4 ms·

modern users (for example, kids) are able to get by with their files in the default folders of the applications and no concept of a directory tree. And with per

modern users (for example, kids) are able to get by with their files in the default folders of the applications and no concept of a directory tree. And with performant search they don't worry about it, they just search for the file. I don't know that that's due to disrespect but it's a thing.

altcognito 3y ago
Mostly because they either don’t know any better or they’re resigned that they’ve only ever been sold a locked down device. It is an abomination. Even the tools apple and Google does provide are awful at backup and file transfer.
- lolsal 3y ago
  Why is visually navigating a directory tree superior to telling the computer "show me photos of my family" and having it do a better job than I manually good?
- tqi 3y ago
  > Mostly because they either don’t know any better.. Who is disrespecting the users now?
- neilalexander 3y ago
  To call it an abomination is annoyingly dramatic and "they don't know any better" is frankly elitist and I am really tired of these attitudes from HN. There are people in the world who grew up with and are used to platforms that have filing-cabinet abstractions (files and folders) and let them run their own code and customisations. Similarly, there are people in the world who grew up with devices that don't expose files and folders as readily and instead present things through apps and search. How many of the latter category could even accurately define what a "file" is? Do they even need to? Probably not, because they get just fine with a different set of abstractions and tools. Just because that isn't to your taste doesn't mean that they don't work fine for other people — there's a world of less technically-minded people out there who get by just fine with an iPad at home for the things they want to do. To them, computing has _never_ been more accessible than it is today and not having to worry about things like folders and files is actually a superpower.
  - memefrog 3y ago
    It's not a "filing-cabinet abstraction". "Files" and "folders" might as well be opaque and arbitrary words to most people. In a computing context, they have no or almost-no association with files and folders IRL. They don't even correspond to those concepts. In real life a "file" is literally a folder full of documents. >How many of the latter category could even accurately define what a "file" is? Do they even need to? All of them, because they don't just use phones. The same people have to write things for school and upload those .doc files onto a school website to have them automatically checked for plagiarism and marked, and if they ever work in an office they use files every day. And trust me, people are NOT being empowered by these devices. They actually find them super frustrating every single day. I know non-technical people. They hate modern devices. The old systems did the same thing every day, day in and day out. They didn't change every five minutes. They didn't hide all their state. These are non-technical people, who couldn't even connect their phone to WiFi without help from someone. Yet they had no problem with plugging their computers into the wall 10 years ago. They can't work out how to print things today, what with the awful array of proprietary printing apps made by the incompetent software developers working for printer companies, yet they had no problem printing things out when all you needed to do was plug the printer into the back of your computer once when you bought it and forevermore press "Ctrl-P" and "Enter". They can't easily use these newfangled tablets and phones to write documents or spreadsheets. Yet they had no problem using desktop office software 10 years ago. They had no problem with the concepts of files and folders. They do have a problem when they just can't work out how they're meant to get things from one device to another, because it's all opaque. They have to resort to things like sharing a document to themselves via email, then opening the document up in the email app and opening it in another app. That was the simplest solution that was obvious to my mother, and to be quite fair to her, that probably WAS the simplest way to move a document from one app to another. Having a single, universal, underlying "filesystem" metaphor that you learnt once and which applied to the whole system was great for non-technical people who just want to get on with using their computers. So no don't start with this "has never been more accessible" or "not having to worry about things like folders and files is actually a superpower" crap. It's the opposite.
  - zozbot234 3y ago
    The whole point of the filing-cabinet abstraction is to reify my access to something in some app. It's not a purely technical concept, it represents an affordance that users do care about. We went through this before; programs used to be written without any generalized notion of a file, and you'd have to work with things like "unit" records represented on punched cards, and "datasets" meaning collections of unit records. There's no reason to go back to that kind of chaos.
- vel0city 3y ago
  Honestly, for a lot of my personal files and documents I really don't care about the folder structure. Don't get me wrong, I do, but only because on most systems its the only reliable way to actually organize the files. But a directory structure isn't always the optimal way to organize things for a lot of my access patterns. Like pictures. Maybe I'm wanting to browse by date. Maybe I'm wanting to browse by events and albums. Maybe I'm wanting to browse by photos with these two people in them. Maybe I want to browse by pictures with boats in them. So should I arrange my photos in directories by date, or by album, or by some kind of classification and then date (family/2023/bobs_birthday)? It sucks! Its a terrible process. And by count of files, photos and videos are the vast majority of the files I care to access! And then its a similar thing with stuff like music, or movies, or all kinds of things. Folder structures are very rigid, things like links are all kinds of fragile and annoying to work with often. For the most part, the vast majority of my files I'd prefer to have them all in some kind of database with tags and be able to query them based on the context of what I'm doing. Open a photo editor app? Ok, show me photos, probably recent ones first until I put some other search in it. Not just a file browser sitting in a home directory in a folder full of other folders with all kinds of other files that aren't even pictures. IMO, for personal files, folders are bad. I don't mind a lot of these interfaces that try and hide the underlying file structure, so long as when I need to I can muck about in there as well, if it still exists.
  - memefrog 3y ago
    I mostly agree with this. I don't think it's "files and folders" that are bad, but a file browser isn't the best way of browsing photos. A file browser is great for documents and you need to have it because you need that "lowest common denominator" browser as a backup or when things go wrong. But for things like photos what most people probably want is: 1. If you plug your SD card/camera into your computer, sync all the photos onto your computer and back them up remotely before wiping them from the SD card. 2. If you take photos with your phone, they should automatically be synced to your computer and to a remote backup. 3. When you want to browse your photos, you just go to a 'photo browser' and browse by tags, date, etc. But one of the problems with this stuff is that those proprietary kinds of databases have a habit of eating your data and being difficult to troubleshoot. I remember with iTunes it would swallow up music you put into it and hide it away in some internal database somewhere. I would have much preferred if it had its own browser but that the underlying data were stored in ~/Music/Artist/Album/1.Track.mp3, so that if anything went wrong it would be easy to pull all that data out. I think the way it actually did it was some big store of files with names like ab4f8241def.mp3 and a database mapping artist/album/etc. to those files. I have all my (legitimately-acquired) TV shows and movies stored across a variety of computers, and then xbmc has media sources that are things like nfs://10.0.0.1/tvshows and nfs://10.0.0.2/tvshows. Of course the only way I ever consume any of that data is through... a big aggregating media browser that automatically downloads metadata about my media from TMDB etc. But it's all still stored as /media/tvshows/Silicon\ Valley/Season\ 1/S01E01.mkv, yknow? It would be awful if I couldn't access it like that.
lbrito 3y ago
Vastly, vastly different things. Throw everything in your home/office into a huge drawer and try finding that one tax receipt from 2012. Sounds fun? Now imagine tree-organized file cabinets. You look up the labels: Personal finance, tax stuff, 2012. Found it. If done right, its basically O(n) x O(log n). With N being very big and your seek time being very bad. Its not because people lost the ability/knowledge/patience/etc to do this that makes it the same as the mess we have now. Sadly, I think its more likely we'll increasingly rely on AI helpers to do the mental work for us (like already happens on Google Photos) instead of putting in the effort with something like a file structure again. I think its gone.

altcognito 3y ago

Mostly because they either don’t know any better or they’re resigned that they’ve only ever been sold a locked down device. It is an abomination. Even the tools apple and Google does provide are awful at backup and file transfer.

lolsal 3y ago
Why is visually navigating a directory tree superior to telling the computer "show me photos of my family" and having it do a better job than I manually good?
tqi 3y ago
> Mostly because they either don’t know any better.. Who is disrespecting the users now?
neilalexander 3y ago
To call it an abomination is annoyingly dramatic and "they don't know any better" is frankly elitist and I am really tired of these attitudes from HN. There are people in the world who grew up with and are used to platforms that have filing-cabinet abstractions (files and folders) and let them run their own code and customisations. Similarly, there are people in the world who grew up with devices that don't expose files and folders as readily and instead present things through apps and search. How many of the latter category could even accurately define what a "file" is? Do they even need to? Probably not, because they get just fine with a different set of abstractions and tools. Just because that isn't to your taste doesn't mean that they don't work fine for other people — there's a world of less technically-minded people out there who get by just fine with an iPad at home for the things they want to do. To them, computing has _never_ been more accessible than it is today and not having to worry about things like folders and files is actually a superpower.
- memefrog 3y ago
  It's not a "filing-cabinet abstraction". "Files" and "folders" might as well be opaque and arbitrary words to most people. In a computing context, they have no or almost-no association with files and folders IRL. They don't even correspond to those concepts. In real life a "file" is literally a folder full of documents. >How many of the latter category could even accurately define what a "file" is? Do they even need to? All of them, because they don't just use phones. The same people have to write things for school and upload those .doc files onto a school website to have them automatically checked for plagiarism and marked, and if they ever work in an office they use files every day. And trust me, people are NOT being empowered by these devices. They actually find them super frustrating every single day. I know non-technical people. They hate modern devices. The old systems did the same thing every day, day in and day out. They didn't change every five minutes. They didn't hide all their state. These are non-technical people, who couldn't even connect their phone to WiFi without help from someone. Yet they had no problem with plugging their computers into the wall 10 years ago. They can't work out how to print things today, what with the awful array of proprietary printing apps made by the incompetent software developers working for printer companies, yet they had no problem printing things out when all you needed to do was plug the printer into the back of your computer once when you bought it and forevermore press "Ctrl-P" and "Enter". They can't easily use these newfangled tablets and phones to write documents or spreadsheets. Yet they had no problem using desktop office software 10 years ago. They had no problem with the concepts of files and folders. They do have a problem when they just can't work out how they're meant to get things from one device to another, because it's all opaque. They have to resort to things like sharing a document to themselves via email, then opening the document up in the email app and opening it in another app. That was the simplest solution that was obvious to my mother, and to be quite fair to her, that probably WAS the simplest way to move a document from one app to another. Having a single, universal, underlying "filesystem" metaphor that you learnt once and which applied to the whole system was great for non-technical people who just want to get on with using their computers. So no don't start with this "has never been more accessible" or "not having to worry about things like folders and files is actually a superpower" crap. It's the opposite.
- zozbot234 3y ago
  The whole point of the filing-cabinet abstraction is to reify my access to something in some app. It's not a purely technical concept, it represents an affordance that users do care about. We went through this before; programs used to be written without any generalized notion of a file, and you'd have to work with things like "unit" records represented on punched cards, and "datasets" meaning collections of unit records. There's no reason to go back to that kind of chaos.
vel0city 3y ago
Honestly, for a lot of my personal files and documents I really don't care about the folder structure. Don't get me wrong, I do, but only because on most systems its the only reliable way to actually organize the files. But a directory structure isn't always the optimal way to organize things for a lot of my access patterns. Like pictures. Maybe I'm wanting to browse by date. Maybe I'm wanting to browse by events and albums. Maybe I'm wanting to browse by photos with these two people in them. Maybe I want to browse by pictures with boats in them. So should I arrange my photos in directories by date, or by album, or by some kind of classification and then date (family/2023/bobs_birthday)? It sucks! Its a terrible process. And by count of files, photos and videos are the vast majority of the files I care to access! And then its a similar thing with stuff like music, or movies, or all kinds of things. Folder structures are very rigid, things like links are all kinds of fragile and annoying to work with often. For the most part, the vast majority of my files I'd prefer to have them all in some kind of database with tags and be able to query them based on the context of what I'm doing. Open a photo editor app? Ok, show me photos, probably recent ones first until I put some other search in it. Not just a file browser sitting in a home directory in a folder full of other folders with all kinds of other files that aren't even pictures. IMO, for personal files, folders are bad. I don't mind a lot of these interfaces that try and hide the underlying file structure, so long as when I need to I can muck about in there as well, if it still exists.
- memefrog 3y ago
  I mostly agree with this. I don't think it's "files and folders" that are bad, but a file browser isn't the best way of browsing photos. A file browser is great for documents and you need to have it because you need that "lowest common denominator" browser as a backup or when things go wrong. But for things like photos what most people probably want is: 1. If you plug your SD card/camera into your computer, sync all the photos onto your computer and back them up remotely before wiping them from the SD card. 2. If you take photos with your phone, they should automatically be synced to your computer and to a remote backup. 3. When you want to browse your photos, you just go to a 'photo browser' and browse by tags, date, etc. But one of the problems with this stuff is that those proprietary kinds of databases have a habit of eating your data and being difficult to troubleshoot. I remember with iTunes it would swallow up music you put into it and hide it away in some internal database somewhere. I would have much preferred if it had its own browser but that the underlying data were stored in ~/Music/Artist/Album/1.Track.mp3, so that if anything went wrong it would be easy to pull all that data out. I think the way it actually did it was some big store of files with names like ab4f8241def.mp3 and a database mapping artist/album/etc. to those files. I have all my (legitimately-acquired) TV shows and movies stored across a variety of computers, and then xbmc has media sources that are things like nfs://10.0.0.1/tvshows and nfs://10.0.0.2/tvshows. Of course the only way I ever consume any of that data is through... a big aggregating media browser that automatically downloads metadata about my media from TMDB etc. But it's all still stored as /media/tvshows/Silicon\ Valley/Season\ 1/S01E01.mkv, yknow? It would be awful if I couldn't access it like that.

lbrito 3y ago

Vastly, vastly different things. Throw everything in your home/office into a huge drawer and try finding that one tax receipt from 2012. Sounds fun? Now imagine tree-organized file cabinets. You look up the labels: Personal finance, tax stuff, 2012. Found it. If done right, its basically O(n) x O(log n). With N being very big and your seek time being very bad. Its not because people lost the ability/knowledge/patience/etc to do this that makes it the same as the mess we have now. Sadly, I think its more likely we'll increasingly rely on AI helpers to do the mental work for us (like already happens on Google Photos) instead of putting in the effort with something like a file structure again. I think its gone.