Prime Mover wrote: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.
Prime Mover wrote: 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.
Prime Mover wrote: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
