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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
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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!
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.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
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
We've replaced his traditional hierarchical filesystem with Folgers Crystals. Let's see if he notices.
English is easier said than done.