9 ms·

Open Question: How Can We Fix Files?

33 points by dschroer 5y ago

coldacid 5y ago
This is more a question on fixing in-browser cloud storage services. Mounting the cloud storage locally is probably the best solution to this. I don't access my files in Nextcloud through my instance's website, I do it through the app that lets me treat it as another directory on my computer. OneDrive and iCloud already do this by default on Windows and Mac, respectively.
- dschroer 5y ago
  Do the in-browser storage services help this? Usually you need extra apps and some don't even have them. It would be nice if they didn't continue fragmenting. I suspect a large number of users don't know that it could even be mounted to their FS.
  - coldacid 5y ago
    At least for OneDrive on Windows and iCloud on Mac, they're integrated with the OS and installed by default. There's no need for extra apps. It's not so good for Google Drive, Dropbox, Nextcloud, or other cloud storage services (or for that matter, OneDrive on Mac and iCloud on Windows) where you do need to grab and install an app. I don't see "fragmentation" (as you put it) going away, because each service has its own way of authenticating users and accessing the services, and each OS has its own API for mounting or synchronizing files.
chubot 5y ago
Sort of related: I'm still confused by GUIs and files, and I've been using computers for ~30 years and programmed professionally for ~15, using Windows and Linux. I've mostly gotten over all the confusion in Windows and Linux, but OS X still confuses me. Specifically how to install an application. It seems like it's different with each app. For example, I downloaded a .dmg file for the Transmission BitTorrent client. And I double clicked it. There was another icon inside, and I double clicked that. Now I'm running the Transmission client and I can use it. But it's not installed? I can't click on a .torrent file and have it launch the client. I try to drag the whole thing into Applications? That makes a big mess. It doesn't install it. I have to open up finder and manually remove the files. Then I realize I have to click the .dmg and then drag the thing inside into Applications. To me everything in OS X looks like an "icon" and there is some tenous relationship to directories/folders, and "Applications" is some special pseudo-folder. I'm still confused, and not surprised at all that end users are confused. And this is on the OS that's supposedly the most user-friendly.
- sitharus 5y ago
  This is mostly a historical thing. There’s no real reason to use .dmg these days - historically it was the only Apple-supported way of compressing macOS files and keeping their resource forks intact. These days .zip is fine. That said there isn’t an ‘install’ as such on macOS. Applications isn’t a special folder, it’s a regular folder like anything else. Putting an application bundle on your local disk anywhere is sufficient to get file type mappings to work. The downside of course is there’s no corresponding uninstall that removes anything extra the app dropped in to ~/Library.
  - unnah 5y ago
    So if installation means simply moving an application to your local disk, or specifically to the Applications folder... then how does stuff end up in ~/Library instead?
    - einherjae 5y ago
      Preferences, caches, etc. general by-products.
    - IshKebab 5y ago
      The app puts it there when it runs.
  - IshKebab 5y ago
    There totally is an install. Tons of apps use a Windows-style install process.
    - sitharus 5y ago
      For applications there is no Windows style install process where things like the registry have to be updated, the os manages these associations itself. For things like kernel extensions yes there’s an installer, and some more invasive apps do that as well. But for a plain app there’s no _need_ for an installer. That doesn’t prohibit them of course.
anotherhue 5y ago
Skips the rather more pressing issue of files no longer existing for most mobile apps. Data portability matters but not to anyone in particular.
Const-me 5y ago
> Are there ways to simplify and streamline this fragmented system? Technically, yes. There're protocols like FTP and WebDAW supported in pretty much all operating systems who allow users to view, download and/or upload files using any app. Practically, no. Internet companies hate specialized protocols because they don't serve ads.
- tatersolid 5y ago
  There’s no ads in SharePoint, OneDrive personal or business, nor iCloud Drive. They’re services people pay for. I’m not sure about Google Drive; I bailed years ago when its broken sync ate my data.
S5yDyAk3XoQH5 5y ago
You can't. When you build a software to be idiot proof, somewhere a better idiot is built.
alex_young 5y ago
Simple, get a file cabinet. It holds all of your files, and you can forget about them until you move to the next place. Seriously though, this data exchange motif is so ingrained in computing as to be almost unimaginable to dispose of. Programs need a semipermanent method of exchanging information and we call that thing files.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  You're joking but Microsoft actually created the cabinet file format, which even has invisible folders.
perryizgr8 5y ago
The problem described here is not a files problem. It is a Microsoft SharePoint problem. Link to a file should directly download it to your computer. Not open up a fake file browser inside your browser.
- mrweasel 5y ago
  I was thinking the same thing, but why would this be a feature? It's a feature because SOMETIMES, that is the correct way of handling it. We're trying to shoehorn multiple use cases into a single/unified systems, of of cause something the computer will do the wrong thing, for our perspective. In this case Sharepoint is used as a way of transferring files, which it can do, but isn't exactly meant for.
  - nmstoker 5y ago
    Asking the user seems the most obvious way of deciding this. There are plenty of ways to make it discrete with a default option selected that the user could deselect if desired.
- Tagbert 5y ago
  Zipfiles are a special kind of file that contains other files. What is the proper response when a user clicks on a zip file on a web file store? Do you just throw the file at the local file system or do you open the zip file so that the user can see and choose specific files?
regularfry 5y ago
Not building actively confusing user interfaces would be a good start. If what you have is a file, presenting local file controls is appropriate, so do that. If what you have is kind of like a local file but the abstraction is leakier than the Titanic, don't, because unless you can be very clear to all concerned about which operations aren't available (and here's a hint: you can't), it is inevitable that the user is going to try something that Just Doesn't Work for reasons they don't care about. And that's a terrible user experience. Not just because they don't achieve their goal, but because it undermines their trust in interfaces that do get it right, so suddenly everything is fraught.
jl6 5y ago
There’s nothing wrong with files. Files are a fundamental freedom - the freedom to have custody of data, unlike the mobile/cloud paradigm where everything is an app/API with no guarantee that data you access today will be accessible tomorrow. File management and file browsers could always improve, but let’s not get rid of files themselves please.
- Perstone 5y ago
  The issue is that the very concept itself is limiting and thus limits how we can interact with the computer. The concept of files and directories is a direct analogue to a filing cabinet. The concept of how the information is stored is no different. It just the amount of data that can be stored. While storing more data that can be copied, transferred and edited easier is an improvement. The fundamental concept of the file system itself is still wedded to a concept that is probably 1000s of years old at this point and by tying us to these concepts it limits what can be done with data within those files.
- agent327 5y ago
  This, a thousand times this!
londons_explore 5y ago
Gmail/google drive is a big offender here... When someone sends me a zip file, having the most obvious link take me to a list of files in the zip that I can neither preview nor download seems illogical. In the 21st century, I expect webmail providers to understand zip files.
- foxpurple 5y ago
  Im guessing there is some kind of performance issue here. Where large or certain kinds of archives can have huge unzip times. Or especially that it is hard to determine the unzip time before unzipping. Google drive drops a lot of features that are technically easy because there is no fast or constant time to perform the action.
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    Seems easy enough to just have a 1 second timeout and some RAM limit, and if the server can't get the job done in that the request is aborted and an error is presented to the user telling them to download the whole zip file and unzip it themselves.
jeroenhd 5y ago
> This caused confusion because the the user did not understand that a online view of the files is not the same as having the files on your computer. I think that's the crux of the problem. The concept of files should not be estranging to anyone. It's the weird mix between native GUI and online GUI that's confusing here. Modern smartphones have abstracted files into specific names inside specific apps. Every file is in their own little app, and the idea that a document and a picture can live right next to each other is starting to look foreign. I believe this babification of user interfaces is taking away fromtthe computer experience. The arcane menus and knowledge Windows 98 required is luckily a thing I'd the past, but the concept of "web browser or file browser" shows a dangerous lack of knowledge about the system in use. This isn't a problem for random DOCX files, but it makes phishing very easy. After all, if the user doesn't know that there's a difference between the browser and the rest of their computer, how will they ever doubt those messages about their computer being infected by a virus? People use computers every day for many tasks, but their education seems to have halted around ten years ago. Kids are growing up solely with the smartphone model in mind, of apps and sandboxes and no way to move information with anything but the "share" button, so it's only a matter of time before that concept is also simplified. Interfaces should be intuitive but computers should not be used without knowledge of the core concepts like "what is a program" and "what is a file". We can try to fix this by making even leakier abstractions, but what we really need is education.
kmarc 5y ago
While it doesn't "fix" the issue of file sharing with less technically inclined people, I found it good enough to tackle my problems with SharePoint: https://rclone.org/ https://rclone.org/
southerntofu 5y ago
> Anyone who has used a computer with a GUI (Graphical User Interface) knows what a file browser looks like. Just nitpicking here, but a lot of people who started using GUI on a "smart" phone have no idea what a file browser looks like. They know what a one-dimensional "photo" or "document" browser is, but they have no idea both are "files" that are stored in "folders".
- chubot 5y ago
  Yup some evidence of this is the way that Android presents "large files" for deletion. It insists on showing you a flat view, not a hierarchy, which is very annoying to me. I want to know which folders are biggest, but it doesn't support that. Only files.
mikewarot 5y ago
I've been reassuring people for decades that computers are confusing, it's not just them. My go-to example is quite simple... "You have two folders, with files in them, if you drag a file from one to the other, what will happen? Depending on rules you can't be expected to remember, one of three things will happen. It might copy, move, or make a shortcut to the file. If you right-click (the other mouse button) on a file, and drag it to the destination, you get to choose which thing you want done, every time." This little instruction saves boatloads of time for Windows users. It's sad that there isn't a right button in the Apple world to help make things easier.
- Tagbert 5y ago
  Yes, there is a right button in the Apple world. Yes, the very earliest version didn’t have the concept of multiple mouse buttons but a couple of decades ago, they did implement it. The Apple mouse lets you click on the left or right side of the mouse. There just are not discrete buttons. Third party mice have multiple buttons just like Windows. You can always hold the Option key and click on something to trigger the right-click action.
rapjr9 5y ago
While you're at it maybe you could prevent ransomware by making access to one file different than access to many files? Any application that wants to access many files, especially critical ones, should require special permissions, perhaps a USB access key. For critical infrastructure this could be very useful. Spawning threads for each file should be detected and require the same special permission. Emergency access could be provided via a physical "break glass" mechanism that triggers logging and an alert on the network (perhaps even via an independent mesh network based on cheap ESP32 chips). Sure it would cost more, require some OS changes, and be a hassle to use, but for critical infrastructure those costs seem worth it. I know computer science has studied such things, is there some known roadblock to implementing this? Perhaps it was viewed as making system administration too tedious but I haven't seen any other ransomware solutions [backups (which will not stop blackmailing with stolen data) and kill cryptocurrencies (not possible internationally)] that make much sense so maybe it is time to reconsider, the costs may be worth the protection.
- tatersolid 5y ago
  OneDrive for Business sort of does this, warning (with optional auth as I recall) before allowing a large number of file modifications or deletions to sync to the cloud.

33 points by dschroer 5y ago

This is more a question on fixing in-browser cloud storage services. Mounting the cloud storage locally is probably the best solution to this. I don't access my files in Nextcloud through my instance's website, I do it through the app that lets me treat it as another directory on my computer. OneDrive and iCloud already do this by default on Windows and Mac, respectively.

dschroer 5y ago
Do the in-browser storage services help this? Usually you need extra apps and some don't even have them. It would be nice if they didn't continue fragmenting. I suspect a large number of users don't know that it could even be mounted to their FS.
- coldacid 5y ago
  At least for OneDrive on Windows and iCloud on Mac, they're integrated with the OS and installed by default. There's no need for extra apps. It's not so good for Google Drive, Dropbox, Nextcloud, or other cloud storage services (or for that matter, OneDrive on Mac and iCloud on Windows) where you do need to grab and install an app. I don't see "fragmentation" (as you put it) going away, because each service has its own way of authenticating users and accessing the services, and each OS has its own API for mounting or synchronizing files.

chubot 5y ago

Sort of related: I'm still confused by GUIs and files, and I've been using computers for ~30 years and programmed professionally for ~15, using Windows and Linux. I've mostly gotten over all the confusion in Windows and Linux, but OS X still confuses me. Specifically how to install an application. It seems like it's different with each app. For example, I downloaded a .dmg file for the Transmission BitTorrent client. And I double clicked it. There was another icon inside, and I double clicked that. Now I'm running the Transmission client and I can use it. But it's not installed? I can't click on a .torrent file and have it launch the client. I try to drag the whole thing into Applications? That makes a big mess. It doesn't install it. I have to open up finder and manually remove the files. Then I realize I have to click the .dmg and then drag the thing inside into Applications. To me everything in OS X looks like an "icon" and there is some tenous relationship to directories/folders, and "Applications" is some special pseudo-folder. I'm still confused, and not surprised at all that end users are confused. And this is on the OS that's supposedly the most user-friendly.

sitharus 5y ago
This is mostly a historical thing. There’s no real reason to use .dmg these days - historically it was the only Apple-supported way of compressing macOS files and keeping their resource forks intact. These days .zip is fine. That said there isn’t an ‘install’ as such on macOS. Applications isn’t a special folder, it’s a regular folder like anything else. Putting an application bundle on your local disk anywhere is sufficient to get file type mappings to work. The downside of course is there’s no corresponding uninstall that removes anything extra the app dropped in to ~/Library.
- unnah 5y ago
  So if installation means simply moving an application to your local disk, or specifically to the Applications folder... then how does stuff end up in ~/Library instead?
  - einherjae 5y ago
    Preferences, caches, etc. general by-products.
  - IshKebab 5y ago
    The app puts it there when it runs.
- IshKebab 5y ago
  There totally is an install. Tons of apps use a Windows-style install process.
  - sitharus 5y ago
    For applications there is no Windows style install process where things like the registry have to be updated, the os manages these associations itself. For things like kernel extensions yes there’s an installer, and some more invasive apps do that as well. But for a plain app there’s no _need_ for an installer. That doesn’t prohibit them of course.

anotherhue 5y ago

Skips the rather more pressing issue of files no longer existing for most mobile apps. Data portability matters but not to anyone in particular.

Const-me 5y ago

> Are there ways to simplify and streamline this fragmented system? Technically, yes. There're protocols like FTP and WebDAW supported in pretty much all operating systems who allow users to view, download and/or upload files using any app. Practically, no. Internet companies hate specialized protocols because they don't serve ads.

tatersolid 5y ago
There’s no ads in SharePoint, OneDrive personal or business, nor iCloud Drive. They’re services people pay for. I’m not sure about Google Drive; I bailed years ago when its broken sync ate my data.

S5yDyAk3XoQH5 5y ago

You can't. When you build a software to be idiot proof, somewhere a better idiot is built.

alex_young 5y ago

Simple, get a file cabinet. It holds all of your files, and you can forget about them until you move to the next place. Seriously though, this data exchange motif is so ingrained in computing as to be almost unimaginable to dispose of. Programs need a semipermanent method of exchanging information and we call that thing files.

formerly_proven 5y ago
You're joking but Microsoft actually created the cabinet file format, which even has invisible folders.

perryizgr8 5y ago

The problem described here is not a files problem. It is a Microsoft SharePoint problem. Link to a file should directly download it to your computer. Not open up a fake file browser inside your browser.

mrweasel 5y ago
I was thinking the same thing, but why would this be a feature? It's a feature because SOMETIMES, that is the correct way of handling it. We're trying to shoehorn multiple use cases into a single/unified systems, of of cause something the computer will do the wrong thing, for our perspective. In this case Sharepoint is used as a way of transferring files, which it can do, but isn't exactly meant for.
- nmstoker 5y ago
  Asking the user seems the most obvious way of deciding this. There are plenty of ways to make it discrete with a default option selected that the user could deselect if desired.
Tagbert 5y ago
Zipfiles are a special kind of file that contains other files. What is the proper response when a user clicks on a zip file on a web file store? Do you just throw the file at the local file system or do you open the zip file so that the user can see and choose specific files?

regularfry 5y ago

Not building actively confusing user interfaces would be a good start. If what you have is a file, presenting local file controls is appropriate, so do that. If what you have is kind of like a local file but the abstraction is leakier than the Titanic, don't, because unless you can be very clear to all concerned about which operations aren't available (and here's a hint: you can't), it is inevitable that the user is going to try something that Just Doesn't Work for reasons they don't care about. And that's a terrible user experience. Not just because they don't achieve their goal, but because it undermines their trust in interfaces that do get it right, so suddenly everything is fraught.

jl6 5y ago

There’s nothing wrong with files. Files are a fundamental freedom - the freedom to have custody of data, unlike the mobile/cloud paradigm where everything is an app/API with no guarantee that data you access today will be accessible tomorrow. File management and file browsers could always improve, but let’s not get rid of files themselves please.

Perstone 5y ago
The issue is that the very concept itself is limiting and thus limits how we can interact with the computer. The concept of files and directories is a direct analogue to a filing cabinet. The concept of how the information is stored is no different. It just the amount of data that can be stored. While storing more data that can be copied, transferred and edited easier is an improvement. The fundamental concept of the file system itself is still wedded to a concept that is probably 1000s of years old at this point and by tying us to these concepts it limits what can be done with data within those files.
agent327 5y ago
This, a thousand times this!

londons_explore 5y ago

Gmail/google drive is a big offender here... When someone sends me a zip file, having the most obvious link take me to a list of files in the zip that I can neither preview nor download seems illogical. In the 21st century, I expect webmail providers to understand zip files.

foxpurple 5y ago
Im guessing there is some kind of performance issue here. Where large or certain kinds of archives can have huge unzip times. Or especially that it is hard to determine the unzip time before unzipping. Google drive drops a lot of features that are technically easy because there is no fast or constant time to perform the action.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  Seems easy enough to just have a 1 second timeout and some RAM limit, and if the server can't get the job done in that the request is aborted and an error is presented to the user telling them to download the whole zip file and unzip it themselves.

jeroenhd 5y ago

> This caused confusion because the the user did not understand that a online view of the files is not the same as having the files on your computer. I think that's the crux of the problem. The concept of files should not be estranging to anyone. It's the weird mix between native GUI and online GUI that's confusing here. Modern smartphones have abstracted files into specific names inside specific apps. Every file is in their own little app, and the idea that a document and a picture can live right next to each other is starting to look foreign. I believe this babification of user interfaces is taking away fromtthe computer experience. The arcane menus and knowledge Windows 98 required is luckily a thing I'd the past, but the concept of "web browser or file browser" shows a dangerous lack of knowledge about the system in use. This isn't a problem for random DOCX files, but it makes phishing very easy. After all, if the user doesn't know that there's a difference between the browser and the rest of their computer, how will they ever doubt those messages about their computer being infected by a virus? People use computers every day for many tasks, but their education seems to have halted around ten years ago. Kids are growing up solely with the smartphone model in mind, of apps and sandboxes and no way to move information with anything but the "share" button, so it's only a matter of time before that concept is also simplified. Interfaces should be intuitive but computers should not be used without knowledge of the core concepts like "what is a program" and "what is a file". We can try to fix this by making even leakier abstractions, but what we really need is education.

kmarc 5y ago

While it doesn't "fix" the issue of file sharing with less technically inclined people, I found it good enough to tackle my problems with SharePoint: https://rclone.org/ https://rclone.org/

southerntofu 5y ago

> Anyone who has used a computer with a GUI (Graphical User Interface) knows what a file browser looks like. Just nitpicking here, but a lot of people who started using GUI on a "smart" phone have no idea what a file browser looks like. They know what a one-dimensional "photo" or "document" browser is, but they have no idea both are "files" that are stored in "folders".

chubot 5y ago
Yup some evidence of this is the way that Android presents "large files" for deletion. It insists on showing you a flat view, not a hierarchy, which is very annoying to me. I want to know which folders are biggest, but it doesn't support that. Only files.

mikewarot 5y ago

I've been reassuring people for decades that computers are confusing, it's not just them. My go-to example is quite simple... "You have two folders, with files in them, if you drag a file from one to the other, what will happen? Depending on rules you can't be expected to remember, one of three things will happen. It might copy, move, or make a shortcut to the file. If you right-click (the other mouse button) on a file, and drag it to the destination, you get to choose which thing you want done, every time." This little instruction saves boatloads of time for Windows users. It's sad that there isn't a right button in the Apple world to help make things easier.

Tagbert 5y ago
Yes, there is a right button in the Apple world. Yes, the very earliest version didn’t have the concept of multiple mouse buttons but a couple of decades ago, they did implement it. The Apple mouse lets you click on the left or right side of the mouse. There just are not discrete buttons. Third party mice have multiple buttons just like Windows. You can always hold the Option key and click on something to trigger the right-click action.

rapjr9 5y ago

While you're at it maybe you could prevent ransomware by making access to one file different than access to many files? Any application that wants to access many files, especially critical ones, should require special permissions, perhaps a USB access key. For critical infrastructure this could be very useful. Spawning threads for each file should be detected and require the same special permission. Emergency access could be provided via a physical "break glass" mechanism that triggers logging and an alert on the network (perhaps even via an independent mesh network based on cheap ESP32 chips). Sure it would cost more, require some OS changes, and be a hassle to use, but for critical infrastructure those costs seem worth it. I know computer science has studied such things, is there some known roadblock to implementing this? Perhaps it was viewed as making system administration too tedious but I haven't seen any other ransomware solutions [backups (which will not stop blackmailing with stolen data) and kill cryptocurrencies (not possible internationally)] that make much sense so maybe it is time to reconsider, the costs may be worth the protection.

tatersolid 5y ago
OneDrive for Business sort of does this, warning (with optional auth as I recall) before allowing a large number of file modifications or deletions to sync to the cloud.