Funny that this should appear this morning. Last night I was thinking about how much I hate existing file managers. How the metaphor was great when you had 2 m

Funny that this should appear this morning. Last night I was thinking about how much I hate existing file managers. How the metaphor was great when you had 2 meg hard drives and a few folders and maybe a couple hundred files tops, but how now it falls apart. There was a project called lifestreams at Yale ( http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html ) that had some interesting ideas about allowing you to see your documents as a versioned timeline. Using a dcvs type system as a backend would get you a lot of that plus more, you could explore different ideas for files on different branches. I do however want more... I want usable metadata like the BeFS had. Where any arbitrary metadata key/value paris could be attached to a 'file', For example, contacts in the BeFS were basically empty files with metadata attached. That metadata included name, address etc. Any application could uses the data, augment it etc. The file manager ( tracker ) could query the data to create live 'searches' that looked just like folders. You could add new types and what not. Very powerful when the filesystem is a database. BeOS ( and now haiku ) kept the traditional file manager around as well. Others have approached this idea, but haven't really gone after it. What I thought of that I really wanted to see was something like a document-centric database like couchdb that is backed with dcvs like features that operates just like a regular filesystem, i mount it, i can drag and drop content into it, save into it, make it look like a 'normal' fs to existing applications, but all that path info etc is just saved searches on metadata that group information together and you can tag those searches with metadata themselves.