Is that a bad thing?
I'm not saying it will happen soon, or that those of us long in the tooth will go easily, but I honestly think it's the future.
Think about young teenagers who will soon be "in charge". They snap a pic on their phone and send it to someone else. Nobody cares where it is in the filesystem, or even what the filename is. I used to meticulously name, tag and organize my mp3 collection into folders and sub-folders. Now I don't even know where they are on my hard drive - because I just don't care.
Those are old concepts we used to rely on to find and use information stored inside the computer, but I honestly don't see the need for the in the future. We can stop focusing on the "how" of the computer, and focus on the doing.
I will add that "power" users like developers will require these kind of concepts for a lot longer than your average Joe, but I still see it becoming less and less important.
Reminds me of the GDrive story[1]. Basically, Google killed a Dropbox competitor project 4 years ago because "files are so 1990". Fast forward from where they thought the death of files was imminent and they're now preparing to launch Google Drive[2] again.
Files are more popular and profitable than ever. You have companies like Dropbox and Box.net making serious money. Yes, I can see that we may one day not need to expose the concept of filesystems to an end user but I think it will be a very very long time (like generations) unless there is some revolutionary new computing concept besides the ones we have today.
Once you are dealing with more than, say, two hundred pieces of information, you kind of start needing to classify that information and have definite ways to find it.
If tags are a way that you can definitely find and specify a given file, then tags will form part of a new, distributed file system.
If tags wind-up just being half-assed, uncertain hints to where files might be, then they will form part of a new, disfunctional distributed file system. And the later case seems to be where things are going. This "hints but no certainty" approach to file location indeed works great most of the time and fails frustratingly significant percent of the time.
But even here, this is a file system even when it is often dysfunctional.
So... what about my scripts? Should I have to load some specific manager - iScript - in order to access my creations? Just because 'the filesystem is dying'? What about my store of .iso files? Do I need iIso?
Quit trying to get everyone off your lawn and accept that you are a (presumably) some kind of developer. Computers are not made just for your needs. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one. In this case, you'll eventually have to be running some kind of developer tool to have this kind of access. This is probably appropriate. The average computer user (of any mainstream OS) has as much use for the ability to manage "scripts" and "ISOs" outside of a purpose-built application for using them, as he does for a C compiler.
File manager as a developer tool... The very idea makes me want to chase somebody off my lawn, but it does sound plausible. Every time I work with an application that insists on managing things on its own, I can't help but ask "but where _are_ the files??". I guess there is this notion that files are what's "real" in an otherwise ephemeral system. They are what you run, they are what you store your pictures in, they are what you recover from a busted harddrive.
Normal users seem to be very comfortable with the idea of unspecified magic though.
Quit telling me what to do. Quit sucking down the Apple "There is only one way" philosophy. That there is constant complaints at Apple's UI decisions shows that even in UI, there is not 'only one way'. I much prefer the Linux way - "choose how you want to be" - give a reasonable default, which can be tailored.
To try and paint computer users as being in two camps 'normal' and 'developer' does everyone a disservice - there's much more variety in users than that. Here's an example - there's a lot of gamers that like side-editing save games, yet they're not developers. Where to they fit into your dichotomous view?
I think people who need to manage files outside of a particular application will become the exception, not the rule. As long as you can access the underlying file system when you need to, I see no problem with most people not having to care about it.
How do you move photos from Alice's computer to Bob's computer? "Check out these"? With the concept of files, you can move photos/music/whatever in a number of ways - thumb drive, network shares, cloud. If you only work through 'photo manager' applications, how do you do it? What if the creators of the photo manager didn't want to support thumb drives? What if the way the photo managers on the different devices use different ways of referring to the photos?
I think 'regular' users have plenty of use for understanding the filesystem. I also think that it's okay to have some degree of expectation for the user - dumbing it down for the lowest common denominator is harmful (look at politics!). What do you really gain by alienating the power users?
You're still thinking of exceptional cases. Photo managing applications have, and will improve, native ways of sharing the photos, even if it's as simple as sending an email.
I see no reason why making the common case simple (not "dumb") means you have to eliminate, or even alienate, the power users. Frankly, since I started using a Mac, iTunes and an iPhone, I stopped managing music files. And I think that's great. Files are an implementation detail. What I want is music or radio programs, not files.
It's an error to simply transfer "it works for music" to "it works for everything". That it works for music is largely because sharing media files is verboten in our Brave New World - sharing is not a problem that needs to be solved there. But sharing non-media files between users is not an exceptional case, not even remotely - it's common as muck in business.
The idea that the 'normal' user is only a home-based casual web-browser/photo-taker/music listener is misleading from the outset.
"No you don't understand, these amplifiers go up to eleven..."
Even a flickin' unix whiz doesn't care about, say, which disk sector a file is located on. In fact, if they are using a distributed file system, they also can mostly ignore the physical location of the data.
Your spiffy net of tags is a way-to-find data. A officially "file system" is a way to find data. Each has some flexibility, some lack-of-ambiguity and some persistence over time. You may not care about the uniqueness, ambiguity and decay over time of your tag based way-to-find data. But that just means you've got a convenient but half-assed file system. Moreover,
A hierarchy (i.e. a file system) is for many people the most natural way of classifying documents. There are other ways including tagging and search, and maybe those will become powerful and second nature, but right now classification like Linnaeus makes sense when you are dealing with lots of files.
I saw that iCloud file storage will support folders like the iPhone home screen, but I have no idea if they will support nested folders. This isn't only the case with nerds and geeks. My mother, about as computer phobic as they come, is a minister, and she saves all her sermons for future reuse. They are categorized by specific topic using folders. Also related documents from different applications can use folders to be organized together.
There are a lot of features of filesystems that we take for granted, abstracting it away without providing a usable alternative is problematic.
It is a very bad thing. I agree that it looks like this is where the industry is going, and I really, really, really dislike this direction.
Files are an incredibly useful abstraction. Sure, there are programs that work with photos and songs, but thee's a whole class of applications that works with "data" no matter what this data is. Think of stuff like backups, synchronization, compression, encryption, etc. If somebody comes up with a new encryption algorithm, filesystem lets me instantly use it for all my data regardless of which application I used to create it. But we're heading towards the world where we need one program to backup photos and another one to backup songs, and only OS manufacturers are allowed to create utilities that work with all my data in general. This is not good for innovation.
I agree with you. The "Files" abstraction has served us very well for more than 30 years. That's not justification to not attempt to find a better way.
Yes, and never mind that just about everything you take for granted about personal computers was "given" by Apple, too. I find this notion that users are entitled to complete device freedom really annoying.
If you find it so objectionable, go build your own hardware and OS platform. This isn't a matter of human rights because no one is telling you that you can't make your own.
Yes, and never mind that just about everything you take for granted about personal computers was "given" by Apple, too.
The RDF is on full effect there, I see. You might want to look at systems like the Xerox Alto & Star, both released before the Lisa. The implementation was certainly excellent - and I have a lot of respect for the Lisa and Macintosh engineers - but many of the concepts were invented elsewhere.
@cooldeal: Nope, I'm dead serious. There's no fundamental human right that entitles you to tell Apple (or any other device maker) what it can and can't sell you.
Of course there is, it's called Free Speech. There's no right that entitles you to force Apple to do what you want, but then again, nobody's arguing for it.
@recoiledsnake: (for whatever reason, I'm not allowed to reply directly to you)
You're comparing Apple's ecosystem to Earth's.
Apple is a private company that makes products that are sold on the commercial markets. The Earth is something entirely different. If Apple made planets, then yes – they could decide how to manage the atmosphere. That's how business works.
To keep me from advocating an unpopular, but entirely rational, position – all while other people freely misrepresent the First Amendment in response to my comments.
And if you don't like pollution and global warming, stop complaining and trying to make things better, instead colonize your own planet and make them pollution-free.
