Does incorporating iOS features into Mac OS mean Mac OS won't have a Finder?

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  • Reply 61 of 66
    pik80pik80 Posts: 148member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Dr Millmoss View Post


    My thoughts exactly. If anyone can figure out a method for this, it's Apple. But it's probably going to piss off a whole lot of people, especially geeks.



    I think they would keep folder search around in a seperate application. If people haven't tagged all their files people would still need a way to search for them.
  • Reply 62 of 66
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by pik80 View Post


    Fortunately tagging isn?t that much work you might only spend 20-30 seconds tagging a file.



    Uhm, while I understand and respect your drive to tag all your files, 20-30 seconds per file is a HUGE amount of work for most people!



    I just looked and have 2938 items in my documents folder. Suppose I would want/need to tag one thousand of those. That means 17.36 days of NON_STOP, 24/7 tagging! Note that this does not include my (several thousand) pictures collection or my 80 GB of music........



    Yes, spotlight/faces/itunes are far from perfect, but come on, while I applaud you for your perseverence, you are part of an extremely tiny minority that thinks it is worth their time to spend 20-30 seconds of tagging per file.
  • Reply 63 of 66
    pik80pik80 Posts: 148member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by dutch pear View Post


    Yes, spotlight/faces/itunes are far from perfect



    ?Yes, spotlight/faces/itunes are far from perfect,?

    Spotlight only searches names of files and contents. The names of the files are too narrow of a search. The contents of the files is too broad not usually giving you enough of a way to filter the number of files down to a manageable level to sort through. Tagging is the perfect balance between those two extremes. It?s broader then file names and the ten or so tags is far less then the contents of the document. The 10-15 tags I applied to the John Lennon Biography a few posts back are far less then the 100 or 200 pages the biography would have been.



    I didn?t say that I tagged all the files one tag at a time. Many times I would tag 50 or 100 at once. The great thing about having the files in folders currently is that files in the same folder often will all share the same tags. You might have a few files in a folder that have slightly different tags but they are almost all mostly the same. Going forward putting files in folders isn?t so important because you have already tagged them and you don?t need the folder organization.



    Several months ago I tagged about 1,000 files in about 2 days or so (by doing group tagging) That wasn?t such an enormous task and my productivity sky rocketed. In addition to those 1,000 files in two days I have added keywords to all the pictures I have shot from with in Lightroom which has been about 1347 files. These photos all had their keywords added upon import. I don?t know how long it look to do that but I know it wasn?t too long because I did that by group tagging on import.



    Some of the files you have mentioned don?t need to be tagged. For instance music and movies of course wouldn?t need to be tagged because someone from the record label or recording studio already added the right file information.
  • Reply 64 of 66
    Oh I'm sure tagging can be done faster than in my calculation. And great to hear that it is boosting your productivity!



    My only point here is that IMHO, tagging by hand is not the future for replacing the aging current filesystem metaphores. I don't know what is the future, and tagging will definately be a usefull part of it, but most of the heavy lifting will have to be done by the OS.



    I think visual organisation is also important. Humans like to visually group their stuff.



    Here is my -back-of-napkin-sketch of one possible future filemanagement-UI to replace the finder I've been pondering about for some time:



    A timeline view of your computer data: Think of it conceptually as a journal for your files, with some sort apple-style beautifull and fluid scrollable time view. Select a date (range), select the kind of data you want to see, give it a nice UI with quicklook goodness. Integrate with spotlight, get everything into one flexible document workspace.



    Think minority report meets the time machine timeline, meets the iPad calendar UI, meets spotlight. Filelinks are organised spatially on your screen, maybe emails in the top right, calendar appointments below that, pictures top left, documents middle top. Change the daterange and have all those items refreshed to match. Enter a tag/spotlight term, all none-matching items fade away. You could have multiple custom time views, showing only relevant data items to one specific project, with a completely flexible layout.



    Some kind of desktop can be used to store and organize links to these time-views.



    Couple this with automatic backup and cloud-sync and have it accessible through any iOS/osX device and I could see something like this going places.
  • Reply 65 of 66
    pik80pik80 Posts: 148member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by dutch pear View Post


    most of the heavy lifting will have to be done by the OS.



    It would sure be nice if the OS could do this like with faces but you pay the price by not having anywhere near the accuracy that tags provides. With faces you might get 75%-85% accuracy. This may be ok for some people that are opposed to having to do extra work but others really need 100% accuracy. This is especially true if you are doing this as your job. I think my clients would expect for me to show them all the shots I took from a photo shoot. Not just the ones that the software detected. Now I am not saying that Apple will not include Faces like features I am just saying that these features will be provided along with hand tagging as some people need that extra accuracy while others may get by without it.



    ?I think visual organization is also important. Humans like to visually group their stuff.?



    Yes, I agree but you don?t need folder hierarchies to do that. As was mentioned previously in this thread you can also use collections, smart folders, and tag hierarchies to group your things. Three different ways to group files should be plenty.



    I agree that there should be ways to incorporate different programs into one file searching program. The unified interface used across Apple?s software would make it easy to blend them into one. I could even see a solution as simple as when you filter the kind of file like you can in the finder now it would turn into the the program that corresponds to that file type. For instances if I said file type is photos I could get an iphoto like interface. If I said that the file type was fonts I could get a font book like interface. When you click on a camera in the finder the interface would turn into Image Capture. I think this is an incredibly exciting idea.
  • Reply 66 of 66
    pik80pik80 Posts: 148member
    There is an article that was just posted on Macworld by John Siracusa that says many of the same things that we have been talking about here regarding the Finder and iOS. You might want to check it out:



    http://www.macworld.com/article/1559...tml?lsrc=top_1



    The most interesting line to me by far was the following line:

    "With Mac applications increasingly using a ?library? metaphor, as pioneered by iTunes and iPhoto, the need to interact directly with files by accessing the file system is slowly disappearing."



    I don't agree with everything he has to say but still it's an interesting read.
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