9 ms·

The Death of Files

108 points by apgwoz 16y ago

zachware 16y ago
Excellent piece. I think the main challenge for UX architects is breaking the hiearchical model that users are used to. Tags are the ideal solution for organizing like items but few have mastered the UI. Sure, it's easy to to build the refrigerator model but users get freaked out when everything is lumped together (that's why websites still have nav bars.) If someone can master the art of the tag UI, then we're set.
- dcurtis 16y ago
  I don't think tags are the solution. Human beings organize stuff by lumping similar things together, by spatial relationship. It's the way the brain is designed to make sense of things on a neurological level. Tags create a meta layer of information on top of the actual spatial organization of objects, which is hard to comprehend naturally.
  - jimbokun 16y ago
    The problem is we have too many virtual things to organize them spatially. It worked with the finder when each user have a few or few dozens of or maybe even a few hundred files they cared about. Now computers have millions of files, and I don't see how we can sensibly organize them spatially and still find things. I would say that now the dominant way of finding things on a computer is not organization at all, but search. Type some words describing the thing you want to find. We've been trained by Google that we should always be able to find anything we want this way.
    - Psyonic 16y ago
      True, but right now search fails miserably for images. It might not, if people tagged their images better (facebook does a good job of getting people to do this), but most people don't.
  - ciniglio 16y ago
    Why do you say that tags can't represent the spatial organization of objects? Can't you lump similar things together, by putting them under the same tag?
uptown 16y ago
If you're a producer of content ... you care about files. If you're a consumer of content ... you don't.
- nudist 16y ago
  I don't know if this is true for content producers... Why would you care about the file itself if you can create and manipulate the content easily?
  - j_baker 16y ago
    You're presuming that you can do all the manipulating and creating of a file without being able to work with the file itself, which I have my doubts about.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - dagw 16y ago
      You care about files because you have to, not because you want to. As a content producer I consider every abstraction that lets me ignore the fact that the project I'm working on is actually made up of tens of thousands of files in dozens of different formats an unequivocal good thing.
    - BigZaphod 16y ago
      Well, I'm not sure if this is what you mean, exactly, but... I can take a photo with my camera, plug it in to the computer, import the photo into iPhoto (this is done by clicking the photo itself and clicking import - there's no generic "file" icon displayed or choices about where to save anything), then do some red eye reduction, maybe some cropping, and finally click Share/Email and send the edited photo to someone else. This is all done without ever having to care about any underlying "file."
      - abstractbill 16y ago
devinj 16y ago
"When you see a photo on your desk, do you think “a file!” or do you think “a photo of my family!”?" The same applies to a .JPG file in my documents folder. I think "a photo". That last line ruined the article for me, because it made me realize that files are how we do things in the real world, just with other names. We don't deal with fridges, we deal with food. And you know what? We even have to know where to store the food! Some food, like milk, goes in the fridge. Other food, like pasta, goes in the cupboard. Same with spices. Yet other food, like frozen peas, go in the freezer, Still more food might be found on plants in the garden. There is no single app, just a lot of directories for me to search in.
- stat 16y ago
  I strongly agree. The concept of file is extremely popular because it is intuitive. Sometimes designers get carried away in trying to simplify an interface that doesn't need any simplifying. For some simplistic devices like a DVD player or a game console, it might make sense to hide the filesystem because what the user will be doing is predetermined by the designer (console = play game. DVD = watch movie). But for general purpose computers, it makes no sense to hide such a powerful feature.
  - dcurtis 16y ago
    The file model is only intuitive to you because you've been using it for so long that it has become a part of your existence. Do some user testing with casual computer users (not even pure novices), and watch as you ask them to complete a two step task with a file (like, say, resize and then email). They can usually figure it out, but it takes them a long time and they become frustrated. It's not a natural experience to them. You know when you first start programming, and you hack together snippets of code to make your first program work? That's kind of what using a computer is like to the majority of people.
    - thwarted 16y ago
      This is due to a lack of being able to think abstractly, not with files and hierarchical folders specifically (which is a specific kind of abstraction), and I find people's frustration frustrating myself. If you gave the same person a print of a photo, and asked them to resize and fax, they'd have no trouble doing so with a photocopier and a fax machine (other than that these devices are often complex themselves, but that has nothing to do with the photo print as portable storage, which is all a file is).
ihodes 16y ago
I don't know that files are broken. Our brains are trained to "select" things: from the correct answer on a test, to the right phrase to say on your significant other's birthday. Limiting user exposure from little bundles of portable information to hidden databases is exactly what MS did with the registery. It's all well and good until you realize that sometimes it's nice for data to be a little more accessible and visible "Apps" that lock in data, like all sorts of old-school applications that stored your files in hidden folders, fail. They're closed. They're a black box that you can't easily leave when you'd like to move on to another application. Hiding data in closed databases is not only counterintuitive (it's like hiding the mustard in the back of the fridge in your analogy, and chaining it to the door), it's harmful should you ever want to buy a new fridge.
lkozma 16y ago
This mentality has lead OS designers to come up with those "My Documents", "My Videos", "My Photos" folders that are auto-created on installation. It's been there in Windows, recently Ubuntu has them, probably Macs have something similar. It's always the first thing I delete after a fresh install.
- epochwolf 16y ago
  Macs have a home folder with the following sub folders Applications - User version of /Applications Desktop - Desktop Documents Downloads - Safari downloads files here Library - Application configuration and data storage. Movies Music - iTunes library defaults to here Pictures - iPhoto stores it's library file in this folder Public - Documents visible to people on the network, not writable Public/Drop Box - Publicly writable but not publicly visible Sites - Web sharing uses this folder to share your website from here.
- wan23 16y ago
  I know it's annoying to have the Microsoft tell you how to organize your files, but there are some benefits to keeping those. Since those folders are in the API, many apps use them as defaults. Also, trusted Silverlight apps are restricted such that those special directories are the only ones visible. Really whether we like it or not, all of the major OS vendors are moving to a model where you store your own files in specified places.
ciniglio 16y ago
I strongly dislike this trend. Imagine if in the real world, the only place you could put food is your refrigerator, or if a bookshelf only allowed you to place books on it. While it sounds nice to say that a person only looks through their photo album for their photos, that's not, strictly speaking, true. There's also those unflattering photos that you leave in shoeboxes, as well as the photos of loved ones that you keep in your wallet. The idea of a generic file is an extremely useful abstraction to developers and users alike. Does it really make sense to have photos separate from videos? Or photos of your loved ones alongside photos you take for your job? I think that the classification system that folders and files have given us is much more useful to users than the vague lumping of items by what amounts to a filetype. However, I do think that there are better abstractions for a user than the bare file system. I don't have much experience with either, but I'd guess that Win 7 Libraries and something like Leap[1] on the Mac are improvements on this. [1] http://www.ironicsoftware.com/leap/index.html http://www.ironicsoftware.com/leap/index.html
- mechanical_fish 16y ago
  Imagine if in the real world, the only place you could put food is your refrigerator... The machine isn't the real world. In particular: People often like to have software do things for them. But software has no intelligence. So we have to design a system that both the human and the software can understand. If you had a personal robot that would automatically throw out, and reorder, any food that's more than six months past the expiration date -- but only if the food is in the refrigerator -- you might find that you would rather store 100% of your food in the refrigerator than have to deal with your own shopping. Then, a few years later, when you smell the six-month-old food that you accidentally forgot to put in the fridge, you may find yourself wishing for a system that actively constrains you from storing food outside the fridge. And then hides the fridge from you, so that all you see is a list of foods and you don't even have to care about where those foods are being kept. This is the age-old art of database design. On the one hand, databases often feel constrained and clunky. On the other hand, if you learn to deal with the constraints, magical machines can come along and save you thousands of hours.
wvenable 16y ago
The problem with files is that there are so many of them! An average computer contains millions of files yet only a small fraction are actually created by users. Those files are images, or spreadsheets, or documents and people can understand and work with them pretty easily. But these files are often stored in deep folder hierarchies (C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\My Documents really?) on a hard drive filled with other hierarchies that nobody cares about. I don't think we need to get rid of files the way the iPad does, but we do need to rethink what a unit of a data to a user really is. For a user, a photo is a single unit of data (one file) but so is an application (many many files).
BigZaphod 16y ago
I don't think files are the problem. It's the folder hierarchy that's the problem. The thing iPhoneOS is most intent on eliminating are deep trees of files. It does this by training the user to think of their files/content as being managed by an individual app that's responsible for manipulating it. This creates a single top-level "folder" for the user to use as a mental key to remember how to get at something. Contrast that much shorter path to content to the standard desktop model of having a folder in your home folder, perhaps, to store documents. The ability to make sub-folders, sub-sub-folders, etc. and have all the contents of those folders utterly disconnected from the applications you use to manipulate and create that content. It makes sense to those of us who grew up/invented it, but for people just looking to use a computer as a tool in their non-computer-driven life suffer under the cognitive load of the foreign metaphors. In my experience, people "get" that individual files represent their content. They do not "get" folder hierarchies, though, and find themselves easily lost within them. I think many non-experts consider an app as a destination and not as a program to run. It makes more sense to them to think of "going" to the app and then finding their content there than it does to "run" an app and then later point it to their content.
- rmundo 16y ago
  I think one thing that really confuses people is how user data is stored in the same space as system files, and can be manipulated in the same way. It's fine for people who know what they are doing, but many people I know are lost if their files aren't on the desktop or My Documents. The average user doesn't need to look anywhere outside their home directory, or inside their application bundles. iPhone OS is a good start, but eventually Apple will probably want to provide a way for apps to share data, perhaps a common pool for app data. Or maybe a cloud data storage api which all apps use to store and retrieve files. The sheer amount of data we have and how to organize that is yet another problem that is likely still waiting for a brilliant solution.
  - greendestiny 16y ago
    Yeah I agree, and I'd further say I do know what I'm doing and I hate the file system. Unix is much better than windows in that their are much stronger conventions on where to store things, but its still a shmozzle. I think the iPhone OS model is starting to crumble on the iPad with the increase in filetypes that people expect to interact with. I was hoping to see an extension of the itunes library style of database to cover different file types.
sreitshamer 16y ago
General purpose computers are system-integration machines. My mother searches the web for content and drags/drops snippets into presentations; emails photos to friends; sends letters via fax. Those are all inter-app activities that she couldn't do on an iPad. A friend with an iPad sync'd his Dropbox folder to it; clicked a file and chose "Send to Pages", edited it, and then ... Well, he couldn't save it back to his Dropbox because Pages doesn't support it. I thought trapping content in apps was a bad thing.
lhorie 16y ago
Reminds me of that concept for a code editor UI with bubbles[1]. If the user interfaces let me visually organize the code in a way that makes sense, then the way the data is saved on disk doesn't really matter anymore. [1] http://geekswithblogs.net/andrewbrust/archive/2010/03/12/code-bubbles-disruption-comes-to-the-ide.aspx http://geekswithblogs.net/andrewbrust/archive/2010/03/12/cod... On the flip side, I guess there's the problem of being locked to the applications
- Psyonic 16y ago
  I took a look at it. It seems like a Smalltalk IDE for java... does it offer innovations besides that?
  - lhorie 16y ago
    I don't know what is or is not innovative about this particular editor concept, I just pointed out that it's more useful to be able to see things like procedural flow without having other things cluttering the screen just because they happen to be in the same files as what you're interested in at a given point in time. Another nice example of the file-centric approach failing is Photoshop comps. It's a lot easier to just have an interface where I can quickly toggle between various comps in a single project file than it is to have two dozen slightly different files, each representing one comp.
statictype 16y ago
This app-centric model works well until you find that you want different apps to operate on the same file - which will eventually happen on devices that people spend a lot of time in The file-less model may work well for a consumption-centric system like the iPhone where you're not expected to spend much time on it trying to produce content (and the places where you do - like email and sms- the mechanism is simple and is handled by a single app). Even there, photos are exposed in a special way because it's understood that people will want to do various interesting things with them (like edit them or upload them using different apps). I think the real problem is in how the file system is presented to users. When a user saves a file, they have no clue where they saved it. The concept of file shortcuts is another killer - I've seen many cases where someone copied a shortcut onto a pen drive - or worse- burned it on a CD. Instead of presenting a 'Save' dialog, have the user drag some file icon next to the top of the app into the desktop or some folder. When browsing a list of files on the system - instead of showing folders in a hierarchy, show a list of apps - in each one, show the list of files whose last modification was done by that app. Many users already follow a model like this- they just fire up the app and click the Open button which shows the most recently saved location.
- adw 16y ago
  But when do you actually want to do that? There are really only, I think, two use cases: a) media b) source code. Apple solve the first of these with libraries: your music library, your photo library, your film library. Any program can talk to these through the published API, so that solves this, for most people, for photo editing, music making. The second is advanced-user stuff, and you make it hard to access and developers-only.
  - statictype 16y ago
    I want to create a presentation using Powerpoint or Keynote. I then want to zip it up and mail it to someone. Ok, we can skip the zipping step and assume that your mail client has a provision for compressing attachments before sending - where does the mail client pick up your presentation slides from? You have to solve this problem by keeping an expandable list of libraries. I suppose that's not a bad idea actually.
there 16y ago
while the notion that files are "dying" may be true, the way iphone os handles them is still not usable. When you see a photo on your desk, do you think “a file!” or do you think “a photo of my family!”? i think, "a photo of my family", but then i think, "i want to make a copy of this and mail it to someone" so i take it to walgreens and get a copy, then i go to the post office and mail it. to send a copy of the photo on my ipad, can i carry the photo with me as i launch the e-mail application? or can i carry it with me as i launch a flickr uploading application? or carry it into beejive and send it in an instant message? on a mac you can. you just drag the photo out of iphoto and drop it on some application. on android, you click the share button while in the photos application and up pops a list of every application that can do something with your photo. on the ipad, it's backwards. you launch the flickr application and then have to find your photo again. and this is restricted to photos, since it's an internal api. any other 3rd party app wishing to share data with another app can't do it. right now if you want to print an e-mail from an ipad, you install a printing application and it has to have an embedded e-mail client where you have to duplicate your settings and e-mail storage. apple could make an api to access your e-mails (not likely) but it's still backwards. the e-mail client should let you print or do anything else with an e-mail from the e-mail client, not the other way around.
- glhaynes 16y ago
  iPhone OS 3.2 (ships on iPad) and 4.0 (presumably will run on iPhone and iPad, not out yet) have support for apps discovering other installed apps' declared support for filetypes and for apps to hand documents off to other apps.
cesare 16y ago
I just ditched my iPhone 3G and got an Android phone just to have files back. Seriously. And I've never been happier with a phone (it's an HTC Desire, FWIW). The death of files is the death of freedom.
patio11 16y ago
I've mentioned this a couple of times, but coming from my deeply non-technical niche, I think files are dying and good riddance to them. They're a constant barrier in front of my customers getting their work done and going back to their lives. They're an abstraction which is -- mercifully -- more user friendly than disk sectors or IP addresses, but not by very much: my users may lack the ability to find saved files on the computer, to understand the difference between the filesystems on two computers, to be able to copy a file to a floppy or CD without active moving-the-mouse-for-her assistance, to differentiate between files and the applications that created them (expecting, e.g., that copying bingo cards onto their sister's computer will let them open them automatically -- hey, works for photos and letters, right?), etc, etc. We won't even get started with navigating a tree structure. I've had a sustained decrease in the amount of time I spend supporting customers with these issues since releasing my web application, because it comports to how many of them think their files actually work: they live in the application, they always exist in the application no matter what computer you're on, they always show up on the top screen no matter what, they never get lost, and even if they get lost Patrick can find them for you if you send him an email.
- stcredzero 16y ago
  Everything on the iPhone is task-centric, not file-centric. The “file” part of completing tasks is completely insulated from the user. This squares with what you said and with what I saw on the bus last week. A woman with two kids and a Nokia phone was trying to find the video from the school play. First, she went to the apps that were related in her mind, and found nothing. She started to become confused and desperate. (repeating "oh my god" several times) After a long time she said, "Was it File Browser?" She was able to find it shortly after that. Users think in a task oriented way. Our interfaces tend to be implementation oriented, unless we discipline ourselves.
  - abstractbill 16y ago
    Files are an abstraction that allows multiple applications to operate on the same objects (photos, videos, etc). The argument here seems to be that the cost of the abstraction (user confusion) isn't worth the benefit, and that we should go back to only allowing one application to access each kind of object. I have to disagree. The abstraction might not be perfect, but it does enable something pretty damn useful.
rbanffy 16y ago
Suddenly it's Smalltalk 80 all over again... Even if we were to credit Apple for such innovation, IIRC, the Newton did away with files a long time ago. If the Newton did not, then the original PalmOS did.
rbanffy 16y ago
The absence of files suits a media consumption device. I don't think a media creation device would be able to do away with files in the user interface.
rameshnid 16y ago
When a human first saw a photo did he say 'an etched memory of me' or did he say 'it's a new cool thing called a photo and it's of me' In the same way I don't think there is anything wrong with the concept of file as long as the abstraction is fairly simple to understand. I say don't assume humans are stupid. Let them choose if they like files or task based os's. Don't indoctrinate designers to belong to only one school. I say why only two schools - there could be better abstractions out there. Think. Imagine. Make a new abstraction. Don't take one of the two existing sides.
dean 16y ago
"Because most computer operating systems don’t organize things this way, accomplishing simple tasks can be extremely confusing for casual computer users;" You can't compare an operating system with an application. I can use iTunes on any OS to play my music (the iPhone is nothing special in this regard). iTunes only knows about music, so all the files are "songs". I can consume any song this way on my PC. And as long as all you do is consume, this interface works beautifully. But try creating a song, and suddenly you need to know how things work in a little more detail. Files are not going away, but if all you want to do is consume content, then there are some pretty good apps out there that present your data in intuitive and meaningful ways.
omouse 16y ago
Omg, this industry is retarded: "This is a new model for organizing things on computers" No it isn't. Hey, did you know that you can still make computers run programers without an operating system and without a hierarchical file system? My god, we really need to add History Of Computing and History Of Technology courses to the highschool and uni curriculums. It's disgusting how this industry is full of fashion.
- Psyonic 16y ago
  You're getting downvoted (not by me), probably because your post was a bit over the top, but in reality you're right. Whatever the merits of this idea, it certainly isn't new, and Apple wasn't the first to try it. But as always, when Apple implements an idea from somewhere else, they get all the credit. But like you said, it goes far beyond Apple. No doubt people discussed this very issue years and years ago, and had solid reasons for choosing a file-system. Things may have changed, so it's fine to reconsider the decision, but rather than everyone pulling an opinion out of nowhere, perhaps we should review the past rationale first, and once again weigh the pros and cons.
BoppreH 16y ago
Has been discussed before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1230099 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1230099 I still think it's an awful idea to group content by type ("all photos are in the iPhoto app") rather then let the user choose how to group it. Users usually put things together based on content, not type. They want to place that funny video in the same folder as the funny joke saved in .txt and that image of the cute cat. The document with a list of things to buy for the party along with the spreadsheet with the total costs. And IF they one day decide they want to group by type, they do it. Abstracting the notion of files away is just removing options from the user, options that weren't even bugging them in the first place. I have yet to see someone having trouble understanding the concept of files and folders. And don't even get me started on the fact that all applications will have to implement their own content manager...
njharman 16y ago
This crap drives me crazy with my touch and is what's holding me back from buying an iPad. Download file with browser, can't. Get app to download file. Want to view it with PDF app, can't. Cause there are no files and apps can't share data. Want to move it into my photo album or music or video or ebook folders, can't cause there are no "folders". (some newer API's might allow specific exceptions I've quit paying attention). Want to transfer it to removeable media, can't. Cause I guess that's too confusing. Want to transfer it to another device, can't unless task centric app supports that cause again no files, no sharing app data. Every app is a silo. It's the diametrically opposite of *nix philosophy of small tools connected in myriad of ways. It maybe great for consumers who can't or refuse to learn. But for computer users it sucks balls. [edit: this is the point of iPhone and iPad. They aren't devices for computer users. They are the mass consumer device the generic/multipurpose/computer has and can not ever become.]
- sandGorgon 16y ago
  this is roughly the problem that KDE's Nepomuk (and its ontology) is tryin to solve. Though their implementation is a resource hog.
mwexler 16y ago
This reads like the guy just discovered the phrase "object oriented". I know he's a smarty, but come on, haven't we had the idea of data as objects for years now? Is it that the iphone is the first device to make it usable by restricting the available pool of data types instead of trying to boil the ocean by making "everything an object"?
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
JimBastard 16y ago
Am I the only one who thinks Dustin Curtis is kinda a retard with good design skills?
Jach 16y ago
"If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it." --Linus Torvalds Others have basically spoken my thoughts that this is a wrong direction to take, files actually are pretty intuitive and the trouble is often "which app can I use on this file?". I'm against trying to simplify everything to such a degree, since it's treating users like idiots. Down with single-button mice.
jodrellblank 16y ago
When you see a photo on your desk, do you think "a file!" or do you think "a photo of my family!"? This is all well and good except it comes right at the end of an article explaining why I can't have a single photo on my desk and why I shouldn't want to, all I should ever need is a photo album with all my photos in it. Hrm.
URSpider94 16y ago
The file-less model is not new. Anyone who coded for PalmOS is familiar with the idea of storing all of the data for your application in internal data structures. What is also not new is that developers inevitably come along and create file managers to sit atop these file-less devices, so that you can download and store PDF's, spreadsheets, photos, etc. on your device ...

108 points by apgwoz 16y ago

Excellent piece. I think the main challenge for UX architects is breaking the hiearchical model that users are used to. Tags are the ideal solution for organizing like items but few have mastered the UI. Sure, it's easy to to build the refrigerator model but users get freaked out when everything is lumped together (that's why websites still have nav bars.) If someone can master the art of the tag UI, then we're set.

dcurtis 16y ago
I don't think tags are the solution. Human beings organize stuff by lumping similar things together, by spatial relationship. It's the way the brain is designed to make sense of things on a neurological level. Tags create a meta layer of information on top of the actual spatial organization of objects, which is hard to comprehend naturally.
- jimbokun 16y ago
  The problem is we have too many virtual things to organize them spatially. It worked with the finder when each user have a few or few dozens of or maybe even a few hundred files they cared about. Now computers have millions of files, and I don't see how we can sensibly organize them spatially and still find things. I would say that now the dominant way of finding things on a computer is not organization at all, but search. Type some words describing the thing you want to find. We've been trained by Google that we should always be able to find anything we want this way.
  - Psyonic 16y ago
    True, but right now search fails miserably for images. It might not, if people tagged their images better (facebook does a good job of getting people to do this), but most people don't.
- ciniglio 16y ago
  Why do you say that tags can't represent the spatial organization of objects? Can't you lump similar things together, by putting them under the same tag?

uptown 16y ago

If you're a producer of content ... you care about files. If you're a consumer of content ... you don't.

nudist 16y ago
I don't know if this is true for content producers... Why would you care about the file itself if you can create and manipulate the content easily?
- j_baker 16y ago
  You're presuming that you can do all the manipulating and creating of a file without being able to work with the file itself, which I have my doubts about.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - dagw 16y ago
    You care about files because you have to, not because you want to. As a content producer I consider every abstraction that lets me ignore the fact that the project I'm working on is actually made up of tens of thousands of files in dozens of different formats an unequivocal good thing.
  - BigZaphod 16y ago
    Well, I'm not sure if this is what you mean, exactly, but... I can take a photo with my camera, plug it in to the computer, import the photo into iPhoto (this is done by clicking the photo itself and clicking import - there's no generic "file" icon displayed or choices about where to save anything), then do some red eye reduction, maybe some cropping, and finally click Share/Email and send the edited photo to someone else. This is all done without ever having to care about any underlying "file."
    - abstractbill 16y ago

devinj 16y ago

"When you see a photo on your desk, do you think “a file!” or do you think “a photo of my family!”?" The same applies to a .JPG file in my documents folder. I think "a photo". That last line ruined the article for me, because it made me realize that files are how we do things in the real world, just with other names. We don't deal with fridges, we deal with food. And you know what? We even have to know where to store the food! Some food, like milk, goes in the fridge. Other food, like pasta, goes in the cupboard. Same with spices. Yet other food, like frozen peas, go in the freezer, Still more food might be found on plants in the garden. There is no single app, just a lot of directories for me to search in.

stat 16y ago
I strongly agree. The concept of file is extremely popular because it is intuitive. Sometimes designers get carried away in trying to simplify an interface that doesn't need any simplifying. For some simplistic devices like a DVD player or a game console, it might make sense to hide the filesystem because what the user will be doing is predetermined by the designer (console = play game. DVD = watch movie). But for general purpose computers, it makes no sense to hide such a powerful feature.
- dcurtis 16y ago
  The file model is only intuitive to you because you've been using it for so long that it has become a part of your existence. Do some user testing with casual computer users (not even pure novices), and watch as you ask them to complete a two step task with a file (like, say, resize and then email). They can usually figure it out, but it takes them a long time and they become frustrated. It's not a natural experience to them. You know when you first start programming, and you hack together snippets of code to make your first program work? That's kind of what using a computer is like to the majority of people.
  - thwarted 16y ago
    This is due to a lack of being able to think abstractly, not with files and hierarchical folders specifically (which is a specific kind of abstraction), and I find people's frustration frustrating myself. If you gave the same person a print of a photo, and asked them to resize and fax, they'd have no trouble doing so with a photocopier and a fax machine (other than that these devices are often complex themselves, but that has nothing to do with the photo print as portable storage, which is all a file is).

ihodes 16y ago

I don't know that files are broken. Our brains are trained to "select" things: from the correct answer on a test, to the right phrase to say on your significant other's birthday. Limiting user exposure from little bundles of portable information to hidden databases is exactly what MS did with the registery. It's all well and good until you realize that sometimes it's nice for data to be a little more accessible and visible "Apps" that lock in data, like all sorts of old-school applications that stored your files in hidden folders, fail. They're closed. They're a black box that you can't easily leave when you'd like to move on to another application. Hiding data in closed databases is not only counterintuitive (it's like hiding the mustard in the back of the fridge in your analogy, and chaining it to the door), it's harmful should you ever want to buy a new fridge.

lkozma 16y ago

This mentality has lead OS designers to come up with those "My Documents", "My Videos", "My Photos" folders that are auto-created on installation. It's been there in Windows, recently Ubuntu has them, probably Macs have something similar. It's always the first thing I delete after a fresh install.

epochwolf 16y ago
Macs have a home folder with the following sub folders Applications - User version of /Applications Desktop - Desktop Documents Downloads - Safari downloads files here Library - Application configuration and data storage. Movies Music - iTunes library defaults to here Pictures - iPhoto stores it's library file in this folder Public - Documents visible to people on the network, not writable Public/Drop Box - Publicly writable but not publicly visible Sites - Web sharing uses this folder to share your website from here.
wan23 16y ago
I know it's annoying to have the Microsoft tell you how to organize your files, but there are some benefits to keeping those. Since those folders are in the API, many apps use them as defaults. Also, trusted Silverlight apps are restricted such that those special directories are the only ones visible. Really whether we like it or not, all of the major OS vendors are moving to a model where you store your own files in specified places.

ciniglio 16y ago

I strongly dislike this trend. Imagine if in the real world, the only place you could put food is your refrigerator, or if a bookshelf only allowed you to place books on it. While it sounds nice to say that a person only looks through their photo album for their photos, that's not, strictly speaking, true. There's also those unflattering photos that you leave in shoeboxes, as well as the photos of loved ones that you keep in your wallet. The idea of a generic file is an extremely useful abstraction to developers and users alike. Does it really make sense to have photos separate from videos? Or photos of your loved ones alongside photos you take for your job? I think that the classification system that folders and files have given us is much more useful to users than the vague lumping of items by what amounts to a filetype. However, I do think that there are better abstractions for a user than the bare file system. I don't have much experience with either, but I'd guess that Win 7 Libraries and something like Leap[1] on the Mac are improvements on this. [1] http://www.ironicsoftware.com/leap/index.html http://www.ironicsoftware.com/leap/index.html

mechanical_fish 16y ago
Imagine if in the real world, the only place you could put food is your refrigerator... The machine isn't the real world. In particular: People often like to have software do things for them. But software has no intelligence. So we have to design a system that both the human and the software can understand. If you had a personal robot that would automatically throw out, and reorder, any food that's more than six months past the expiration date -- but only if the food is in the refrigerator -- you might find that you would rather store 100% of your food in the refrigerator than have to deal with your own shopping. Then, a few years later, when you smell the six-month-old food that you accidentally forgot to put in the fridge, you may find yourself wishing for a system that actively constrains you from storing food outside the fridge. And then hides the fridge from you, so that all you see is a list of foods and you don't even have to care about where those foods are being kept. This is the age-old art of database design. On the one hand, databases often feel constrained and clunky. On the other hand, if you learn to deal with the constraints, magical machines can come along and save you thousands of hours.

wvenable 16y ago

The problem with files is that there are so many of them! An average computer contains millions of files yet only a small fraction are actually created by users. Those files are images, or spreadsheets, or documents and people can understand and work with them pretty easily. But these files are often stored in deep folder hierarchies (C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\My Documents really?) on a hard drive filled with other hierarchies that nobody cares about. I don't think we need to get rid of files the way the iPad does, but we do need to rethink what a unit of a data to a user really is. For a user, a photo is a single unit of data (one file) but so is an application (many many files).

BigZaphod 16y ago

I don't think files are the problem. It's the folder hierarchy that's the problem. The thing iPhoneOS is most intent on eliminating are deep trees of files. It does this by training the user to think of their files/content as being managed by an individual app that's responsible for manipulating it. This creates a single top-level "folder" for the user to use as a mental key to remember how to get at something. Contrast that much shorter path to content to the standard desktop model of having a folder in your home folder, perhaps, to store documents. The ability to make sub-folders, sub-sub-folders, etc. and have all the contents of those folders utterly disconnected from the applications you use to manipulate and create that content. It makes sense to those of us who grew up/invented it, but for people just looking to use a computer as a tool in their non-computer-driven life suffer under the cognitive load of the foreign metaphors. In my experience, people "get" that individual files represent their content. They do not "get" folder hierarchies, though, and find themselves easily lost within them. I think many non-experts consider an app as a destination and not as a program to run. It makes more sense to them to think of "going" to the app and then finding their content there than it does to "run" an app and then later point it to their content.

rmundo 16y ago
I think one thing that really confuses people is how user data is stored in the same space as system files, and can be manipulated in the same way. It's fine for people who know what they are doing, but many people I know are lost if their files aren't on the desktop or My Documents. The average user doesn't need to look anywhere outside their home directory, or inside their application bundles. iPhone OS is a good start, but eventually Apple will probably want to provide a way for apps to share data, perhaps a common pool for app data. Or maybe a cloud data storage api which all apps use to store and retrieve files. The sheer amount of data we have and how to organize that is yet another problem that is likely still waiting for a brilliant solution.
- greendestiny 16y ago
  Yeah I agree, and I'd further say I do know what I'm doing and I hate the file system. Unix is much better than windows in that their are much stronger conventions on where to store things, but its still a shmozzle. I think the iPhone OS model is starting to crumble on the iPad with the increase in filetypes that people expect to interact with. I was hoping to see an extension of the itunes library style of database to cover different file types.

sreitshamer 16y ago

General purpose computers are system-integration machines. My mother searches the web for content and drags/drops snippets into presentations; emails photos to friends; sends letters via fax. Those are all inter-app activities that she couldn't do on an iPad. A friend with an iPad sync'd his Dropbox folder to it; clicked a file and chose "Send to Pages", edited it, and then ... Well, he couldn't save it back to his Dropbox because Pages doesn't support it. I thought trapping content in apps was a bad thing.

lhorie 16y ago

Reminds me of that concept for a code editor UI with bubbles[1]. If the user interfaces let me visually organize the code in a way that makes sense, then the way the data is saved on disk doesn't really matter anymore. [1] http://geekswithblogs.net/andrewbrust/archive/2010/03/12/code-bubbles-disruption-comes-to-the-ide.aspx http://geekswithblogs.net/andrewbrust/archive/2010/03/12/cod... On the flip side, I guess there's the problem of being locked to the applications

Psyonic 16y ago
I took a look at it. It seems like a Smalltalk IDE for java... does it offer innovations besides that?
- lhorie 16y ago
  I don't know what is or is not innovative about this particular editor concept, I just pointed out that it's more useful to be able to see things like procedural flow without having other things cluttering the screen just because they happen to be in the same files as what you're interested in at a given point in time. Another nice example of the file-centric approach failing is Photoshop comps. It's a lot easier to just have an interface where I can quickly toggle between various comps in a single project file than it is to have two dozen slightly different files, each representing one comp.

statictype 16y ago

This app-centric model works well until you find that you want different apps to operate on the same file - which will eventually happen on devices that people spend a lot of time in The file-less model may work well for a consumption-centric system like the iPhone where you're not expected to spend much time on it trying to produce content (and the places where you do - like email and sms- the mechanism is simple and is handled by a single app). Even there, photos are exposed in a special way because it's understood that people will want to do various interesting things with them (like edit them or upload them using different apps). I think the real problem is in how the file system is presented to users. When a user saves a file, they have no clue where they saved it. The concept of file shortcuts is another killer - I've seen many cases where someone copied a shortcut onto a pen drive - or worse- burned it on a CD. Instead of presenting a 'Save' dialog, have the user drag some file icon next to the top of the app into the desktop or some folder. When browsing a list of files on the system - instead of showing folders in a hierarchy, show a list of apps - in each one, show the list of files whose last modification was done by that app. Many users already follow a model like this- they just fire up the app and click the Open button which shows the most recently saved location.

adw 16y ago
But when do you actually want to do that? There are really only, I think, two use cases: a) media b) source code. Apple solve the first of these with libraries: your music library, your photo library, your film library. Any program can talk to these through the published API, so that solves this, for most people, for photo editing, music making. The second is advanced-user stuff, and you make it hard to access and developers-only.
- statictype 16y ago
  I want to create a presentation using Powerpoint or Keynote. I then want to zip it up and mail it to someone. Ok, we can skip the zipping step and assume that your mail client has a provision for compressing attachments before sending - where does the mail client pick up your presentation slides from? You have to solve this problem by keeping an expandable list of libraries. I suppose that's not a bad idea actually.

there 16y ago

while the notion that files are "dying" may be true, the way iphone os handles them is still not usable. When you see a photo on your desk, do you think “a file!” or do you think “a photo of my family!”? i think, "a photo of my family", but then i think, "i want to make a copy of this and mail it to someone" so i take it to walgreens and get a copy, then i go to the post office and mail it. to send a copy of the photo on my ipad, can i carry the photo with me as i launch the e-mail application? or can i carry it with me as i launch a flickr uploading application? or carry it into beejive and send it in an instant message? on a mac you can. you just drag the photo out of iphoto and drop it on some application. on android, you click the share button while in the photos application and up pops a list of every application that can do something with your photo. on the ipad, it's backwards. you launch the flickr application and then have to find your photo again. and this is restricted to photos, since it's an internal api. any other 3rd party app wishing to share data with another app can't do it. right now if you want to print an e-mail from an ipad, you install a printing application and it has to have an embedded e-mail client where you have to duplicate your settings and e-mail storage. apple could make an api to access your e-mails (not likely) but it's still backwards. the e-mail client should let you print or do anything else with an e-mail from the e-mail client, not the other way around.

glhaynes 16y ago
iPhone OS 3.2 (ships on iPad) and 4.0 (presumably will run on iPhone and iPad, not out yet) have support for apps discovering other installed apps' declared support for filetypes and for apps to hand documents off to other apps.

cesare 16y ago

I just ditched my iPhone 3G and got an Android phone just to have files back. Seriously. And I've never been happier with a phone (it's an HTC Desire, FWIW). The death of files is the death of freedom.

patio11 16y ago

I've mentioned this a couple of times, but coming from my deeply non-technical niche, I think files are dying and good riddance to them. They're a constant barrier in front of my customers getting their work done and going back to their lives. They're an abstraction which is -- mercifully -- more user friendly than disk sectors or IP addresses, but not by very much: my users may lack the ability to find saved files on the computer, to understand the difference between the filesystems on two computers, to be able to copy a file to a floppy or CD without active moving-the-mouse-for-her assistance, to differentiate between files and the applications that created them (expecting, e.g., that copying bingo cards onto their sister's computer will let them open them automatically -- hey, works for photos and letters, right?), etc, etc. We won't even get started with navigating a tree structure. I've had a sustained decrease in the amount of time I spend supporting customers with these issues since releasing my web application, because it comports to how many of them think their files actually work: they live in the application, they always exist in the application no matter what computer you're on, they always show up on the top screen no matter what, they never get lost, and even if they get lost Patrick can find them for you if you send him an email.

stcredzero 16y ago
Everything on the iPhone is task-centric, not file-centric. The “file” part of completing tasks is completely insulated from the user. This squares with what you said and with what I saw on the bus last week. A woman with two kids and a Nokia phone was trying to find the video from the school play. First, she went to the apps that were related in her mind, and found nothing. She started to become confused and desperate. (repeating "oh my god" several times) After a long time she said, "Was it File Browser?" She was able to find it shortly after that. Users think in a task oriented way. Our interfaces tend to be implementation oriented, unless we discipline ourselves.
- abstractbill 16y ago
  Files are an abstraction that allows multiple applications to operate on the same objects (photos, videos, etc). The argument here seems to be that the cost of the abstraction (user confusion) isn't worth the benefit, and that we should go back to only allowing one application to access each kind of object. I have to disagree. The abstraction might not be perfect, but it does enable something pretty damn useful.

rbanffy 16y ago

Suddenly it's Smalltalk 80 all over again... Even if we were to credit Apple for such innovation, IIRC, the Newton did away with files a long time ago. If the Newton did not, then the original PalmOS did.

rbanffy 16y ago

The absence of files suits a media consumption device. I don't think a media creation device would be able to do away with files in the user interface.

rameshnid 16y ago

When a human first saw a photo did he say 'an etched memory of me' or did he say 'it's a new cool thing called a photo and it's of me' In the same way I don't think there is anything wrong with the concept of file as long as the abstraction is fairly simple to understand. I say don't assume humans are stupid. Let them choose if they like files or task based os's. Don't indoctrinate designers to belong to only one school. I say why only two schools - there could be better abstractions out there. Think. Imagine. Make a new abstraction. Don't take one of the two existing sides.

dean 16y ago

"Because most computer operating systems don’t organize things this way, accomplishing simple tasks can be extremely confusing for casual computer users;" You can't compare an operating system with an application. I can use iTunes on any OS to play my music (the iPhone is nothing special in this regard). iTunes only knows about music, so all the files are "songs". I can consume any song this way on my PC. And as long as all you do is consume, this interface works beautifully. But try creating a song, and suddenly you need to know how things work in a little more detail. Files are not going away, but if all you want to do is consume content, then there are some pretty good apps out there that present your data in intuitive and meaningful ways.

omouse 16y ago

Omg, this industry is retarded: "This is a new model for organizing things on computers" No it isn't. Hey, did you know that you can still make computers run programers without an operating system and without a hierarchical file system? My god, we really need to add History Of Computing and History Of Technology courses to the highschool and uni curriculums. It's disgusting how this industry is full of fashion.

Psyonic 16y ago
You're getting downvoted (not by me), probably because your post was a bit over the top, but in reality you're right. Whatever the merits of this idea, it certainly isn't new, and Apple wasn't the first to try it. But as always, when Apple implements an idea from somewhere else, they get all the credit. But like you said, it goes far beyond Apple. No doubt people discussed this very issue years and years ago, and had solid reasons for choosing a file-system. Things may have changed, so it's fine to reconsider the decision, but rather than everyone pulling an opinion out of nowhere, perhaps we should review the past rationale first, and once again weigh the pros and cons.

BoppreH 16y ago

Has been discussed before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1230099 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1230099 I still think it's an awful idea to group content by type ("all photos are in the iPhoto app") rather then let the user choose how to group it. Users usually put things together based on content, not type. They want to place that funny video in the same folder as the funny joke saved in .txt and that image of the cute cat. The document with a list of things to buy for the party along with the spreadsheet with the total costs. And IF they one day decide they want to group by type, they do it. Abstracting the notion of files away is just removing options from the user, options that weren't even bugging them in the first place. I have yet to see someone having trouble understanding the concept of files and folders. And don't even get me started on the fact that all applications will have to implement their own content manager...

njharman 16y ago

This crap drives me crazy with my touch and is what's holding me back from buying an iPad. Download file with browser, can't. Get app to download file. Want to view it with PDF app, can't. Cause there are no files and apps can't share data. Want to move it into my photo album or music or video or ebook folders, can't cause there are no "folders". (some newer API's might allow specific exceptions I've quit paying attention). Want to transfer it to removeable media, can't. Cause I guess that's too confusing. Want to transfer it to another device, can't unless task centric app supports that cause again no files, no sharing app data. Every app is a silo. It's the diametrically opposite of *nix philosophy of small tools connected in myriad of ways. It maybe great for consumers who can't or refuse to learn. But for computer users it sucks balls. [edit: this is the point of iPhone and iPad. They aren't devices for computer users. They are the mass consumer device the generic/multipurpose/computer has and can not ever become.]

sandGorgon 16y ago
this is roughly the problem that KDE's Nepomuk (and its ontology) is tryin to solve. Though their implementation is a resource hog.

mwexler 16y ago

This reads like the guy just discovered the phrase "object oriented". I know he's a smarty, but come on, haven't we had the idea of data as objects for years now? Is it that the iphone is the first device to make it usable by restricting the available pool of data types instead of trying to boil the ocean by making "everything an object"?

deleted 16y ago

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JimBastard 16y ago

Am I the only one who thinks Dustin Curtis is kinda a retard with good design skills?

Jach 16y ago

"If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it." --Linus Torvalds Others have basically spoken my thoughts that this is a wrong direction to take, files actually are pretty intuitive and the trouble is often "which app can I use on this file?". I'm against trying to simplify everything to such a degree, since it's treating users like idiots. Down with single-button mice.

jodrellblank 16y ago

When you see a photo on your desk, do you think "a file!" or do you think "a photo of my family!"? This is all well and good except it comes right at the end of an article explaining why I can't have a single photo on my desk and why I shouldn't want to, all I should ever need is a photo album with all my photos in it. Hrm.

URSpider94 16y ago

The file-less model is not new. Anyone who coded for PalmOS is familiar with the idea of storing all of the data for your application in internal data structures. What is also not new is that developers inevitably come along and create file managers to sit atop these file-less devices, so that you can download and store PDF's, spreadsheets, photos, etc. on your device ...