3 ms·

Neat idea. If you need something like this, then I don't think you're organizing your files well enough as it is.

• m_eiman 17y ago
  That's kind of the point - people can't or don't want to organize their stuff in the way that suits their operating system best. There's definitely room for usability improvement in this area.
  • bensummers 17y ago
    A hierarchical filesystem is an implementation detail, and it's unhelpful to expose it to the user. It doesn't really match the mental models. It's interesting to see how the lack of filesystem is handled in the iPad. The video for iWork where the slides are flicked backwards and forwards (like pages in the iPhone Safari) doesn't look like it'll scale. Maybe you have to use a search interface when you get more docs than you can comfortably flick through?
    • joeyo 17y ago
      Yeah, I think filesystems are (inevitably?) converging towards search or some sort of computer-aided file organization. I've been meditating a lot on this recently. The way I organize files is in a current directory for the last N weeks, or for the duration of the last project or similar. I then batch process it every so often and delete the files that need deleting and squirrel away the ones that may need referencing later in an actual hierarchical file system. This way a small number of recent files are readily available, and I have some hope of finding historical files later (at the cost of some upfront work). Anyway, it occurred to me that I really don't enjoy doing this, that my time is better spent doing other things and that computers are supposed to be good at boring work like this anyway. Ideally, the computer should be able to help me "get the files I want" either by placing the files somewhere where I can later find them myself or by searching and providing them for me when I ask nicely. All this leads me to wonder: are there any tag-based filesystems out there? EDIT: answering my own question after a google search: http://code.google.com/p/xtagfs/ http://code.google.com/p/xtagfs/
      • ThinkWriteMute 17y ago
        Tag based structuring is rather progressive thinking. People who write/design file systems are neither progressive nor creative. Don't believe me? Just look at the names :P
• ugh 17y ago
  This comment reminds me of two of my friends who laughed at me when I told them about Spotlight. “WE keep our stuff orderly, why would we need THAT?”