4 ms·

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

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.
  - stoney 16y ago
    But then what happens when I want to copy my presentation, some associated video clips, my notes, the directions to the venue and the meeting agenda onto my USB drive? Suddenly all of the information relating to my presentation is scattered across multiple locations, which just gives me exactly the opposite problem to the one created by the file/folder heirarchy (i.e. now my data is grouped by type (e.g. in my photo library) instead of by subject (e.g. in a folder).
    - statictype 16y ago
      Yeah, sorry, in this utopian future we are describing, there is no USB drive :) You just take all the information and apps with you on your device. Or you beam it up to the cloud.
pyre 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 This is solvable with standards. If all photos are in a standard place, in a standard way, with a standard db schema, then any app can access it. The standards can be supplemented with app-specific stuff, but as long as they all adhere to a base level of standards, then we are ok. Obviously there is some data that is more free-form that others, which would require apps that are more open.
- Qz 16y ago
  What do you do when files contain other files in a different 'standard'?
  - pyre 16y ago
    Huh? I was talking about things like having a 'images' or 'photos' store where all photos can live. If you want to create a program that uses the photos, there can be a standard 'photo search' dialog rather than a 'file' dialog. This way all programs can access this store, and we can have dialogs that are tailored to the type of data that is being presented to the user. We could even make it possible for the user to search content if you had a 'docs' dialog that encompassed things like PDFs, text files, Word documents, etc. This would make it a lot easier if say, you had a 'project management' app (not in the 'supervisor' usage of the term). Say you were creating a collection of documents for a particular project and you wanted various types of documents like photos, PDFs, etc (maybe you're doing research for something). If you were trying to pull together some of these documents from existing sources (i.e. documents you already have) you could use the lightweight search facilities of a 'docs dialog' to search the content of the PDF that you're looking for rather than trying to put all sorts of context into the filename and/or directory structure.
    - anamax 16y ago
      > Huh? I was talking about things like having a 'images' or 'photos' store where all photos can live. A single directory is a disaster as soon as you have a reasonable number of photos. And, if you have subdirectories of photos, you're back where you started, except that you don't know where the "root" of the photo directory is, so you can't use standard file tools to manipulate them. And, where do you put videos? Some people organize their photos and videos together (in part because they came from the same device) while others keep them separate. And if I take notes about my photos, where does that file go? I really want to be able to keep related things together so I can easily provide them to someone else. There are lot of easy answers, but getting one that covers a large fraction of the use cases is hard.
RyanMcGreal 16y ago
>This app-centric model works well until you find that you want different apps to operate on the same file Wasn't this one of the big innovations of the Mac - content portability across applications?

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.
- stoney 16y ago
  But then what happens when I want to copy my presentation, some associated video clips, my notes, the directions to the venue and the meeting agenda onto my USB drive? Suddenly all of the information relating to my presentation is scattered across multiple locations, which just gives me exactly the opposite problem to the one created by the file/folder heirarchy (i.e. now my data is grouped by type (e.g. in my photo library) instead of by subject (e.g. in a folder).
  - statictype 16y ago
    Yeah, sorry, in this utopian future we are describing, there is no USB drive :) You just take all the information and apps with you on your device. Or you beam it up to the cloud.

pyre 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 This is solvable with standards. If all photos are in a standard place, in a standard way, with a standard db schema, then any app can access it. The standards can be supplemented with app-specific stuff, but as long as they all adhere to a base level of standards, then we are ok. Obviously there is some data that is more free-form that others, which would require apps that are more open.

Qz 16y ago
What do you do when files contain other files in a different 'standard'?
- pyre 16y ago
  Huh? I was talking about things like having a 'images' or 'photos' store where all photos can live. If you want to create a program that uses the photos, there can be a standard 'photo search' dialog rather than a 'file' dialog. This way all programs can access this store, and we can have dialogs that are tailored to the type of data that is being presented to the user. We could even make it possible for the user to search content if you had a 'docs' dialog that encompassed things like PDFs, text files, Word documents, etc. This would make it a lot easier if say, you had a 'project management' app (not in the 'supervisor' usage of the term). Say you were creating a collection of documents for a particular project and you wanted various types of documents like photos, PDFs, etc (maybe you're doing research for something). If you were trying to pull together some of these documents from existing sources (i.e. documents you already have) you could use the lightweight search facilities of a 'docs dialog' to search the content of the PDF that you're looking for rather than trying to put all sorts of context into the filename and/or directory structure.
  - anamax 16y ago
    > Huh? I was talking about things like having a 'images' or 'photos' store where all photos can live. A single directory is a disaster as soon as you have a reasonable number of photos. And, if you have subdirectories of photos, you're back where you started, except that you don't know where the "root" of the photo directory is, so you can't use standard file tools to manipulate them. And, where do you put videos? Some people organize their photos and videos together (in part because they came from the same device) while others keep them separate. And if I take notes about my photos, where does that file go? I really want to be able to keep related things together so I can easily provide them to someone else. There are lot of easy answers, but getting one that covers a large fraction of the use cases is hard.

RyanMcGreal 16y ago

>This app-centric model works well until you find that you want different apps to operate on the same file Wasn't this one of the big innovations of the Mac - content portability across applications?