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The Death of Folders?
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Jun 09, 2005 10:25 AM
from the croak dept.
from the croak dept.
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.'"
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Microsoft has planned this for quite awhile. (Score:5, Informative)
What's taking so long? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:What's taking so long? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:What's taking so long? (Score:5, Interesting)
Now that Apple's shown everyone the way with database filesystems, I wonder if we could get them to replace the "Recent" menu with "Piles" of recent folders. Wait, they're already looking at that. [mac.com] God, I love this new Apple. (i.e. NeXT renamed.) And that's coming from a guy who's hated Apple his entire life!
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Re:What's taking so long? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:What's taking so long? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because you arn't just designing some cool thing here, this will effect how people organize *everything* on their computer. The reason the file/folder method worked so well is because it's a good abstraction from the real world model. If you switch to something more complex that can't be described easily in the real world, many people will reject it without trying it.
Not to mention making meta data searchable on a hard disk is not an easy task without making the metadata you want to search a permanent part of the FS design. I think the idea here is to have any abount of metadata (within reason), of varying sizes, and searchable fast. That's not easy.
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Re:What's taking so long? (Score:5, Insightful)
File links have always been a sort of "hack" to get around that fact that files can only be in one folder at any given time. With a database file system, you can keep the one folder per file metaphor, or you can grow into the folders as metadata concept. Your choice.
The greatest danger in Desktop metaphors has always been that the metaphor will be taken to its fully restrictive extreme, and that the powers added by the computer will be ignored. That's exactly what's happened in this case, and it's not a good thing.
Maybe I should blog something more complete about this...
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What's more... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Figures. (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Bull (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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*
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Only faster if you don't know... (Score:5, Insightful)
This on it's face looks pretty good. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think so... (Score:5, Funny)
Not quite yet (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
My File Search (Score:5, Funny)
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
Folders good for backups (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)
Folders may die, but what about directories? (Score:5, Insightful)
Spotlight is great for users, but there will be a need for something like the Finder indefinitely.
Removable media (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Not broken (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Death to folders/directories death to discovery. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
No Folders? No thanks? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Spotlight not the be-all end-all of search (Score:5, Informative)
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
They haven't used Spotlight, have they? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Opera invented labels? (Score:5, Informative)
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?
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