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Files are important because they act as an interface (in the OO sense) to all of the different things that the author of this article talks about. The universal
by bgruber 15y ago
Files are important because they act as an interface (in the OO sense) to all of the different things that the author of this article talks about. The universality of that interface is, for now, key to interoperability.
I don't care how many times david pogue says otherwise, it's a lot easier to drag the audio files i want on my mp3 player from one window to another than to wrestle with itunes. Not only is it easier, but it's a skill I can apply again and again and again to lots of different tasks. If you do want to wrestle with some kind of crazy-ass music management system, the way that seems to work best to make it so that we can all use whatever we want is to have an underlying interface based on files.
Beyond interoperability, tech that's too specific to 'what people actually use their computers for' tends to make it harder to do things that the developers didn't think of; go far enough down that road and computers become about as interesting as TVs.
- orangecat 15y agogo far enough down that road and computers become about as interesting as TVs This perfectly summarizes Apple's post-2007 business model.
- scott_s 15y agoI find it a lot easier to hit "Sync" than to look at my podcasts and think "I listened to that one, this one and that one, so I can delete them, and hey! there's a new one, so I should transfer it..."
- jerf 15y agoNothing bgruber said contradicts that. But instead of a magic "Sync" button that only works in one program on one type of file, the "sync" operation on files can be used over and over again. I only "sync" too, because it's way faster than literally copying things over... but I rsync. Granted, I'm a power user doing this on the command line, but absolutely nothing stops you from "Dropboxing" your music player. Potentially literally.
- StuffMaster 15y agoThis requires setting up syncing, which seems complicated when I just want to copy some files.