Also because I still use a PC as well, I would *die* without a hierachical file system. The good thing for the Mac is I have Time Machine so no longer do I need to worry about what folders to back up, etc. But I am pretty anal about all my home folders, etc.
Just seeing the home page of the Leap official website scares me. Scares me deeply.
BTW I use Spotlight primarily to launch applications, calculate, and not really to search for files.
Years of horrible PC habits. I am constantly trying to be aware of where files are, why they are there, if there are any other files there, and where files have gone.
I've been asking Apple to create such a browser for a long time and it seems to be falling onto deaf ears.
I'm sure a quick search of AI forums for words like "hierarchical filesystems are so 1984" and "why can't Apple leverage Spotlight to its fullest" and "Dominic Giampaolo must be rolling in his grave - oh wait, he's not dead yet and still working for Apple, wtf does the Finder still suck?" and "they rewrote the Finder for 10.6 and they haven't bothered to change how it's used?" you'd find threads in which I discuss:
1. How to make the Finder better by making it, by default, use Spotlight to browse files
2. Still offer a hierarchical file browser for old timers that can't adapt and for backwards compatibility
3. Open/Save dialogs that allow users to search using metadata tags and tag documents with metadata that makes sense
The guys behind Leap are geniuses. The guys behind Finder are morons.
Apple, seriously, fire your team of 1000 monkeys typing on 1000 Apple Keyboards and hire Ted and Tom. It'll cost you a bit more but you'll feel better knowing the Finder is now ready for the 21st century.
a file name is just another piece of metadata. It shouldn't have more importance or less importance than other metadata. The most important thing about a file is the data itself -- the content.
I would disagree. I know where you are coming from - all descriptive tags are the same type of data and the importance lies in the priority they have in a given query and shouldn't have global importance. However, we are talking about descriptive tags that give a user an idea about what is in a file.
A generic text-based meta-tag does not give you a preview of a movie's content and a tag that says a file is of a particular type gives you no help either. A file can be auto-tagged with the following:
H264, Quicktime, 700MB, 90 minutes, 640 x 360
But that could be one of a thousand files. With just 2 'tags':
~/Movies, Terminator 2: Judgement Day
you get far more meaningful information and you don't rely on watching the first 3 minutes of the film. So not all tags have equal weight - it's based on uniqueness, how efficiently can a tag help you find what you want. Path and filename are the two strongest tags.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kim kap sol
I just want Apple to work on something similar to Leap.
You mean you want Spotlight to be better? LEAP is doing pretty much the same thing except allowing the use of more custom tags (to get round the filesystem flaws of having static metadata) like Spotlight comments. It looks like LEAP version 1 may have used the Spotlight comments for some metadata storage but found them unreliable, hence the development of openmeta:
I personally feel Spotlight should be improved. In early versions of OS X and OS 9, I used to use the search loads. Since Spotlight was introduced, I haven't used a search more than about 20 times in 2-3 years or so. Maybe I have just grown accustomed to where everything is but the way Spotlight is presented isn't very good and I'm put off using it.
The distinction between Spotlight search and Finder browsing is still an important reason I don't use it nearly so much. As someone on the LEAP forum writes:
"Imagine you wanted to find a screwdriver. Following the Leap setup you're using (and many others), you would first put everything you own into an enormous pile in the front yard and then start separating them into piles looking for the screwdriver. But in reality, you would start in the garage (a Location) and on the west wall (further focusing the Location) and start looking for the Philips head model (another attribute) with the red handle (and another). Instead of starting with the back-breaking work of making the giant pile (which is essentially what Leap is doing with such a broad Home search) you start in a more specific locale and start moving closer and closer to your target.
Leap is a search tool. It is a browser, not a container. That's why you don't "put things into Leap", you expose them on your computer with Leap. When you start Leap you do it with the intention of finding files, not to see how many files your computer can hold."
I like LEAP, the performance is great - faster than Spotlight it seems - and their tagging system is pretty fast and convenient but I want to be able to limit a search to a given location/container. LEAP 2 seems to not use folder name tags, which is a bit of a problem as it wasn't actually able to find some things I searched for where Spotlight did.
What I'd be happy to see is a LEAP-like interface inside an icon beside Coverflow. If it could replace Coverflow even better. This could essentially replace itunes and iphoto as you would never open a program to play music, you'd just click the icon in the Finder and look for a track via meta tags and hit play - the files could be anywhere on your machine.
Your devices like the iphone and ipod would mount in your Finder.
For photos, you'd use the same Finder section to look at files or use Column view etc. Simply hit spacebar to quicklook the file and it would allow you to modify the photo. If you changed the photo, it would ask to save the changes on hitting spacebar again.
There are complications such as making sure it's logical and easy enough to stop music and allow encoding features but I think it would be a good move. I don't see the rigid hierarchy being lost nor do I think it's necessary. Consider the URL for this site. When you make a reply, you get a location - forums.appleinsider.com, a filename - newreply.php and a lit of metadata - action=newreply, post number=10984.
There is no reason why newreply.php would exist at another location because it acts on it's container data i.e. that of Appleinsider. On the other hand, information like action type and post number have no container, they are descriptions entered into a database for a search. Both are needed but for different reasons.
I know that a filesystem seems like it could simply be a flat list all the time as the machine itself acts as the container but it causes problems like I've mentioned earlier about duplicate files, file uniqueness etc. Instead, the problems can simply be avoided and just allow people to browse and manage files in whichever way works best for them. Giving a LEAP-like interface equal status beside column view, cover flow etc would be enough.
But note that it's not a revolutionary idea that Apple have yet to adopt, it's merely a extension to what they have already done. That's all that the LEAP devs have done - made a better Spotlight.
Comments
Just seeing the home page of the Leap official website scares me. Scares me deeply.
BTW I use Spotlight primarily to launch applications, calculate, and not really to search for files.
Years of horrible PC habits. I am constantly trying to be aware of where files are, why they are there, if there are any other files there, and where files have gone.
Leap 2.0
I've been asking Apple to create such a browser for a long time and it seems to be falling onto deaf ears.
I'm sure a quick search of AI forums for words like "hierarchical filesystems are so 1984" and "why can't Apple leverage Spotlight to its fullest" and "Dominic Giampaolo must be rolling in his grave - oh wait, he's not dead yet and still working for Apple, wtf does the Finder still suck?" and "they rewrote the Finder for 10.6 and they haven't bothered to change how it's used?" you'd find threads in which I discuss:
1. How to make the Finder better by making it, by default, use Spotlight to browse files
2. Still offer a hierarchical file browser for old timers that can't adapt and for backwards compatibility
3. Open/Save dialogs that allow users to search using metadata tags and tag documents with metadata that makes sense
The guys behind Leap are geniuses. The guys behind Finder are morons.
Apple, seriously, fire your team of 1000 monkeys typing on 1000 Apple Keyboards and hire Ted and Tom. It'll cost you a bit more but you'll feel better knowing the Finder is now ready for the 21st century.
a file name is just another piece of metadata. It shouldn't have more importance or less importance than other metadata. The most important thing about a file is the data itself -- the content.
I would disagree. I know where you are coming from - all descriptive tags are the same type of data and the importance lies in the priority they have in a given query and shouldn't have global importance. However, we are talking about descriptive tags that give a user an idea about what is in a file.
A generic text-based meta-tag does not give you a preview of a movie's content and a tag that says a file is of a particular type gives you no help either. A file can be auto-tagged with the following:
H264, Quicktime, 700MB, 90 minutes, 640 x 360
But that could be one of a thousand files. With just 2 'tags':
~/Movies, Terminator 2: Judgement Day
you get far more meaningful information and you don't rely on watching the first 3 minutes of the film. So not all tags have equal weight - it's based on uniqueness, how efficiently can a tag help you find what you want. Path and filename are the two strongest tags.
I just want Apple to work on something similar to Leap.
You mean you want Spotlight to be better? LEAP is doing pretty much the same thing except allowing the use of more custom tags (to get round the filesystem flaws of having static metadata) like Spotlight comments. It looks like LEAP version 1 may have used the Spotlight comments for some metadata storage but found them unreliable, hence the development of openmeta:
http://code.google.com/p/openmeta/
I personally feel Spotlight should be improved. In early versions of OS X and OS 9, I used to use the search loads. Since Spotlight was introduced, I haven't used a search more than about 20 times in 2-3 years or so. Maybe I have just grown accustomed to where everything is but the way Spotlight is presented isn't very good and I'm put off using it.
The distinction between Spotlight search and Finder browsing is still an important reason I don't use it nearly so much. As someone on the LEAP forum writes:
"Imagine you wanted to find a screwdriver. Following the Leap setup you're using (and many others), you would first put everything you own into an enormous pile in the front yard and then start separating them into piles looking for the screwdriver. But in reality, you would start in the garage (a Location) and on the west wall (further focusing the Location) and start looking for the Philips head model (another attribute) with the red handle (and another). Instead of starting with the back-breaking work of making the giant pile (which is essentially what Leap is doing with such a broad Home search) you start in a more specific locale and start moving closer and closer to your target.
Leap is a search tool. It is a browser, not a container. That's why you don't "put things into Leap", you expose them on your computer with Leap. When you start Leap you do it with the intention of finding files, not to see how many files your computer can hold."
I like LEAP, the performance is great - faster than Spotlight it seems - and their tagging system is pretty fast and convenient but I want to be able to limit a search to a given location/container. LEAP 2 seems to not use folder name tags, which is a bit of a problem as it wasn't actually able to find some things I searched for where Spotlight did.
What I'd be happy to see is a LEAP-like interface inside an icon beside Coverflow. If it could replace Coverflow even better. This could essentially replace itunes and iphoto as you would never open a program to play music, you'd just click the icon in the Finder and look for a track via meta tags and hit play - the files could be anywhere on your machine.
Your devices like the iphone and ipod would mount in your Finder.
For photos, you'd use the same Finder section to look at files or use Column view etc. Simply hit spacebar to quicklook the file and it would allow you to modify the photo. If you changed the photo, it would ask to save the changes on hitting spacebar again.
There are complications such as making sure it's logical and easy enough to stop music and allow encoding features but I think it would be a good move. I don't see the rigid hierarchy being lost nor do I think it's necessary. Consider the URL for this site. When you make a reply, you get a location - forums.appleinsider.com, a filename - newreply.php and a lit of metadata - action=newreply, post number=10984.
There is no reason why newreply.php would exist at another location because it acts on it's container data i.e. that of Appleinsider. On the other hand, information like action type and post number have no container, they are descriptions entered into a database for a search. Both are needed but for different reasons.
I know that a filesystem seems like it could simply be a flat list all the time as the machine itself acts as the container but it causes problems like I've mentioned earlier about duplicate files, file uniqueness etc. Instead, the problems can simply be avoided and just allow people to browse and manage files in whichever way works best for them. Giving a LEAP-like interface equal status beside column view, cover flow etc would be enough.
But note that it's not a revolutionary idea that Apple have yet to adopt, it's merely a extension to what they have already done. That's all that the LEAP devs have done - made a better Spotlight.