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.'"

Comments

What's taking so long?

[AKAImBatman]

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.

Call me when Folders become saved queries, and then we'll talk about the semi-demise of Finder. Actually, Finder wouldn't leave us at all. In a properly designed database file system, folders/directories should be replaced with standard queries. An example of this is the Labelling system in GMail. You can add a meta-data label to any email, which will then cause that email to appear in a virtual folder of the same name as the label. But if you pay attention to the search bar, you find that the folder is nothing more than a stored search on a key piece of meta-data.

This concept has massive implications for File System Usability. Under the folders-as-search concept, the same files can be organized under multiple folder groupings. This labelling data not only assists users in doing future searches for their information (i.e. A real reason to fill out meta-data other than "It might be useful."), but it also provides the user with a way of organizing ALL data for a given project under one folder without forcing the user to make a copy. It may not seem all that revolutionary, but I think you'll find that a lot of GMail users have already grasped the real power of the concept.

That being said, WHAT'S TAKING SO DAMN LONG?! This stuff was figured out 10+ years ago, and pieces of it were even included in BeOS. NTFS has had many of the necessary features since its inception (just turned off for some bloody reason), and ReiserFS is bringing the same design to Linux. So what is everyone waiting for? The next guy to scoop you on it?

*sigh* Dear Mr. Jobs: Will you please demonstrate to everyone how you do this properly with a file system? Thanks. Kudos to your NeXT development team who's made this possible.

Bull

[thesupermikey]

What a load of Bullshit

Spotlight is really good, but that hasnt stoped me from being anal about setting up files so i can find things.

What really pisses me off is out iTunes reognized all my music when it was inported into the libary. I spent years putting together music in such a way that i can find it. Now i have the seach for it b/c itunes had to mess things up.

Re:Bull

[kfg]

Computers are good at organizing data.

And here lies the root of problem. People think this is true, and it's arrant nonsense. Computers are absolutely worthless at organizing data. All they can do it process instructions for organization.

The organization itself derives from, and can only derive from a human mind. Thinking "the computer organizes the data" is the main reason why virtually all databases are giant Mongolian cluster fucks.

When you run a program that "organizes the data for you" what you are really doing is imposing someone else's idea of how your data should be organized on your data.

When people ask me how they should organize their data I like to answer honestly:

"How the hell should I know?"

Until know about their data, what it is, what it "means" and how it is expected to used I can reorganize it a billion different ways without in any way organizing it in any useful fashion.

Organization is a state of mind and for a database to be useful you must transfer the state of your mind to the "business model" of database managment system.

Just like you do when you arrange your folders in a heirarchy.

KFG

This on it's face looks pretty good.

[cmefford]

But the very concept of having millions of files just scattered about in a completely flat heirarchy, well, doesn't seem like a really good way to handle your company's data.

Folders good for backups

[rice0067]

While I love the idea of a decent search system, the time honored forlder hierarchy works because thats how people think. For instance, pictures. For these meta based search systems each picture needs to have a comment attatched (if not searching by date).. and who really does that? I tried adding notes to my pics in iphoto but after a while it gets tiresome.

And backups.. in a workflow.. every project has its own file and subfolders, makes it easy for backup and finding files.

Anywho... folder hierarchy works great and is here to stay for most people. (except for those people who just save everything to the desktop.)

Re:Not broken

[smithmc]

What I'm wondering is what is broken with the whole directory/folder design?

What's broken about it is that a single hierarchical classification scheme may not always be appropriate for a given body of data. Suppose I have a whole bunch of documents. They're all about different products - ProductA, ProductB, etc. Meanwhile, some of them are proposals, some are degisn docs, some are marketing literature, etc. I want to be able to sift through these documents in various ways. What's the best hierarchy to use? Product type first, then document type (proposal/design/etc)? Or the other way around? What happens when I want "all proposals on ProductA or ProductC for North American markets"? Where in the hierarchy do I look? Meanwhile, if each file were in a database, with search keywords, I could find anything I wanted just as easily as anything else - there's no predetermined hierarchy that makes it easier to find some things than others.