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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;)
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I just put everything in the C:\ drive and know that I can find it using Windows XP's sweet search capabilities!
err...yea...
The only shocking part is that there will be millions of people that have been using computers since the 1980s, who never noticed that there ever was such a thing as folders/directories.
I'm sorry, but I like to categorize things. I like to know where they are, in this logical space. If this loses a document, can you dig it out? Or did it just never exist?
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.
Mikey
I've always been the kinda guy to fall for the girl dressed like an eskimo.
If you have your work organized in a defined folder structure, your memory will be faster than any Spotlight search -- especially given Spotlight's annoying habit of searching before you complete the search term.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
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.
In other news, it was recently announced that due to the widespread use of email, street addresses would soon become obsolete. Out with the antiquated, in with the new!
From the article: "The way Searchlight transforms the computing experience is akin to Google's effect on the web"
And Google has made bookmarks obsolete, right? So Searchlight will make folders obsolete.
Better search is always very cool. But proper organization and categorization is better yet. The problem is not that the latter is a bad system but that people don't do it very well. I think a system that helps people organize their stuff will be even better than a better search. The "labels" which are used instead of folders in gmail seem like a step in that direction.
<sig>Guvf vf abg n frperg zrffntr
I'm still waiting for the time when I can "see" the computer code, via a green monitor that displays a shower of code. Then, I will have a plug that connects to my spinal column and allows me to "enter" the computer and manipulate the code using my brainwaves.
It'd be very efficient, I could then just think of finding a file, and there it would be. Or better yet, I could imagine a beowul...NO CARRIER
IGB: More fun than eating oatmeal!
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.)
The idea of a folder as a visual reference for a directory may well be on the way out. There's still plenty of need for directories and hierarchical organization, though, for managing the contents of a system from the standpoint of software. OS X's Unix base is pretty heavily dependent on the basic Unix filesystem structure, and lots of software is built with a deeply ingrained assumption that it's there and the way files are organized.
Spotlight is great for users, but there will be a need for something like the Finder indefinitely.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
I must admit, I really like Tiger's Spotlight. It has improved file management on my machine considerably.
Having said that, how can this apply to removable media? I would like to see a feature on the next MacOS that automatically indexes removable storage.
Let's say I burn a CD of some data. The finder should keep track of which files I burned to that CD, long after I erased the actual files from my hard drive. That way, I can perform spotlight searchs on my data, even if it really isn't present on my local drive.
Find the file that you want and the machine prompts you to insert the proper CD.
I read this as the death of Folgers. I almost fained since Folgers is The Best Part of Wakin' Up(TM).
More
What I'm wondering is what is broken with the whole directory/folder design? I wasn't aware that there was a problem. And what's the alternative... every file is stored on the hard drive in some arbitrary location, and a query is needed for each and every file access? That seems like a *ton* of overhead to fix a problem that just doesn't exist.
And what about file systems? I know that modern file systems like NTFS are much better at optimizing file storage for large drives with millions of discrete files, but are all of the modern ones ready to handle a drive with millions of files all at root?
I don't respond to AC's.
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It's all very well to talk about the death of folders because of intelligent indexing and searching of file systems, but this is in the context of retrieving data. Where a hierarchical structure is so useful is when you are saving information in the first place. It's important to remember that a hierarchy divides the file system into a number of logical namespaces.
A completely flat filesystem sounds all very well in principle, but how do you find names for all of those files? I have loads of files on my computers with the same names but in different namespaces. Or are we going to throw away filenames as well?
Something is happening here but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr Jones.
Or on MacOS take a look at all the pfiles and see what they can control and what they can't.
Or say you want to find a way to make the dock transperent and you search for Dock Transperance. While the real term that the search will find is Dock Clearness. Or that file you saved way back when you don't know the date you did it or what it is about but once you see it you know that is the one you need.
Sure I like spotlight but there are some cases where it just fails me mostly because I am absent minded.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
That plus there is still a large group of folks in the business world for whom computers are still fairly recent (the managers and partners who have been working since the 70's and 80's). Granted their numbers are starting to thin, but there are still a great many folks, in relatively high positions, who like the folder system because it replicates a filing cabinet- they get it. Trying to educate the entire generation on a "whole new way" of doing something "easier and faster" will frighten them off.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
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
Pie-in-the-sky. Please spare me the deep-think prognostications of people who obviously are unfamiliar with how the facility actually works (or doesn't) in the real world.
When it is good, Spotlight is very, very good. And when it is bad, it is horrid. So far, in my experience, Spotlight has been very, very good about 50% of the time I've really used it (i.e. to find something I wanted to find, as opposed to playing around with it). And horrid the other 50%.
Spotlight has several big problems.
a) It doesn't find things reliably. This isn't like using Google on the Web, where you're happy with the results you find, and mostly don't know about what relevant hits Google missed. You have a very good idea what's on your hard drive, and it is incredibly annoying when Spotlight does NOT find a file you know is there.
There is ongoing discussion of why Spotlight doesn't find things reliably, and, of course, many people who say "It works for me," but the number of users reporting that Spotlight is not finding files they know are there is very significant.
There are various reasons for this. One is that Spotlight has a fairly long built-in exclusion list of directories it doesn't think you really want to search, but, unfortunately, it does not explicitly show you what they are. This is not, however, the only issue.
b) It doesn't find things quickly. Wags are starting to call it "stoplight." Frankly, I'm scared to type anything directly into the search field. I've gotten to the point where I type the search target into a text editor and paste it into the edit field.
The problem is that Spotlight oh-so-cleverly gives real-time live updating of the partial query as you type it in. So if you type in "Slashdot", for example, by the time you have typed in two characters it is trying to display every file on your computer that begins with "sl". For reasons that aren't clear to me, this frequently locks up the Finder's UI with a spinning pizza wheel. The entire Finder becomes unusable--you can't even activate another window and search for the file manually--for big fractions of a minute.
c) A signficant number of users are reporting frequent occasions when Spotlight causes their whole system to slow down. And, in at least one case, I've pinned down a situation in which Spotlight, for some reason, actually causes another program to fail with file I/O errors unless it is prevented from accessing the directories that program is using.
So, Spotlight is sometimes wonderful... but other times is unreliable, slow itself, slows down the rest of the system, and makes other programs unstable.
But aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
We need something to help that is clear from the number of digital objects we have lying round on our computers these days. Some method of collecting these objects into conceptual sets or classifications (apart from file extensions which is not always the most useful) could be really useful - I have read some interesting stuff by people who are Metadata crazy (seem to have lost the links though - the tiger review of metadata writer was really interesting...) Maybe the answers are somewhere there.
But for most people, some method of grouping data, adding categorical schemes, visually and texturally organising and generally making files/objects more plastic in the way that we store them would be a great step forward.
But in any case, nested folders *do* still have uses. And I think we need --in addition to-- rather than --instead of--.
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There are times when searches are ideal for grouping disjoint sets of information. There are many, many more times when a best guess is completely insufficient. Searches to augment folders? Sure. Searches to replace them? No way.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
It will be too easy for files to get lost. Say you don't label something properly, or you change the label, or you forget the name, or the name is unmemorable - what will happen to the file? Just sit there on your disk taking up space, never to be seen again?
And how about old/less useful files that are unnecessarily included in searches, forcing you to read over more file names to find what you want?
One handy feature about folders I've (automatically or intentionally) organized things in is it makes it easy to go back and figure out what I no longer need, and delete it, thus freeing up disk space and reducing clutter. Spotlight is designed to GENERATE clutter.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
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 personally have iTunes set to not organize, and not move my music. I keep all my songs in folders organized by genre on the second partition of my HD. iTunes gladly "imports" them by just remembering where they are.
Go to: iTunes->preferences->advanced tab
uncheck "Keep iTunes music folder organized" and "Copy files to iTunes music folder when adding to library"
Create your iTunes playlists the same way your folders are aranged. Select your playlist, drag your folder to it to import those songs into it. Your songs stay where you put them, and just their location is recorded in the DB.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
You know that memory trick, where you remember a long list of items by mentally walking through your house and assigning them positions? There's a huge chunk of our brains that's devoted to remembering *what* something is based on *where* it is.
... it had a name like Exercise or Expendable, I forget ... Now I need to find it. What do I remember about it? That I saved it to the Desktop.
...
So for example: 5 or 6 days ago I downloaded a plugin for some blog package or other, written in php or perl I think
That kind of thing will always have a place in my Finder. I like metadata search too, but I'm just not with-it enough to give up my brain's best way of remembering things
On another note, my biggest complaint about iTunes defaults is the "Use error correction while reading CDs" checkbox. I ruined much of my library on importing because I left this unchecked when I first started importing my collection. A lot of songs sound like crap; random distortion really loud, and there's no way to know which songs got screwed until they are playing. Why have an almost hidden preference that will ruin your library if not checked? Perhaps other people have better luck importing with this turned off than I do, but now whenever I use a computer's itunes for the first time I make damn sure that box is checked before importing CDs....