Hum drum, bum drum, OS X Lion...

[MIDI Life Crisis]

The BIG difference, however Mr. Steel, is the idea of "Push." With the iCloud, clods could have their data automatically grabbed by the 3rd party. Very convenient if you're the third party. If you want to control your data... not so much. And once the cloud is hacked, say goodbye to any expectation of privacy. Once it crashes, say goodbye to your data. And once the OS is gone, say goodbye to any kind of customizing or troubleshooting. System problem? Just reboot and the cloud will bring it all back home - provided the cloud is there and you have paid your fees.

... and the Titanic was unsinkable.

[James Steele]

And once the cloud is hacked, say goodbye to any expectation of privacy.

Seems like this is a big concern. Just ask people who had Sony Playstations, right?

[Prime Mover]

A point I'd like to make is that heirarchical organizational structures have their limits, and are quickly finding competition with new paradigms. In the video world, production houses have long ditched the filesystem method of organizing video clips, in favor of metadata tagged search systems, not too different from the way iTunes organizes files. With spotlight and windows 7, we're seeing a hybrid system where the basic drive organization is heirarchical, but more and more people are using advanced metadata and keyword tagging/searching. I think, eventually, we will see the utter demise of the heirarchical folder structure. It has it's uses, but loses efficiency the more data you have to organize, and the more cross references you need. I think within the next 5 years, we'll start seeing a file browser that becomes closer and closers to the iTunes paradigm. Even though the idea might seem shocking and horrible, it actually makes a lot of sense. Instead of browsing by pre-defined location, you're browsing by the actual contents of the file, getting closer to having the organization be seemlessly integrated with actual data usage. I think that's an admirable goal, it will just take a lot of work and brain stretching for those of us where heirarchies are so ingrained.

[Killahurts]

System problem? Just reboot and the could will bring it all back home - provided the cloud is there and you have paid your fees.

Yes, and there you have hit on the big picture. This is all about getting people to the point where they have to pay a monthly fee to use a computer.

Of course, you already do that to stay online with internet and email.. but can you imagine having to pay a monthly fee to, say, turn on DP and write a song?

Pretty soon computers will be like cell phones, where they give you some POS computer or pad for free when you sign a 2 year agreement.

The reason why I hate it so bad is because computer makers have been putting more and more power into our personal hands for the past 25 years, but now the powers that be want to wrest that power away from us and make us slaves to it.

Television is going the same way.

[cuttime]

Here is a nicely succinct MacWorld summary:

http://rdd.me/ixmbah8k" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Shooshie]

Here is a nicely succinct MacWorld summary:

http://rdd.me/ixmbah8k" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Good article. According to that, we don't have to worry about losing the Finder. (losing the finder? Finding the loser? Lion covers it all.) I guess I do things differently than some folks. If I have to explain why I MUST have a Finder-like app, then chances are the person to whom I'm explaining has no concept of it, and simply won't get it. I spend a lot of time digging around in my files, and in some cases I see them so often that I get tired of their look, so I apply custom icons to them. Sometimes I do a Mac-makeover to change the look of all the important things. About once every couple of years I'll go to an icon website and download a few hundred icons. I end up saving about 1 out of 20, throwing the other 19 out. Then I customize my desktop with them. Appearances of my workspace have a profound effect on my productivity, which is why I value Themes so much in DP. But in my icon and dock, I use custom icons that guide my eyes to what I need, or in the case of the desktop, make my hard drives appear somewhat coordinated. Part of why I get around so quickly is that I've made things visibly inter-related, and I can just see their patterns more quickly than if I used the icons provided by the developer or by OSX. This is not a skilled habit that I would be willing to give up.

I have almost every file I've created over the past 26 years. I've got them indexed and can put my finger on anything in probably less than 5 minutes. Most things I can find in 15 seconds or less. Don't even suggest to me that I should never have to see my files, but that they should just be taken care of by the apps that created them. Anyone who thinks that hasn't been using a computer for very long.

I'm still trying to figure out how to save a photo from Safari in my iPad. I've found nothing to indicate that it can even be done! Just dragging a jpeg from the window to the desktop saves the file in the Mac, but that's apparently not possible in the iPad. If it CAN be done, then why am I having to ask someone else how to do it? There are no controls apparent -- even after a great deal of careful searching and reasoning -- that make this possible in an iPad.

And that's a profound reason why I do not want the Mac to go that direction without options to do things the old ways. Sure, I love the idea of full-page apps. No Dock! That would be Great! But just be sure that I can still do the things we take for granted -- like sliding a selection or picture from app to app to desktop and back. Let me duplicate the file in the Finder. Let me rename it sequentially with another couple hundred very much like it.

And according to MacWorld, that's still going to be possible in Lion.

Shooshie

[MIDI Life Crisis]

If the Finder ever did go away, no doubt someone would come up with a 3rd party app to bering it back...

[MIDI Life Crisis]

OK, now I HAVE TO have this:

http://cocoatech.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

There goes the egg money...

[Shooshie]

A point I'd like to make is that heirarchical organizational structures have their limits, and are quickly finding competition with new paradigms. In the video world, production houses have long ditched the filesystem method of organizing video clips, in favor of metadata tagged search systems, not too different from the way iTunes organizes files.

I do this, too, when I'm making movies. Consider that I make movies from individual frames. Individual photos, sequentially lined up and animated. There are a lot of techniques for making this work, making it easy, or making it even practical to do at all. But it starts with individual frames accumulated a few minutes each day for literally years on end. But you brought up a very good point: "in the video world, production houses have long ditched the filesystem method…" You see, that's a very, very specialized world, and those people are only using those clips until they are done with the project, and then they are archived (or tossed out) probably forever, unless someone comes along in a few years and wants a sequel or remake.

Ours is a much more general world. In addition to making those movies, I make music, which is in fact my profession of over 35 years, 25 with computers. I'm also a writer. I've got important things written in over a dozen different formats. I have to be able to keep track of them, without the apps that created them. OSX does a great job of that, right in the Finder, using QuickLook. Likewise, the Finder (with QuickLook) eliminates the need to open iPhoto or Preview 95% of the time. Apps come and go. If you depend on an app to do this for you, that's great until it goes away. Every graphics app I've used seriously, except Photoshop and Illustrator, has gone away. Maybe Graphic Converter is still around. The copy that came with OSX in 2002 is still working, so I still use it. Even Preview is one of the least consistent apps out there. I once made a chart just to keep track of the features of 4 different versions of it. Unfortunately, now all those versions ceased to work in Snow Leopard. Apple can't write a graphics app that stays valid 2 years, whereas Thorsten Lemke can write Graphic Converter in 2002 and it still works today? In any case, this exemplifies why you don't want an app taking care of your files. Apps are temporary. Files are for the rest of your life if you take care of them, convert them, update them, or resave them.

With spotlight and windows 7, we're seeing a hybrid system where the basic drive organization is heirarchical, but more and more people are using advanced metadata and keyword tagging/searching. I think, eventually, we will see the utter demise of the heirarchical folder structure. It has it's uses, but loses efficiency the more data you have to organize, and the more cross references you need.

Depends on what you're doing. If you're doing video, then metatags are far more effective than naming 250,000 frames individually. If you're a poet, you need a hierarchical system to find that snippet you wrote in the summer of 1992 at Z-Tejas in Scottsdale, and later copied to Idea Keeper, or Text Edit, or Stickies, Word, WriteNow, Pages, Fullwrite, More, Thinktank, MacWrite, YoJimbo, Little Secrets, or my favorite: Seize the Day. Many of those didn't even make it to Power PC, much less to OSX or Intel, and yet I can drag those into FileJuicer and out pop all the pictures, text, audio, or anything else that was once stored in there, all in usable form. Not gonna happen in iOS.

I think within the next 5 years, we'll start seeing a file browser that becomes closer and closers to the iTunes paradigm. Even though the idea might seem shocking and horrible, it actually makes a lot of sense. Instead of browsing by pre-defined location, you're browsing by the actual contents of the file, getting closer to having the organization be seemlessly integrated with actual data usage. I think that's an admirable goal, it will just take a lot of work and brain stretching for those of us where heirarchies are so ingrained.

Hierarchies aren't just ingrained. They are natural structures. The Periodic Table of the Elements demonstrates hierarchical structure since the creation of matter. Hierarchies aren't always the best way to organize, but they serve a real purpose: the ability to work with large amounts of data and to keep track of all of it without ever having to focus on more than a few elements of its structure at a time. When you are organizing physical objects, hierarchies win, because most other methods are subjective and unreliable. Computers can process a lot of data, so they don't depend on neat stacks of things, but can look inside them for similarities and differences, but someone has to teach it what to look for. Going back and refitting old files into a new cataloguing system is going to require artificial intelligence, and even then a LOT of things are going to get misplaced. It's better for me if I can, even as a last resort, go back to "summer, 1992, Scottsdale, Z-Tejas Restaurant, Seize the Day Files." Then, rather than the OS telling me "This file is not compatible with this OS," I just drag it into File Juicer, which knows what to do with old things. Then whammo… that old file is back in action again:



Just an example. Those haven't seen light of day in over 15 years. Took me less than a minute to find and resurrect them. (took a little longer to convert them from picts to jpegs)

Bottom line: let there be iOS-like apps. But don't take away the power we're accustomed to having. Leave us something like the Finder to use for legacies. We don't all live in a world where yesterday's freshness is today's landfill. Ideas are usable for centuries.


Shooshie

[williemyers]

Wow...I'm happy to say I'm in no hurry to update, at all.
MacPro Dual Core 2Ghz | 7GB RAM | OS 10.6.4

PM, fret not, Lion's not going to run on your MacBook Pro... According to the MacWorld article, the min. requirement for Lion is a Core *2* Duo...

[williemyers]

System problem? Just reboot and the could will bring it all back home - provided the cloud is there and you have paid your fees.

Yes, and there you have hit on the big picture. This is all about getting people to the point where they have to pay a monthly fee to use a computer.

But really, it's about an even bigger thing than loss of privacy or monthly fees.....it's about - as it has been for some years now - "data mining".
It's about having everything of yours that goes on to "a cloud" being anaylized by someone somewhere to assess your interests and how marketers might more easily reach out to you. Despite that we'd like to think otherwise, the net has really been primarily an "electronic billboard" for some years now.
And will continue to be...

[Prime Mover]

Wow...I'm happy to say I'm in no hurry to update, at all.
MacPro Dual Core 2Ghz | 7GB RAM | OS 10.6.4

PM, fret not, Lion's not going to run on your MacBook Pro... According to the MacWorld article, the min. requirement for Lion is a Core *2* Duo...

Ummm, wait, so it won't run on a 2011 i5?

[williemyers]

my bad... I think I misread your sig.

[mikehalloran]

With all this talk about the finder and cloud etc.

I have used a cloud application to make my living for many years now. It runs slowly on a very fast iMac but much faster than it did on my G5 - that ran much faster than my company issued PC notebook. Here in the San Francisco Bay area, I have a fairly fast internet connection but my database runs much faster in Nashville on a connection that is 86% slower (using the very same notebook). I live 20 minutes away from the data center that hosts all of my work applications.

For me, cloud computing sucks. So, the announcement that everything is going to move to iCloud is leaving me unimpressed. Maybe, someday... Besides, my cell provider does not have the iPhone.

Looking at the keynote speech, we learned that the "typical" user builds presentations, spread sheets and documents for work and uses his iPhone/iPad for games and TV. Now, he'll be able to do all these things wherever he is on whatever Apple device he owns.

As Bob Dylan once wrote, "It ain't me, Babe. I said, no, no, no, it ain't me, Babe..." None of us here are Steve Jobs' typical user.

There is a lot of talk that Lion is leaving out the power user and, I think for this discussion, we all qualify. All that talk is nonsense, IMO. True, there's nothing new for us but very little of what we do will be affected - yet. How we do some things will change. The Finder will have a graphic interface that is different but I don't see that any functionality is going away. In fact, access to multiple apps running simultaneously should improve - if everything works as advertised.

I am reminded of an old silicon valley joke: In what environment does Oracle run fastest? On the PowerPoint slides during the demo. We'll see...

Rosetta is supposed to go away so PPC apps will no longer run. Universal should run the same or better. Maybe, I remain a sceptic until a few months pass. Meanwhile, I am going through all of my PPC apps and have found I only have use for one anymore and will need to convert files I created in a few others - better get cracking now. Let me just say that iWork's inability to import many Applework files is one of the stupidest decisions Apple has ever made. Gotta get out MacLinkPlus and convert what I can to Word and modify the rest (seeing how MacLinkPlus and AppleWorks are PPC only).

The one thing that interests me in Lion is that my track pad will allow my desk top to behave like an iPad. This means I will have to get it out of the box and learn to use it - it came with my iMac last year. My handicap forces me to live life one-handed so this may be a boon. I hope it is but, if a bust, I will be no worse off.

The keynote assumes that all will be on track pads and that no one will use a mouse anymore. Oh Really? I bet there will be a control panel setting that allows mouse users their scroll bars - or maybe not. Again, we won't know for another month or so. After all, Apple is the company that kept the one-button mouse without a scroll wheel long after the OS and all apps supported the right button and scroll wheels.

So, while I am convinced that I am correct about the future regarding the OS, I don't believe that Lion is for the rest of us. For now, I guess it's for the rest of them. Time will tell.

[FutureLegends]

Rosetta is supposed to go away so PPC apps will no longer run.

Finally!
Now maybe Synchro Arts will make an Intel version of VocAlign for example! Something they admitted not intending to do unless the old one stopped working...