Slashdot Mirror
The Death of Folders?
saintlupus writes "There's an interesting article on Wired about the interface changes in Tiger being a precursor to the demise of the classic folder-browsing Finder." From the article: "Users type search queries more or less as they did pre-Tiger, but 'the quality, scope and presentation of the results are significantly better, so users get good benefits without having to change their behavior.'"
Microsoft purposed the death of folders back when they announced the WinFS system. The idea of an SQL or Database file system where queries are performed more often than direct references isn't new. While Microsoft is not releasing WinFS with longhorn, much of their search capabilities and ability to group files into multiple spots and 'death of folders' will still be occurring. Obviously apple is the first to give a solid attempt at implementing this, hopefully it will make organization far easier;)
It's already here. It says right in the article that "[...] Tiger's Smart Folders feature, which lets the user save the results of a Spotlight search as a virtual folder that automatically updates as new items matching the search are added to the system." This sounds quite similar to the smart playlists in iTunes eh? I use the smart playlists in iTunes quite a lot, and I'll definitely be using this smart folder feature once I get Tiger.
What's a sig?
This advice is probably too late for you, but you can actually tell iTunes not to reorganize your music folder in the preferences.
I agree this seems like a stupid thing to have turned on by default. I also find the behavior where it copies mp3s that you play to the music folder automatically strange. But I guess some people would get confused that deleting a file from their desktop makes it not playable in itunes anymore. *shrug*
FiGZ.COM - A waste of perfectly good web space
Reasons? Well, first of all Spotlight won't search the whole of your drive. Can't remember if it was in /usr/local/bin or /usr/bin? Tough. Spotlight won't help you, it doesn't look in those hierarchies.
Made a mistake typing your search term into Spotlight and on an older machine? Don't even think of hitting that backspace key, or the Finder may go into a spinning beachball hell whilst it tries to live search everything for you.
Want to find just files and nothing else (ie. no meta-data or content-related stuff, just filenames)? Well, you can use the undocumented start-your-search-with-a-double-quote feature, but that doesn't work well because it doesn't understand wildcards (so "*.java won't work, for example, whereas ".java will but would include *.java.backup).Also it seems to lose its idea of filename-only as soon as you hit backspace and try to re-edit it. In other words, typing ".java will find me *.java*, but typing that, then hitting backspace, then typing hte final 'a' character again will start finding me things with java in the content instead of just the name.
It also has poor resource usage - some seem to be lucky, but search the forms and you'll see many people complaining about processes called mdimport or similar hogging large amounts of CPU. Then there's the indexing it does every time you connect a firewire drive - if I reboot my Powerbook in target mode and hook it up to the Power Mac, a large amount of indexing is initiated which slows down my performance on that drive. I can set it to not index, but then it slows down search on that drive. What's needed is for the indexing stuff to be really low priority or user-ppausable perhaps.
Sorry, Spotlight is ok but in the Finder it's a pain more than a help for me. I wouldn't have minded it in addition to Panther's more straightforward 'find a file' bit, but as a total replacement for that it's rather lacking. I'm not even contemplating using it as a complete replacement for a normal directory structure.
Cheers,
Ian
Sigh. Go read the Opera website. Opera is heavily opposed to software patents and in favour of competing on merit rather than through the courts.
If they weren't - if instead they were patent-happy and litigous in nature - then Firefox would have been stripped of several of its features, as a great many of them were borrowed from Opera.
And, I didn't say Opera invented labelling, only that they introduced labelling rather than foldering to email way before Gmail did. Had they wanted to, Opera could have easily patented labelling in emails, especially with the way that the USPTO gives out patents to everyone who so much as looks in its direction.
All clear now?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I'm spending a lot more time replying to these posts than I should. Still, I can't let them slip. :)
:)
A study was published just last year about how the desktop paradigm breaks down when a lot of files are trying to be stored. There's nothing wrong with the folder system from a technical standpoint. The problem comes when you have hundreds or thousands of files that need to be sorted and then found. Your capacity to remember such things is finite. If you know even vaguely what you're looking for ("Hmmm, it was about 2 weeks ago, I think it mentioned nintendo, and James may have written it..."), it's probably easier to find by searching than by trying to figure out if you filed it under James, Nintendo, or the documents that you got 2 weeks ago.
If you'd like to read the study, try and get your hands on the ACM Transactions on Human-Computer Interfaces, June 2004, Volume 11, Number 2. It's quite interesting; a lot less dry than most papers.
I use spotlight as an app launcher and it works very well. Type in a few characters of the app name and then hit command+enter. Command pops the selection down to the top hit, which is always the app for me.
I trimmed my dock down to almost nothing thanks to this.
No, I never liked QS. I don't know why either.