12 ms·

Steve Jobs on the File System

58 points by dwynings 14y ago

0x0 14y ago
This is all fun and games until you need to work with multiple hard drives, removable media, and network volumes. And backups of and onto such devices. Maybe only "professionals" need that. But I'd imagine even amateur photographers will soon run out of space if they store all their holiday photos on the macbook SSD.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  I guess the answer is to somehow handle this transparently, for example putting most commonly used files on the SSD. Think about the Unix way vs Windows. In Windows you have a C drive , D drive etc, all of these are seperate partitions and if you want to locate a file you need to know which partition it is on. In Unix you want your personal files , so you go to /home/username or programs are in /usr/bin etc. This is because the filesystem is providing a layer of abstraction over the physical disk. Of course this has a snag that if one of your disks fails you won't be quite sure what you lost because you don't know what was on that specific disk, but I guess anything important will be persisted to the cloud anyway. The filesystem is really a very limited way of organizing things. You have to choose one criteria to categorize on which means you end up in subfolder hell. The big problem is, how do you store your data in a way that means it can be accessed by multiple programs. For example you catagorise your music in iTunes but you want to move it into a different media player? The Apple answer to this seems to be to simply say no, you have one program for each type of data and that is it.
  - johnchristopher 14y ago
    > Think about the Unix way vs Windows. In Windows you have a C drive , D drive etc, all of these are seperate partitions and if you want to locate a file you need to know which partition it is on. > In Unix you want your personal files , so you go to /home/username or programs are in /usr/bin etc. This is because the filesystem is providing a layer of abstraction over the physical disk. Hm. I have the opposite feeling. To me unix is using one less layer of abstraction than windows. I know hdd are really devices located in /dev/sd* or /dev/scsi or sthg and these acronyms relate more to the hardware wiring than the piece of metal that is a hdd. blkid, fstab would tell me which devices are mounted or their properties and I can "mount (or switch them on)" them to a "kind of virtual folder". In windows, two partitions located on the same hard drive appears as two distinct hard drives both in explorer and in a prompt and that is an additionnal layer. Specifically, with 2hdd with 4 partitions scattered on each drive you can't tell which partition is on which drive at first glance. > The Apple answer to this seems to be to simply say no, you have one program for each type of data and that is it. This boils down to "what is a computer to me? : a machine to run programs that manage data ? data that are supposed to be looked at and data that are supposed to be executed to look at another type of data ? Do I use word to write text or do I write text to a file via word ?" Personnaly, I believe the "everything is a file" moto to cover a lot of ground and to be a very good description of how computer/mobile works when I have to explain "computer" to beginners. It also frees you from paradigms imposed by the use of one and only one explanation ("yes, you can write text without MSWord and people will be able to read it!")
    - jiggy2011 14y ago
      My point is more that the directory structure on Unix is seperated from the physical disks. For example, you have a computer with 1 HDD and you upgrade it so that there is now 2. On a Windows computer you are going to have to explain to the user that their "my documents" folder is now on the D drive whereas on Unix you just map the second disk to /home and they can be none the wiser. The next logical step is to have a system whereby you don't even need to wrangle fstab, you just throw hard disks and cloud storage at a computer and let the OS decide how to balance it all.
      - johnchristopher 14y ago
        I see your point and I mostly* agree. It's also true on Unix that you can use LVM but it's not (yet) for the non-technical user. *mostly because real-life scenarios aren't as straight forward.
- endlessvoid94 14y ago
  Apple does this pretty well with Aperture. If you just want to use aperture simply, you don't have to know about filesystems. But if you know you want to have separate libraries, you can open and close other libraries on the filesystem. I guess I'm saying I agree, but it's still possible to keep the filesystem as free from the UI as possible.
- crazygringo 14y ago
  That's when the amateur photographs turn into professional Mac users.
delsarto 14y ago
No way would I trust all my photos to iPhoto, or Flickr, or Picasa! What happens in 18 years when I want to make a slide-show of my daughters baby photos for her birthday party. Good luck with that... I feel the only reasonable approach is to have the original jpegs layed out in a simple date-encoded directory tree, title/comment them with IPTC, add EXIF geotags and archive that. Backs up to S3 (even though if I got hit by a bus I doubt my family could figure out how to restore them). Actually, SD cards are so cheap these days I don't even reuse them. So I have that backup, minus comments and geotags as well
- endlessvoid94 14y ago
  You're not their target market.
  - delsarto 14y ago
    This is true ... but what I want to do -- have my photos for years to come, is pretty much what everyone wants to do (otherwise, why did you take them). But how many people can even move their iphoto/itunes library across when they buy a new apple computer? Let alone all the important meta-data...
    - jpxxx 14y ago
      ANECDATA: A numerical majority figure it out. Typically a visit to the genius bar gets them on the path to Migration Assistant. The ones who understand where their photos are or attach significance to them will make the effort. The remainder tend to work exclusively out of Facebook or iOS Camera Roll, which is why iCloud now backs that up.
      - deleted 14y ago
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- esbwhat 14y ago
  Hope you're accomodating for bit rot with your SD cards
tosseraccount 14y ago
An application managing it's own data is not Steve Jobs idea. Marketing genius/visionary types have been trying to save us from "the file system" for about a half a century. The file system is still here and there are still magic proprietary bins for putting your data into (saving you from having to think too hard ... about the file system).
grumblepeet 14y ago
This is the great thing about SharePoint. It adds a layer of abstraction that allows you to present different views of the files and you can slice and dice as much as you want. I can see a time in the next few years where the traditional file share on Windows Server will be completely replaced by a SharePoint interface.
tensor 14y ago
It does sound like iOS, except for the fact that iOS has no fallbacks for pros to access the file system, modify the OS, or otherwise manage it like the portable computer it is. Before someone mentions jailbreaking, I'd just like to say that jailbreaking is not a suitable solution. There should be an official supported way to obtain advanced access to your device.
- j_baker 14y ago
  There should be an official supported way to obtain advanced access to your device. This seems like an awfully arbitrary statement. Why should there be an official way to get access to the filesystem?
  - tensor 14y ago
    For all the same reasons that you can do so on OS X. I'm also lumping in the ability to side load apps here, among other features pros might need or want. I'm aware of all the arguments for their completely closed eco-system. But OSX itself is also a perfect example to counter them. Fundamentally, portable touch screen devices are still computers and are not actually so different that such a closed environment is needed.
    - fjarlq 14y ago
      But to many people, the difference between OSX and iOS is large. I think this is one of the reasons why iOS has been so much more successful than OSX. The closed, curated environment is much easier to use for many people. A natural extension of this is a Mac that runs iOS, or making OSX more like iOS. I think this is happening, and it's being driven by what most people want. It may not be what I personally want, but fortunately there is more than one choice these days.
      - tensor 14y ago
        Unfortunately, for me there is really no good alternative to OSX. I require a unix environment for work, and yet also need word, photoshop, and other such applications. If I left OSX I'd be forced to run either Windows with a Linux VM, or Linux with a Windows VM. It would be clunky for sure. Also, I completely disagree that iOSs success is due to it being closed. As the current OSX environment shows, it is completely possible to have both an App Store yet not discard your professional customers. I can tell my mother to only use the App Store and she is perfectly happy. Apple is removing control for a single reason only: money. They want their 30% of every sale on their devices. This is a good reason for them, but a bad reason for their customers.
mcantelon 14y ago
>And that was the breakthrough, as an example, in iTunes. You don’t keep your music in the file system, that would be crazy Actually I do and it works great. I hate iTunes.
- alexchamberlain 14y ago
  Devil's Advocate: Why do you hate iTunes?
  - randallsquared 14y ago
    I'm not the OP, but in 2003 iTunes was the single biggest drawback to switching to the Mac, for me. I had a fairly large collection of MP3s at the time -- maybe a coupla thousand -- and a bunch of versions of the same song in some cases (an album version, a radio version, live at here, live at there), and it was all neatly categorized in the filesystem, band/album/name, when I switched from Gentoo to OS X. I freely admit I should have had a backup. When I "tried" iTunes, there was an option for it to rename all your files (I don't remember whether it was the default or if I stumbled on it), but what I did NOT expect was that all my carefully named folders and files would be lumped into "Unknown Artist"/"Unknown Album"/"Unknown Track NNN".mp3, while my old files were all carefully removed. My MP3 collection literally never recovered. I could choose to play the few hundred tracks that had happened to have good ID3 information, but all the tracks I'd ripped myself were essentially randomized. I also never found an ID3 creator that could successfully differentiate the various versions of songs I had, though I stopped trying around 2006 or 2007, and now I don't bother buying music any more -- I just listen to Pandora.
    - Gring 14y ago
      Why didn't you do a backup before using such a risky feature, or use the feature on a copy of your original files?
      - Mavrik 14y ago
        Because you don't really expect a music player to destroy your collection without as much as a warning.
51Cards 14y ago
Interesting since just the other day I read an article on how lack of access to the file system in iOS was one of its significant drawbacks. Specifically the lack of ability to browse and attach multiple files to an email, etc. I agree it's confusing for a lot of users, but I still think there is a happy medium in there.
- ajross 14y ago
  Or not. A large class of people have simply never used the filesystem at all. Everything on their PC went onto the desktop or default directory. They used the "Find..." dialog to locate everything they used, etc... These folks are well served by the "modern" app-centric abstractions, and frankly will be harmed by an attempt to show them the filesystem. But the rest of us are harmed by hiding it (badly, sometimes). I'm not sure there is a happy medium; I suspect to some extent we filesystem-conscious few will simply have to learn and use two UX environments.
- skibrah 14y ago
  I agree that there are definitely cases, attaching multiple files being one, where the lack of file system access makes the process more difficult or impossible. However, I think that there isn't really a "happy medium" in terms of whether direct access to the file system is provided or not, there is either access or there isn't. Rather, one possible solution is to put the onus on the app developer and allow apps to present files that can be "public" within the phone and accessible to other applications. Obviously this opens a worms in terms of security, which I think is one of the main reasons that Apple has not done this.
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advocate1 14y ago
My main issue with the file system is hierarchy. I hate typing paths. Even if it's point and click, paths are still a nuisance. They require too much thinking. And to ask a novice to deal with paths, and having all these things in various locations, is I think unreasonable. Apple once had a flat filesystem. It seems crude but it's very fast. And it's simple. A list. Our minds can handle that with little trouble. I actually try to make my filesystem as flat as possible. This allows me to glob for things. This is much faster than something more complex like using find or precalculated indices (e.g. codesearch). It's not full on regex so it's something I could teach to a novice. I have some short scripts I wrote for locating files or lists of files and saving the path as a shell variable ("v"). Then you just do app $v Simple. And the other thing, which Google has reminded us, is that to work with "big data" you may find you must transcend the limits of the filesystem. The way to do that is to simplify. So to me the way forward is greater simplicity. But certainly not in the Steve Jobs Apple "lock down" sense. Where you can't get at the data unless you're using whatever Apple wants you to use. Where Apple devices cannot connect with non-Apple ones. Totally inflexible. And an unreasonable trade-off in exchange for whatever interface du jour Apple is offering.
agumonkey 14y ago
We're still toying around data categorization. Files are dull, hierarchies are almost meaningless since they require arbitrary ordering. DB-oriented FS aren't there yet (although BeOS found a sweet spot it seems, their c++ API has some ORM feel). '''Semantic''' still in progress. The solution is barycentric: A network a loosely coupled types as a basis for ontology/semantic network in with `atomic` artefacts can be seen/search through. Could even be used to feed dataflow-like graphs for user to manipulate their data. Just like unix pipes but typed, and with an interactive side effect `free` GUI.
- fratis 14y ago
  I did a video on something like this that got some traction on reddit, where some really nice, knowledgable folks told me about BeOS and the original vision for Longhorn. What I think both of them are missing is a really simple GUI that makes it so that the average user doesn't need to worry about the metadata layer, which seemed a little too present in those efforts. I'd posted it on HN at the time, but it never really picked up any steam. Here it is again, if you're interested: https://vimeo.com/39284250 https://vimeo.com/39284250
albertzeyer 14y ago
Hm, for mails, I usually use IMAP or an web interface, so it doesn't really matter (for me) how/where there is a local cache in my file system. For music, pictures and other stuff, I care and I want to be able to use different tools and switch between them on the same set of media. This is why I disabled all the automatic management, e.g. in iTunes or iPhoto and just move the files around manually. It's because only this way, I have a sane and common way to find my media, no matter what application I am using. The same is for projects (source code, other stuff; I also sometimes switch between different IDEs/editors) and documents. And then there are contacts and dates. I haven't really found a good way yet to manage them as powerful as I want. Currently I use CalDAV and the like, all what GMail is offering me, so it is serverside just as mail. I guess to get all the possibilities I want, I also would need to have it just in my file system in some way.
peterkelly 14y ago
So what happens if you're working on several different projects, each of which involves working with multiple files of different types (e.g. word processing documents, photos, videos, and spreadsheets)? On a desktop OS you would have a folder for each project, and store all the stuff related to a particular project in the respective folder. I've been doing this for longer than I can remember. With the current iOS model, content is organised by the app that created it, not by the project it's related to. So if you're doing work for multiple clients, or collaborating on different internal projects, all of your content is spread out between different apps, and there's no easy way to gather it all together for the purposes of sharing, archiving, or backup. I agree that the way in which the filesystem is exposed to users on desktop OSs can be confusing, but I really think they need to find a way to allow people to organise their files better. Dropbox has essentially become the filesystem for iOS - it's a way around the limitations, and a lot of apps use it.
hoprocker 14y ago
> And eventually, the file system management is just gonna be an app for pros and consumers aren’t gonna need to use it. I.e., Terminal.
10098 14y ago
That is a poor approach that only introduces more unnecessary complexity. On a side note, this probably explains why Finder is the most retarded file manager ever :-)
losethos 14y ago
India nigger shrink is clueless.
jfernandez 14y ago
One of the biggest pros for having a file system is data portability. To a local degree that means being able to use files across multiple contexts, usually "apps". Another related effect is that you can transfer your files across devices/platforms without the need for systems to build ad-hoc/proprietary techniques to communicate with each other (i.e any iOS app that does app-to-app cooperation or how iTunes can show you files related to your apps). A lot of people feel iOS 6 will include better system-supported architecture for this so in that sense he is right we don't need a 'file system app', but iOS hasn't given us this kind of abstraction yet that works to scale.
nadam 14y ago
The file system is basically a simple abstraction: store data in a tree structure. The broader topic is how the tree structure can be 'disrupted' by less structured data organization and what are the territories where the tree structure (or at least a very strong (hierarchical?) structure) seems to be the right abstraction for most people. For example let's take written communication: A Word document, a non-fiction book, is a tree structure. A wiki, or the web of tweets is not. The web itself is not a tree (web directories did not work out) while some parts of it (some websites, some webpages) are tree structured.
drcube 14y ago
This is probably the reason I will never buy an idevice. The very first app I downloaded on my Android phone was a file explorer. I can't imagine any other way to interact with data than as individual files in some kind of hierarchy. What is iTunes but a specialized file browser that happens to have a built in music player? The need for a single, general purpose program for performing actions that are generic for all files just makes sense to me. Say I have a bunch of pictures, a few albums, a movie and an ebook I'd like to share with my mom. Do you really think it would be easier to open four different applications, which probably have four different sets of "sharing" features and four distinct user interfaces? Or to just copy and paste from my hard drive into her thumb drive? Speaking of which, is this actually a problem? I don't know anybody who has difficulty with the file/folder metaphor. And it isn't like I just hang around technical folks. I know lots of people who could use a "computers for dummies" book. Which makes me think the real "problem" with file system behavior is that it facilitates file sharing. If people forget they have a disk drive filled with files, and think instead of their "iTunes multimedia blob", then the FBIAA can just lean on MS and Apple to "program out the piracy". Brilliantly evil.
- WildUtah 14y ago
  I don't know anybody who has difficulty with the file/folder metaphor. Half the world has an IQ below 100. Computers need to help and serve them, too. The threshold for comfortably managing hierarchical file systems is around 100 IQ. For doing it well is several points higher. And eliminating access to the file system makes app developers get creative about inventing new ways to make things easier for users. A lot of data is relational and not compatible with the file metaphor. Some data is a net of objects (not as much as OO language designers seem to think). New ways to interact with those are valuable. Of course, the flexibility of the file system has a lot of advantages. It invites a powerful and uniform set of tools that can make it even more flexible. That's why it continues to be useful. Nevertheless, other ideas, like relational data as a universal system service, are setting in to give it competition.
  - kapilkaisare 14y ago
    > The threshold for comfortably managing hierarchical file systems is around 100 IQ. For doing it well is several points higher. Do you have any citations for that?

58 points by dwynings 14y ago

0x0 14y ago

This is all fun and games until you need to work with multiple hard drives, removable media, and network volumes. And backups of and onto such devices. Maybe only "professionals" need that. But I'd imagine even amateur photographers will soon run out of space if they store all their holiday photos on the macbook SSD.

jiggy2011 14y ago
I guess the answer is to somehow handle this transparently, for example putting most commonly used files on the SSD. Think about the Unix way vs Windows. In Windows you have a C drive , D drive etc, all of these are seperate partitions and if you want to locate a file you need to know which partition it is on. In Unix you want your personal files , so you go to /home/username or programs are in /usr/bin etc. This is because the filesystem is providing a layer of abstraction over the physical disk. Of course this has a snag that if one of your disks fails you won't be quite sure what you lost because you don't know what was on that specific disk, but I guess anything important will be persisted to the cloud anyway. The filesystem is really a very limited way of organizing things. You have to choose one criteria to categorize on which means you end up in subfolder hell. The big problem is, how do you store your data in a way that means it can be accessed by multiple programs. For example you catagorise your music in iTunes but you want to move it into a different media player? The Apple answer to this seems to be to simply say no, you have one program for each type of data and that is it.
- johnchristopher 14y ago
  > Think about the Unix way vs Windows. In Windows you have a C drive , D drive etc, all of these are seperate partitions and if you want to locate a file you need to know which partition it is on. > In Unix you want your personal files , so you go to /home/username or programs are in /usr/bin etc. This is because the filesystem is providing a layer of abstraction over the physical disk. Hm. I have the opposite feeling. To me unix is using one less layer of abstraction than windows. I know hdd are really devices located in /dev/sd* or /dev/scsi or sthg and these acronyms relate more to the hardware wiring than the piece of metal that is a hdd. blkid, fstab would tell me which devices are mounted or their properties and I can "mount (or switch them on)" them to a "kind of virtual folder". In windows, two partitions located on the same hard drive appears as two distinct hard drives both in explorer and in a prompt and that is an additionnal layer. Specifically, with 2hdd with 4 partitions scattered on each drive you can't tell which partition is on which drive at first glance. > The Apple answer to this seems to be to simply say no, you have one program for each type of data and that is it. This boils down to "what is a computer to me? : a machine to run programs that manage data ? data that are supposed to be looked at and data that are supposed to be executed to look at another type of data ? Do I use word to write text or do I write text to a file via word ?" Personnaly, I believe the "everything is a file" moto to cover a lot of ground and to be a very good description of how computer/mobile works when I have to explain "computer" to beginners. It also frees you from paradigms imposed by the use of one and only one explanation ("yes, you can write text without MSWord and people will be able to read it!")
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    My point is more that the directory structure on Unix is seperated from the physical disks. For example, you have a computer with 1 HDD and you upgrade it so that there is now 2. On a Windows computer you are going to have to explain to the user that their "my documents" folder is now on the D drive whereas on Unix you just map the second disk to /home and they can be none the wiser. The next logical step is to have a system whereby you don't even need to wrangle fstab, you just throw hard disks and cloud storage at a computer and let the OS decide how to balance it all.
    - johnchristopher 14y ago
      I see your point and I mostly* agree. It's also true on Unix that you can use LVM but it's not (yet) for the non-technical user. *mostly because real-life scenarios aren't as straight forward.
endlessvoid94 14y ago
Apple does this pretty well with Aperture. If you just want to use aperture simply, you don't have to know about filesystems. But if you know you want to have separate libraries, you can open and close other libraries on the filesystem. I guess I'm saying I agree, but it's still possible to keep the filesystem as free from the UI as possible.
crazygringo 14y ago
That's when the amateur photographs turn into professional Mac users.

delsarto 14y ago

No way would I trust all my photos to iPhoto, or Flickr, or Picasa! What happens in 18 years when I want to make a slide-show of my daughters baby photos for her birthday party. Good luck with that... I feel the only reasonable approach is to have the original jpegs layed out in a simple date-encoded directory tree, title/comment them with IPTC, add EXIF geotags and archive that. Backs up to S3 (even though if I got hit by a bus I doubt my family could figure out how to restore them). Actually, SD cards are so cheap these days I don't even reuse them. So I have that backup, minus comments and geotags as well

endlessvoid94 14y ago
You're not their target market.
- delsarto 14y ago
  This is true ... but what I want to do -- have my photos for years to come, is pretty much what everyone wants to do (otherwise, why did you take them). But how many people can even move their iphoto/itunes library across when they buy a new apple computer? Let alone all the important meta-data...
  - jpxxx 14y ago
    ANECDATA: A numerical majority figure it out. Typically a visit to the genius bar gets them on the path to Migration Assistant. The ones who understand where their photos are or attach significance to them will make the effort. The remainder tend to work exclusively out of Facebook or iOS Camera Roll, which is why iCloud now backs that up.
    - deleted 14y ago
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esbwhat 14y ago
Hope you're accomodating for bit rot with your SD cards

tosseraccount 14y ago

An application managing it's own data is not Steve Jobs idea. Marketing genius/visionary types have been trying to save us from "the file system" for about a half a century. The file system is still here and there are still magic proprietary bins for putting your data into (saving you from having to think too hard ... about the file system).

grumblepeet 14y ago

This is the great thing about SharePoint. It adds a layer of abstraction that allows you to present different views of the files and you can slice and dice as much as you want. I can see a time in the next few years where the traditional file share on Windows Server will be completely replaced by a SharePoint interface.

tensor 14y ago

It does sound like iOS, except for the fact that iOS has no fallbacks for pros to access the file system, modify the OS, or otherwise manage it like the portable computer it is. Before someone mentions jailbreaking, I'd just like to say that jailbreaking is not a suitable solution. There should be an official supported way to obtain advanced access to your device.

j_baker 14y ago
There should be an official supported way to obtain advanced access to your device. This seems like an awfully arbitrary statement. Why should there be an official way to get access to the filesystem?
- tensor 14y ago
  For all the same reasons that you can do so on OS X. I'm also lumping in the ability to side load apps here, among other features pros might need or want. I'm aware of all the arguments for their completely closed eco-system. But OSX itself is also a perfect example to counter them. Fundamentally, portable touch screen devices are still computers and are not actually so different that such a closed environment is needed.
  - fjarlq 14y ago
    But to many people, the difference between OSX and iOS is large. I think this is one of the reasons why iOS has been so much more successful than OSX. The closed, curated environment is much easier to use for many people. A natural extension of this is a Mac that runs iOS, or making OSX more like iOS. I think this is happening, and it's being driven by what most people want. It may not be what I personally want, but fortunately there is more than one choice these days.
    - tensor 14y ago
      Unfortunately, for me there is really no good alternative to OSX. I require a unix environment for work, and yet also need word, photoshop, and other such applications. If I left OSX I'd be forced to run either Windows with a Linux VM, or Linux with a Windows VM. It would be clunky for sure. Also, I completely disagree that iOSs success is due to it being closed. As the current OSX environment shows, it is completely possible to have both an App Store yet not discard your professional customers. I can tell my mother to only use the App Store and she is perfectly happy. Apple is removing control for a single reason only: money. They want their 30% of every sale on their devices. This is a good reason for them, but a bad reason for their customers.

mcantelon 14y ago

>And that was the breakthrough, as an example, in iTunes. You don’t keep your music in the file system, that would be crazy Actually I do and it works great. I hate iTunes.

alexchamberlain 14y ago
Devil's Advocate: Why do you hate iTunes?
- randallsquared 14y ago
  I'm not the OP, but in 2003 iTunes was the single biggest drawback to switching to the Mac, for me. I had a fairly large collection of MP3s at the time -- maybe a coupla thousand -- and a bunch of versions of the same song in some cases (an album version, a radio version, live at here, live at there), and it was all neatly categorized in the filesystem, band/album/name, when I switched from Gentoo to OS X. I freely admit I should have had a backup. When I "tried" iTunes, there was an option for it to rename all your files (I don't remember whether it was the default or if I stumbled on it), but what I did NOT expect was that all my carefully named folders and files would be lumped into "Unknown Artist"/"Unknown Album"/"Unknown Track NNN".mp3, while my old files were all carefully removed. My MP3 collection literally never recovered. I could choose to play the few hundred tracks that had happened to have good ID3 information, but all the tracks I'd ripped myself were essentially randomized. I also never found an ID3 creator that could successfully differentiate the various versions of songs I had, though I stopped trying around 2006 or 2007, and now I don't bother buying music any more -- I just listen to Pandora.
  - Gring 14y ago
    Why didn't you do a backup before using such a risky feature, or use the feature on a copy of your original files?
    - Mavrik 14y ago
      Because you don't really expect a music player to destroy your collection without as much as a warning.

51Cards 14y ago

Interesting since just the other day I read an article on how lack of access to the file system in iOS was one of its significant drawbacks. Specifically the lack of ability to browse and attach multiple files to an email, etc. I agree it's confusing for a lot of users, but I still think there is a happy medium in there.

ajross 14y ago
Or not. A large class of people have simply never used the filesystem at all. Everything on their PC went onto the desktop or default directory. They used the "Find..." dialog to locate everything they used, etc... These folks are well served by the "modern" app-centric abstractions, and frankly will be harmed by an attempt to show them the filesystem. But the rest of us are harmed by hiding it (badly, sometimes). I'm not sure there is a happy medium; I suspect to some extent we filesystem-conscious few will simply have to learn and use two UX environments.
skibrah 14y ago
I agree that there are definitely cases, attaching multiple files being one, where the lack of file system access makes the process more difficult or impossible. However, I think that there isn't really a "happy medium" in terms of whether direct access to the file system is provided or not, there is either access or there isn't. Rather, one possible solution is to put the onus on the app developer and allow apps to present files that can be "public" within the phone and accessible to other applications. Obviously this opens a worms in terms of security, which I think is one of the main reasons that Apple has not done this.

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advocate1 14y ago

My main issue with the file system is hierarchy. I hate typing paths. Even if it's point and click, paths are still a nuisance. They require too much thinking. And to ask a novice to deal with paths, and having all these things in various locations, is I think unreasonable. Apple once had a flat filesystem. It seems crude but it's very fast. And it's simple. A list. Our minds can handle that with little trouble. I actually try to make my filesystem as flat as possible. This allows me to glob for things. This is much faster than something more complex like using find or precalculated indices (e.g. codesearch). It's not full on regex so it's something I could teach to a novice. I have some short scripts I wrote for locating files or lists of files and saving the path as a shell variable ("v"). Then you just do app $v Simple. And the other thing, which Google has reminded us, is that to work with "big data" you may find you must transcend the limits of the filesystem. The way to do that is to simplify. So to me the way forward is greater simplicity. But certainly not in the Steve Jobs Apple "lock down" sense. Where you can't get at the data unless you're using whatever Apple wants you to use. Where Apple devices cannot connect with non-Apple ones. Totally inflexible. And an unreasonable trade-off in exchange for whatever interface du jour Apple is offering.

agumonkey 14y ago

We're still toying around data categorization. Files are dull, hierarchies are almost meaningless since they require arbitrary ordering. DB-oriented FS aren't there yet (although BeOS found a sweet spot it seems, their c++ API has some ORM feel). '''Semantic''' still in progress. The solution is barycentric: A network a loosely coupled types as a basis for ontology/semantic network in with `atomic` artefacts can be seen/search through. Could even be used to feed dataflow-like graphs for user to manipulate their data. Just like unix pipes but typed, and with an interactive side effect `free` GUI.

fratis 14y ago
I did a video on something like this that got some traction on reddit, where some really nice, knowledgable folks told me about BeOS and the original vision for Longhorn. What I think both of them are missing is a really simple GUI that makes it so that the average user doesn't need to worry about the metadata layer, which seemed a little too present in those efforts. I'd posted it on HN at the time, but it never really picked up any steam. Here it is again, if you're interested: https://vimeo.com/39284250 https://vimeo.com/39284250

albertzeyer 14y ago

Hm, for mails, I usually use IMAP or an web interface, so it doesn't really matter (for me) how/where there is a local cache in my file system. For music, pictures and other stuff, I care and I want to be able to use different tools and switch between them on the same set of media. This is why I disabled all the automatic management, e.g. in iTunes or iPhoto and just move the files around manually. It's because only this way, I have a sane and common way to find my media, no matter what application I am using. The same is for projects (source code, other stuff; I also sometimes switch between different IDEs/editors) and documents. And then there are contacts and dates. I haven't really found a good way yet to manage them as powerful as I want. Currently I use CalDAV and the like, all what GMail is offering me, so it is serverside just as mail. I guess to get all the possibilities I want, I also would need to have it just in my file system in some way.

peterkelly 14y ago

So what happens if you're working on several different projects, each of which involves working with multiple files of different types (e.g. word processing documents, photos, videos, and spreadsheets)? On a desktop OS you would have a folder for each project, and store all the stuff related to a particular project in the respective folder. I've been doing this for longer than I can remember. With the current iOS model, content is organised by the app that created it, not by the project it's related to. So if you're doing work for multiple clients, or collaborating on different internal projects, all of your content is spread out between different apps, and there's no easy way to gather it all together for the purposes of sharing, archiving, or backup. I agree that the way in which the filesystem is exposed to users on desktop OSs can be confusing, but I really think they need to find a way to allow people to organise their files better. Dropbox has essentially become the filesystem for iOS - it's a way around the limitations, and a lot of apps use it.

hoprocker 14y ago

> And eventually, the file system management is just gonna be an app for pros and consumers aren’t gonna need to use it. I.e., Terminal.

10098 14y ago

That is a poor approach that only introduces more unnecessary complexity. On a side note, this probably explains why Finder is the most retarded file manager ever :-)

losethos 14y ago

India nigger shrink is clueless.

jfernandez 14y ago

One of the biggest pros for having a file system is data portability. To a local degree that means being able to use files across multiple contexts, usually "apps". Another related effect is that you can transfer your files across devices/platforms without the need for systems to build ad-hoc/proprietary techniques to communicate with each other (i.e any iOS app that does app-to-app cooperation or how iTunes can show you files related to your apps). A lot of people feel iOS 6 will include better system-supported architecture for this so in that sense he is right we don't need a 'file system app', but iOS hasn't given us this kind of abstraction yet that works to scale.

nadam 14y ago

The file system is basically a simple abstraction: store data in a tree structure. The broader topic is how the tree structure can be 'disrupted' by less structured data organization and what are the territories where the tree structure (or at least a very strong (hierarchical?) structure) seems to be the right abstraction for most people. For example let's take written communication: A Word document, a non-fiction book, is a tree structure. A wiki, or the web of tweets is not. The web itself is not a tree (web directories did not work out) while some parts of it (some websites, some webpages) are tree structured.

drcube 14y ago

This is probably the reason I will never buy an idevice. The very first app I downloaded on my Android phone was a file explorer. I can't imagine any other way to interact with data than as individual files in some kind of hierarchy. What is iTunes but a specialized file browser that happens to have a built in music player? The need for a single, general purpose program for performing actions that are generic for all files just makes sense to me. Say I have a bunch of pictures, a few albums, a movie and an ebook I'd like to share with my mom. Do you really think it would be easier to open four different applications, which probably have four different sets of "sharing" features and four distinct user interfaces? Or to just copy and paste from my hard drive into her thumb drive? Speaking of which, is this actually a problem? I don't know anybody who has difficulty with the file/folder metaphor. And it isn't like I just hang around technical folks. I know lots of people who could use a "computers for dummies" book. Which makes me think the real "problem" with file system behavior is that it facilitates file sharing. If people forget they have a disk drive filled with files, and think instead of their "iTunes multimedia blob", then the FBIAA can just lean on MS and Apple to "program out the piracy". Brilliantly evil.

WildUtah 14y ago
I don't know anybody who has difficulty with the file/folder metaphor. Half the world has an IQ below 100. Computers need to help and serve them, too. The threshold for comfortably managing hierarchical file systems is around 100 IQ. For doing it well is several points higher. And eliminating access to the file system makes app developers get creative about inventing new ways to make things easier for users. A lot of data is relational and not compatible with the file metaphor. Some data is a net of objects (not as much as OO language designers seem to think). New ways to interact with those are valuable. Of course, the flexibility of the file system has a lot of advantages. It invites a powerful and uniform set of tools that can make it even more flexible. That's why it continues to be useful. Nevertheless, other ideas, like relational data as a universal system service, are setting in to give it competition.
- kapilkaisare 14y ago
  > The threshold for comfortably managing hierarchical file systems is around 100 IQ. For doing it well is several points higher. Do you have any citations for that?