say "you have metadata X associated with you", where now X is the folder. Cool, you can add as many of these as you want now.
So, you could have a Books folder, and any file you drop in it appears in there. Just like before. And you can have a Work/Research/Project A/ folder, and any file you drop in there appears in there. Just like before.
But now you can drop the same file into both places, and have it appear, without having to resort to work arounds like aliases.
Want to remove the metadata? Take it out of the folder.
Want to add other metadata? Put it in another folder.
It'll work *just like before*, except that now you can do neat stuff like:
- Make a folder with search parameters like "All Books downloaded after July 10, 2004, not associated with Project B, but associated with Project A"
The computer can pull a lot of information about a file out, like the download date, and use that along with what you provide as metadata based on where you put the file, and now you have a rich soup of information to mine for info.
Sure, you can do this now with Spotlight, but adding all that metadata is a pain. Using folders as a UI to add/delete metadata is seamless, easy, and intuitive. Heck, we already all know how to do it, we've been doing it all along.
Folders aren't going to go away - how we use them, and what they represent, is changing, and quickly.
Take your lecture example - you're right, the computer doesn't know that information, but you did. Now, the computer knows that if you do a search for any of the items named in the folder hierarchy list, it should return that file as part of the results. You did the metadata tagging, just not in a way that the computer currently uses. Rich metadata opens up whole new worlds of file organization.
Originally posted by Kickaha
Want to remove the metadata? Take it out of the folder.
Want to add other metadata? Put it in another folder.
It'll work *just like before*, except that now you can do neat stuff like:
- Make a folder with search parameters like "All Books downloaded after July 10, 2004, not associated with Project B, but associated with Project A"
Ok, I can perfectly understand what you're saying there. My iTunes library is very much sorted in this way, all I use are smart folders pretty much. For example I have an playlist that's called "5 star fresh" where my Rating is 5 stars, Play count is less than 10, podcast is false, kind does not contain movie. (They should put in a parameter for the smar playlists that lets you specify the source to be Music, Audiobooks, Podcasts, Videos, or Booklets, like the libray is)
Anyway, the point being, is that I was able to set up all that data on the music file by getting info on it, and specifying all sorts of meta data like, album, genr, rating, etc. And from there I can use metadata very effectively. I don't see how this is the case with files on finder. The only place I can find to add meta data is through the "Spotlight Comments" field of the info.
I'm also confused as to how you are adding metadata to the file by putting it in the folder. When I create a new smart folder, I can't specify the name of a particular folder, all I can do is work with metadata like Kind, last opened, color label, etc. If I could ADD my own meta data to the file like I did with my iTunes song, then I could start doing something.
You are, in essence, creating metadata on that file the same as the folder name - and the folder name it is contained in, and so on, all the way back up to the hard drive level.
Think of it this way - when you place a picture in /Users/deepeajay/Pictures/Family/Vacations/Honolulu, you've said that it is a Picture that belongs to User deepeajay, and it is of a Family Vacation to Honolulu. It's not just about Honolulu, but it's associated with everything down to that point. That's, what, six pieces of metadata? You just didn't realize it.
Folders that are manually created are a way of tagging files with metadata, but right now we only get a partial view of that.
Do a Spotlight search for 'Vacation' on the above mythical file system, and you won't get the pictures in 'Honolulu', as it currently stands. If folders were treated as a way for the user to add hierarchical metadata, you would. Because, really, that's what the picture is - a vacation photo. 'Honolulu' just refines that metadata to be just vacation photos of Honolulu.
Imagine being able to use folders to add the metadata, just like you do now to organize your files. The folders are the user's way of manually adding or deleting metadata in a natural way.
Of course, there are other ways to do this, like the iTunes Info panel - but you'll notice that if you have your music organized by iTunes on the drive, it places them into artist/album hierarchies that look suspiciously like what I've discussed above...
Traditional folders become the manual tagging method, while smart folders become a method to flexibly view the files in new ways. Make more sense?
(And, it offers a slick upgrade path this way - you don't have to force users to add a bunch of metadata to make the system really useful, like you do now. Instead, just scan their folder structures, and every file in a folder gets tagged with the folder name as metadata. A one-time pass, and voila - rich soup of metadata to play with.)
Another, more technical way of looking at it, is that Smart Folders are regex-capable read-only views on the metadata database, while manual folders are single-element (but hierarchically organized) read/write controllers of the metadata database.
you're speaking of something that SHOULD be done for leopard?
Can't do it now, should be able to in Leopard. In my opinion. Nobody knows what Apple has planned.
The organization of data in a "sea", where it floats around, until some part of it is caught by a query "hook" is the concept behind metadata. It was also the concept behine the original idea for the Newton, way back when. But, it can be confusing to most people, because metadata isn't usually the way they would organize their files. We are too used to a,b,c..., or 1,2,3..., names, etc.
Metadata basically regards all data as having the same value, until it is called up. There is no real hierarchy. A hierarchy is an artificial concept that we make up to organize files in the one or two ways that we can easily remember them.
The computer remembers everything with equal facility, so it doesn't need that artificial ordering.
The difficulty is in the interface. It can be far more powerful than the concept of folders, but far more confusing, because people have to learn a different way of thinking about their data, as opposed to thinking about files. There will be overlap, but not always. In the beginning, Apple has tried to make it simple, with the KISS rule, but that can, and often has, resulted in chaos. simple extensions to the interface, such as allowing results only after a "return" is hit, can help there, but still, the power of the search is not being utilized. Something new needs to be done.
But, that is where the problem begins. I suspect that the interface is one of the major problems that MS has had with "Cairo" over the many years they have been working on it. It must feel natural, while, at the same time, giving people the power it promises.
The first company to do that will have a major victory.
Yup, we're coming back around to that little wee green beastie. (I still say that Aqua is geared to be pen-input capable right away... Dock, single-click requirement... it all makes for a truly pennable UI. Add in a soup, and yeah, we're getting back to what the Newton promised.)
Originally posted by livatlantis
Then there could be a demo of the concept - a 3D world, a massive universe of information (camera floating around millions of icons in black space). Then there's sound of keyboard keys clicking.
A few of those millions of icons suddenly light up, and others fade away. The user is then presented with just the icons he/she is looking for.
Just to quote myself there from the previous post. This is what Spotlight already does, and it's worked for me.
Those familiar with Opera's M2 email client know how convenient smart folders are. All messages are in the Inbox, and the same message can be in many smart folders. An AppleInsider Forum reply notification could be in the "Notifications" folder, and on the "Mac-Related" folder. I never had problems.
Again, it's not about doing away with folders. It's about coming up with an alternative, and moving on.
For websites, app development, widgets... or anything else that depends on folders (there's tonnes! I realize), they will still be there. Finder can still exist.
But imagine not needing it. Throw in your latest camera roll into OS X, and data such as image date, dimensions, resolutions, shutter speed are all registered. Tag the roll, as Kickaha illustrated "Honalulu" (just as you would a folder), and instead of finding the folder and clicking on the files, you just type in Honalulu.
Or create a smart folder called Honalulu.
Or create a normal folder (like a normal iTunes playlist) if you like.
But the idea of a folderless OS is just... wow.
Add: melgross, really like your post and the hook imagery. Most users are adapted to the folder system of organizing things - me included. So it can't really be outdone (and shouldn't), no fear there. But wow. Again.
A folderless file system isn't that big a stretch, but a filesystem without any method for organizing is.
I just think that the current GUI/folder approach is so well ingrained that it will take a lot to usurp it. And besides, it has a place in the New File Order... as a controller approach. Still a good widget for that.
What smart folders get us is better *views* on the data, and that's really what organization is ultimately about.
To date, we've had either good control, but limited views (traditional folders) or lousy control but decent views (Spotlight). The approach I outlined above gives good control, and good views. Bada bing.
http://jef.raskincenter.org/home/index.html
Originally posted by melgross
To give some idea of just how hard this problem really is, remember Jef Raskin (you all know who he was, right?), his "Humane Interface", which he had put foward as a replacement for all other GUI's, is really a disaster. He seems to be the only person who thought it is really easy and sensible.
http://jef.raskincenter.org/home/index.html
didn't he die?
Originally posted by melgross
Just try to remember that folders don't actually exist. They are simply the convention that the computer is given to us.
A hierarchy is an artificial concept that we make up to organize files in the one or two ways that we can easily remember them.
That convention/concept is primarily reenforced by hierarchical filesystems, creating the illusion of files/folders having fixed locations for interfaces to fundamentally rely on. Using those interfaces (e.g. Finder) relentlessly insists we choose (explicitly or implicitly) where particular files "belong" (when saving) or "are" (when opening) within hierarchical folder structures, Then we copy/move/link/delete those files/folders, attempting to create useful relationships between them, a.k.a. file management.
Foo, people are replying faster than I can keep up ...
Originally posted by Kickaha
A folderless file system isn't that big a stretch, but a filesystem without any method for organizing is.
I was getting to that.
Some of the explanations (especially from you and Mel) already cover most of it anyway.
Originally posted by DeaPeaJay
didn't he die?
Yes. That's why I said "was".