10 ms·

Files and folders

70 points by ukd1 13y ago

ebbv 13y ago
This again? Nonsense like this comes up every so often and it's always based on a myopic and naive view of computing, and of the general public's use of computers. File systems are necessary because files need to move between applications and devices. File systems are already an abstraction, and they will continue to be useful until someone comes up with a better one. Which, at this point, seems unlikely. Yes, your exposure to the file system on an iPad is much lower than on a MacBook Air. But it's still present. Try saving an image from the web, an email attachment, or using the Drop Box App. You may not be at a command prompt but you're dealing with the file system. The more complicated things you want to do with a tablet, the more you're going to have to interact with the file system. A better abstraction does not yet exist, so the file system persists. Declaring its death prior to the appearance of a better abstraction is silly.
- kunai 13y ago
  Exactly. Who the hell writes this? I'm 15 years old, possibly part of the "generation" this author is referring to, and I do not want my information stored on remote servers that I have to access with high-latency and low-throughput connections. I do not want to launch an app to find one file I can get to easily with search. I do not want a curated application experience. All these things should be reserved for auxiliary machines like tablets. On a general-purpose computing device such as a laptop or desktop PC, I do think that file hierarchies will be deprecated, but they won't die completely. Search will be king on the desktop, and eventually will integrate both locally and remotely on the Web. Cloud computing's uptake upshoot is ephemeral. Once it's gained as much ground as it has to, the growth rate will stagnate and the cloud will plateau. I don't see SaaS being successful much either.
  - dclusin 13y ago
    It seems like there is still hope for the younger generations. Says the 28 year old.
  - zanny 13y ago
    Of note, even if you store your information remotely, it still makes more sense to organize it in a file system. That photo app is best done with folders and hierarchies, you organize your email in the same way, discrete information is best organized in groups, and that is all a filesystem is.
    - JamisonM 13y ago
      I emphatically disagree on the photo app example. The only folders I use for my photos is by date and the only reason I do so is because of the limitations of the design of the computer on which those files are stored. Photos do not particularly lend themselves to hierarchies - one person's "Family and Friends" grouping might be arbitrary to someone else, that's why tags came along - they add information instead of putting items in silos.
      - andrewflnr 13y ago
        I hope what makes the traditional filesystem obsolete is something with better support for non-treeish data, including tags.
        ori_b 13y ago
        A tag based file systems are equivalent to a hierarchy with symlinks (or directory hard links). If you don't allow tagging of tags, it's equivalent to restricting your hierarchy to one level. Tags and directory DAGs are the same.
        andrewflnr 13y ago
        True. Maybe we just need better interfaces for managing multiply-referenced files.
- macspoofing 13y ago
  >File systems are already an abstraction, and they will continue to be useful until someone comes up with a better one That's the entire point of the article, The author argues the File System metaphor is going away. It doesn't mean the File System itself will cease to exist, or that it won't be ever-present in every major operating system. What the author means is that it just won't be exposed to the end-user. And good riddance. The File System is by far the most confusing aspect of computing to newcomers and even those that have been working with computers for a while. Understanding directory structure and the way it is organized in any given operating system seems to be a big problem for people.
  - jarrett 13y ago
    > The File System is by far the most confusing aspect of computing My experience has been the complete opposite. I find the file system, far, far more intuitive than all the ad-hoc ways various applications attempt to manage my "content" for me. With these apps that abstract away the filesystem, you can never really be sure you have the right mental model of your data. The way apps like iTunes store your data is just so opaque. Indeed, iTunes is the perfect example of this problem. I can't count how many people have come to me utterly confused about how syncing between your hard drive, iOS, the iTunes store, and iCloud works. They can't understand it because Apple imposes an ever-shifting system of abstractions onto your music storage. You don't have music files anymore. You have songs stored in certain libraries, and those libraries can be "synced" with each other in ways that often result in strange error messages and loss of data. Imagine instead that things worked like the old days: You just have MP3 files, and you can put them in folders. The iPhone, when connected to the computer, can be accessed like any other filesystem. You move files in and out of a folder called iPhone/Music. In this alternate reality, you'd understand exactly what you're doing. You wouldn't have to guess at how "syncing" is going to change the state of your data.
    - altcognito 13y ago
      I think this is the best argument against ditching the file system metaphor. Having a generic, well-understood resource like a file-system is the power of general purpose computers. If Apple (or Google) can blur the concept of portable data, they can argue that data is "just too nebulous and complicated" to be useful to you mere mortals.
- noonespecial 13y ago
  File systems are necessary, but not necessary for users. They are needed for computers, os's and applications but users could do fine with tags (the primary of which is the application that handles the file, traditionally the extension) File systems will fade into a protocol like HTML and slip from users minds, but will remain the hard core tools of the makers and admins of systems.
  - GhotiFish 13y ago
    I made a presentation on that subject actually. Tag based file systems. There's alot of ways you could make it more effective than the hierarchical structure we use right now.
    - ctdonath 13y ago
      And a major feature of the latest OS X incarnation is...file tags.
    - dharmatech 13y ago
      I've used Tabbles on Windows for file tagging. What other systems are there? http://tabbles.net/ http://tabbles.net/
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
- sthommes 13y ago
  A better abstraction will happen. It is inevitable. And my impression of Jan is that he is neither myopic nor naive. Files are an old, ugly metaphor born of the file cabinet. Remember when you had to label a file and then figure out where to file it: alphabetically, client name, recency, importance, by project, etc. You even used different color labels: green meant go, red meant it's hit the fan, etc. What seems unlikely is that the following WILL NOT happen in the next 5 years: A way to effortlessly tag any content, anywhere and on any device in a predictive and n-dimensional way so that content is broken down to its most granular, atomic and consumable unit- a quote of a book, a lyric of a song, a smirk or a smile in a photo, a highlight clip of a video, the exact anniversary gift you intend to buy- each having its own 'GPS coordinate' on the Web, or in some emergent meta-layer fabric that hovers above and interweaves our now-Web This much-faster way to navigate is a hyper-jump teleport to discrete coordinates, probably crowd-sourced like Waze. With combinations of tags parallax-sextant-triangulating there way more efficiently than today’s ubiquitous search query paradigm, another antiquated metaphor falls. A metaphor, no matter how popular today, I imagine not playing a major role in the future Internet What is this next new thing? My 10 year old would say he already has it: Minecraft
  - marcosdumay 13y ago
    Yeah, I first heard that by the earlier 90's. Except that the timeframe was 10 years, not 5. Most of the time, people don't want to bother with several ortogonal tag sets. That's because most of the time, just one hierarchical set is enough, and when it's not people simply put lots of data inside a single file, and use application specific tools for dealing with it. AI will probably change that. But untill then, no, people won't organise their data in an n-dimensional space.
- adventured 13y ago
  Conceptually it's the same mentality that leads smart people to think HTML5 style apps will win out against native apps. A significant misunderstanding of average users, what they want, and why.
abruzzi 13y ago
The first think I think of when somebody (usually a developer trying to predict the future) says the file system is going away, is: So, without a file system, how do you organize the Linux kernel code? Or the WebKit code? The reality is the lack of a front facing file system (like iOS, even thou there is still a file system down there) would probably work for 80% of users, but what do the rest of us do? And the reality is that 20% are developers, music editors, video editors, enterprise, and similar types of users where not having the file system isn't an inconvenience, but a show stopper. I'm in that 20% for some of my uses, and I'll say that my #1 complaint about my ipad (which I love) is the lack of a file system.
- macspoofing 13y ago
  >So, without a file system, how do you organize the Linux kernel code? Or the WebKit code? He means the File System metaphor. There most certainly is a File System underpinning iPads and iPhones but the end-user need not know it even exists.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  One could build a development environment that was not dependent on a filesystem for code organization. Actually, its been done at least once with Smalltalk's class browser and persistent images. Also, music and video editors really only care about their content, not fancy directory structures. I've never wanted a filesystem for my ipad. What use would it be?
  - aidenn0 13y ago
    I don't own an i{Pad,Pod,Phone}; how would you (for example) open up an MP3 in a music editor, make some changes, and then open up the same MP3 in the music player? The solution on the desktop is to give it a unique identifier in the form of a hierarchical filesystem.
    - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
      This is a really niche use case, but let's try anyways since you can do it with Garage Band [1]. Music exists in its own data space on iOS organized by artist, genre, album, and so on...you know...what the user wants for playing music. Now, this definitely wouldn't work very well for meta-data free content...but how many users deal with data that lacks meta-data? File system path is just one awkward form of meta-data that they could manually specify. [1] http://www.midnightmusic.com.au/2012/08/how-to-get-garageband-songs-off-your-ipad/ http://www.midnightmusic.com.au/2012/08/how-to-get-garageban...
kaiwen1 13y ago
The removal of the file system is anti-feature. Users with no knowledge, no interest, and no need of a file system metaphor may do fine, but as it turns many users do need this metaphor. They need to operate on files, and share them between apps, and know things about their metadata. This is no just programers. It's users create and consume diverse content. I wrote about this more here: https://plus.google.com/100198164384432656847/posts/JUPAUCe8jQK https://plus.google.com/100198164384432656847/posts/JUPAUCe8...
nvmc 13y ago
In other news, trolling will soon be obsolete due to bloggers like this one.
crazygringo 13y ago
> Kids today who start out with iPads and iPhones will never or rarely be in touch with a file or a folder. On what planet? They're not going to be writing papers in high school and saving them on their computer's SSD? They're not going to be putting them in separate folders by year or subject? Even Google Drive lets you organize files in folders. > The next generation wants to be able to... I'm not sure I've ever seen a writer start a sentence like this, and then end it with something true. If there were any truth in what he was saying, he'd actually be quoting "the next generation" directly and backing it up with evidence, instead of putting his own words in their mouth.
- NZ_Matt 13y ago
  >They're not going to be putting them in separate folders by year or subject? Even Google Drive lets you organize files in folders. I think the point is that this will be taken care of automatically based on the metadata. A lot of people don't take the time to sort everything into folders, instead they end up with one messy documents folder with all their documents.
Fice 13y ago
“There should be no distinction between a file name and a file. A human mind can more effectively use a fast, whole-text search engine, so that any word or phrase from the file can serve as a key to it.... An unlimited length file name is a file. The content of a text file is its own best name.” (Jef Raskin. The Humane Interface)
brisance 13y ago
Don't know why the title was changed to use the provocative "obsolete"; the blog post linked to reads "Files and Folders". I do agree with the article in the general sense. That's not to say that the file system hierarchy is going away. Just that a search field is generally far more efficient when it comes to retrieving data (specific use case). Kind of like how Google does it. Does Google drill down to a folder 3451 levels deep to return a link? Maybe it does, I don't know. :)
beat 13y ago
For the application development side of this, see http://www.12factor.net http://www.12factor.net. One of the tenets is that processes should be stateless, and therefore filesystems are ephemeral. Don't expect a file to stick around from invocation to invocation. This is explicitly true on Heroku, where they guarantee that they will kill every process sooner or later - and with it, the VM that it runs in.
- groby_b 13y ago
  How is the filesystem ephemeral? The local filesystem, yes. But a shared FS is nothing but yet another backing service.
  - beat 13y ago
    A filesystem as backing service is a different problem (or more to the point, a different solution). But the filesystem used to store the application runtime is itself ephemeral. In Heroku, when the app shuts down, its VM goes away permanently, along with any local storage, and any instance of an app can be shut down at any time.
mitchty 13y ago
For average users, maybe. But as long as I have source files, scripts, executables/etc.... I don't think the filesystem is going anywhere. The other thing is even if people get used to the "new" way of doing things, the old way won't go away entirely. Look at guis versus command line. Most people never use the command line, but that doesn't mean its gone, or obsolete. It has just moved to being an advanced tool.
thenilly 13y ago
What about the people who create content? Sure the consumer doesn't care but what about the sound engineer, the digital artist, the film maker, the architect?
foobarbazqux 13y ago
The conclusion here that the file system will soon be obsolete is overstating the argument. A more accurate conclusion, in line with the rest of the article, might be that the file system will soon no longer be directly accessible by non-developers.
KaiserPro 13y ago
But that assumes that the "app" is able to manage its assets competently. the iphone deals with assets that lend themselves to simple organisation. Photos work quite well as tiles, Contacts in name order. But what about text files? How do I move from one product to another if it doesn't have a "export" function. If we go down this route, we are going to end up in the bad old days of lots of small incompatible app with no way to share between them. Its great while its still hip and fashionable, but what happens when everyone stops using it? Whatsapp, voxer are a good example, how do I get my messages out of that service?
jimbobimbo 13y ago
"Accessing data on their own terms"? Like in terms "I created a silo of valuable data with some obscure app and now stuck with this app"?
stormbrew 13y ago
The end of hierarchical storage has been heralded for as long as I can remember. I doubt it'll ever happen. It's not like it was an abstraction we were forced into by computers; hierarchies dominate every aspect of real world information storage, digital or otherwise.
kintamanimatt 13y ago
The file system isn't going away. Even when I'm in consumer mode I access the file system on my phone daily. Maybe I've just transferred a file to my phone that I want to read. I'll look in the appropriate folder where files that are transferred by Bluetooth are saved, this being the easiest way to open such a file. Or perhaps I'll open up the Dropbox app and use its pseudo-filesystem to find a file. I delete large folders manually and I sometimes dig out a profile photo that Grindr cached if I'm creating a new contact in my phone and don't want to forget who they are. Also, the desktop isn't going to disappear, it's just going to be used in more niche cases, like development, graphic design, and even gaming. Some people just have a preference for that form factor, especially because it can be more comfortable for longer stretches. For casual users? They'll probably just have a laptop, a tablet (or a tablet with a decent keyboard), and a phone. People love to consume on phone and tablets and create on laptops and desktops with real keyboards. As long as a real keyboard is necessary true mobile devices are going to be a supplement but not a replacement.
- andybak 13y ago
  Files obviously aren't going anywhere as even document-based metaphors are files by another name. Folders? Well - maybe tags but hierarchical tags are essentially the same thing as folders with one restriction relaxed (a 'document' can be in more than one place). But removing them altogether is a step back to MS-DOS 1.0 with a single flat hierarchy and I don't see that helping anyone. The desktop however - I'm not even sure what you mean. A surface on which multiple overlapping windows are arranged? I don't think overlapping windows is anything other than a Xeroc PARC-induced collective mistake. I'd much rather have a tiling window interface of some kind. The only thing left for the desktop to provide is some kind of launcher and location for recently used files. It doesn't do a very good job of that when combined with overlapping windows (they tend to be blocking the desktop most of the time...) so I think that is something we can happily improve on.
  - kunai 13y ago
    Think about what you said for just a minute. > A surface on which multiple overlapping windows are arranged? I don't think overlapping windows is anything other than a Xeroc PARC-induced collective mistake. I'd much rather have a tiling window interface of some kind Now, rearrange that a bit: > A surface on which multiple overlapping papers are arranged? I don't think overlapping windows is anything other than a paperwork-induced collective mistake. I'd much rather have a tiling desk paper interface of some kind. Sounds a bit absurd, right? Desktops on PCs are virtual analogues of desktops in real life, and desktops in real life are designed to be modular, flexible, so they can stack and scale to any given task.
Millennium 13y ago
People have been saying this for years. I remember in 2003, when people whined about how the nascent Mac OS X (as it was called at the time) still had a concept of folders and files that needed to be in specific places. They wanted to "keep everything in a database" instead, like BeOS (never mind that BeOS also had files and folders in specific places; that was beside the point). Ten years later, the filesystem hierarchy is still around. Nowadays, with the Internet's hierarchical domains and URI paths, I don't think there's any risk of it going anywhere. That notion of files in a space hangs around because, simply put, it works. People know what files and folders are, and hardlinks notwithstanding, they generally behave the way people expect them to. It's too easily-understood to throw away, not matter how hard people try.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  The file system is just, IMO, too fundamental to replace. It isn't that we haven't thought of alternatives- it is that there aren't any! Or, well, there is one- a flat database, which is just a flat filesystem- but as soon as you start using it, you will start wishing for some organization... In summary: If you give a mouse a cookie...
  - foobarbazqux 13y ago
    The problem is that digital file systems are digital versions of the physical file systems that we are all familiar with. Most notably these don't let one file be in two folders at the same time. But our mental file system does work like this. By this I mean that the same memory can be reached by multiple routes. Couldn't you design a filesystem that was a flat database with file metadata being used to both browse and search for files, thus avoiding the need for tree hierarchies in current systems? Wouldn't this be closer to our mental model? Crucially, could you develop software like this?
    - krichman 13y ago
      But you can (on Unix) put the same file in two places using ln[1]. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ln_(Unix) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ln_(Unix)
freyrs3 13y ago
Completely sensational, file systems will continue to exist as long as we use storage devices. The end-user interacting with the low-level interface may be phased out though.
- icebraining 13y ago
  I think the argument was purely about UI semantics. People here seem to be missing the point completely, in my opinion.
  - freyrs3 13y ago
    Then the author is conflating the term "file manager" with "file system".
    - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
      No he's not, you are just twisting the argument so it is easier to knock down, which is a completely normal relevance fallacy even if you didn't intend it as such. File systems, physical memory addresses, and processing units exist in iOS, the user just isn't exposed to it. What many of us our proposing is that filing cabinets as user-facing abstractions in particular are not very useful. How many users save their files to more than a couple of locations (Documents and Desktop) these days? Rather, they just throw them all in one place and rely on search or LRU caches to find things.
      - Gigablah 13y ago
        > rely on search or LRU caches to find things Which is pretty awful in current implementations. Search in Windows is slow (contrast that with a 3rd party app like Everything, which gives results almost instantaneously). As for Mac... maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I've almost never managed to find anything with Finder.
    - icebraining 13y ago
      But it's not just the file manager, it's the file themselves as user interface semantics. Right now, the file system is more than just a data storage layer, it's also a set of concepts (files, directories, etc) with which the user interacts through almost all applications. For example, when I click on a link to a paper, I'm not just viewing an abstract document, I'm downloading and opening a PDF file, and this is exposed to the user as the UI to manage the content. OP is talking about the file system as that set of concepts, and claims they'll be obsolete and mostly replaced by more abstract views of the content we use.
dsr_ 13y ago
Of course the filesystem will soon be obsolete! That's why it's called ext4, to distinguish it from ext3, which came before. Oh, you think you're going to store all your data in a soup, pulling out collections of bits based on tags? That's a nice feature, and users may like it, but it's going to be implemented as an extension to a hierarchical file system. The same evolutionary pressures that guarantee we will have desktops* in ten years mean that filesystems will still be here: they've been tested in battle, and they continue to function in odd situations. *Desktops: they aren't going away. People like large displays; people like accurate and reliable text entry devices; people like expandability and the ability to plug new stuff in. These are all things that desktops are much better suited to than laptops, tablets, or phones.
- protomyth 13y ago
  > Oh, you think you're going to store all your data in a soup, pulling out collections of bits based on tags? Bit of history, the Newton actually did store all of its data (from an application programmer and user point of view) in "soups"[1]. It was quite interesting since some of the data could be on an external card and some internal. When you pulled the external card, part of the data would disappear. The Newton was quite fun to program. 1)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soup_(Apple) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soup_(Apple)
- r0s 13y ago
  Totally agree about desktops. Previous employer asked me if I wanted a laptop, but I prefer a large display, keyboard, etc. with a big fast machine and lots of working memory. Ergonomics are important to me, I have friends with permanent damage from poor posture. To see people hunched over laptops makes me cringe.
  - CanSpice 13y ago
    I have two external monitors plugged into my laptop's docking station. Most laptops allow for external monitors. They also allow you to plug in a full-size keyboard and mouse via USB. "Laptop" does not necessarily imply "ergonomic disaster".
VLM 13y ago
The article assumes people don't like tree structures. What if they do? There's a good analogy with a programmer blog reporting he likes linked lists, therefore B-trees are going away. Or I prefer the syntactic sugar of recursion, therefore iteration will disappear in the future (or vice versa) I will say nothing screams "silo" like hiding metadata from the end user. Oh that plain ASCII text file, that can only be opened in MS Word of course because its a "word file" because MS Word opens when I click on it.
- Nelson69 13y ago
  A filesystem engineer/professor at a top-tier university told me once (well he told a whole class of us) that hierarchy is the only mechanism that the human brain has for dealing with complexity. A few people balked, they don't like 'trees' or what have you but nobody could come up with an alternative. This was nearly 20 years ago and I still haven't heard of a better idea. So what's a filesystem? It's a very good and very scalable data structure for storing lot's of items. It's pretty good at lot's of little things and big things a like and a bunch of sizes in between. This problem remains. Then be it tags, folders, something else, it's all just hierarchy to find and store your stuff in that data structure.. Where it looks like everything is going is having multiple overlay hierarchies, all your songs are in the music folder but then you tag different things to help you sort it out. Then maybe the computer can figure out some more optimal ways to store stuff. Take those fancy hybrid drives, maybe songs you don't play too often, there is no reason they can't be in part of the filesystem that is on spinning media and not in flash.
  - lesedilino 13y ago
    >hierarchy is the only mechanism that the human brain has for dealing with complexity. A few people balked, they don't like 'trees' or what have you but nobody could come up with an alternative. None of you could think of anything better because you're engineers, not psychologists or philosophers. The "human brain" deals with complexity through: * causation * hierarchy * chunking * association * ordering Complexity in general is managed using all the tools of analysis: * drawing distinctions * drawing similarities * making definitions * transforming concepts using other concepts And this is all off the top of my head. It's been years since I took psychology of memory and philosophy of mind. But suffice to say your "top engineer" commenting on stuff outside his specialty and using the stupidity of undergrads to bolster his amateur argument is not convincing and is a pure expression of bathos.
abelardx 13y ago
How many kudos are from people who just wanted to see what the icon did?
- jack-r-abbit 13y ago
  Oh that is sneaky. what a shitty thing to do. one of those kudos is mine now and I am so NOT wanting to give this trash kudos. :( EDIT: Looks like all the sites built on svbtle do that. What kind of jack-ass "feature" is that?
  - to3m 13y ago
    He has a twitter account, so you can do what I did and tell him not to count it :)
  - makomk 13y ago
    The kind of jack-ass feature that's been carefully kept by its creator despite a number of people doing exactly what you did and then complaining about it. I've honestly got no idea why.
- marcosdumay 13y ago
  You just have to hover it for the kudo counting. How many are from people that didn't even see the widget? Or people like me, that just read it, and discovered that I was interacting with it only after it counted my vote? Anyway, it doesn't have any consequence. It's just some feelgood freature... Kind of stupid to have a counter that doesn't count anything real.
lignuist 13y ago
iOS n > 7 will have a file system browser. Why? Look at how many apps have built-in directory browsers to manage files. Moving this functionality to the core, will look like a revolutionary and elegant idea.
saidajigumi 13y ago
I'll agree with this observed trend. Colleagues of mine at a top-tier university are already seeing this in students. They have "computing" experience, but no real sense of the file system as an organizational and navigational tool. This poses a question in my mind: Are we creating a world of perpetual intermediate users? I think there are definite advantages to reducing cognitive noise in "casual computing" found in current mobile experiences. What's less clear is the path individuals will take from this world of per-app organization into one where content creation, workflow, and eventually implementation details increasingly take precedence. It's not enough to say "the king is dead" until we also have a way to add ", long live the king."
- macspoofing 13y ago
  >Are we creating a world of perpetual intermediate users? No, we're including users that were previously alienated from computing. The desktop metaphor has been with us for 20 years and there's a segment of the population that just doesn't get it, doesn't understand it, and just can't get used to it. It causes a whole slew of issues (e.g. the virus-pocalypse of the early 2000s).
  - aidenn0 13y ago
    Yes, if users can't obtain and open external, untrusted documents then they can't get viruses. So what? Whether or not it's abstracted in a file system, people will be sharing documents.
- devcpp 13y ago
  We could increase the productivity of humanity in fabulous ways if we all knew how to use computers efficiently. Instead, we go the other way and only use them as entertainment platforms. Too bad education doesn't make big money.
  - mgkimsal 13y ago
    Education does make big money (pearson), it's just generally people don't have a choice - they're not spending their 'disposable' income on it.
hakcermani 13y ago
The new OS X is kind of getting there isn't it with multiple tags for a file.
hadem 13y ago
The apps the author speaks of uses the file systems he claims will soon be obsolete. Maybe some enjoy not having to organize their data but I prefer having access to decide where my files are stored on my system.
batbomb 13y ago
The file system isn't going anywhere. The file system as we know it is almost effectively an extremely partitioned index organized table of BLOB information, which actually makes it more efficient when handling permission than a database would likely be. Without this hierarchical structure, permissions are nearly a nightmare to go through with. Furthermore, a database can also be implemented in a way similar to a hierarchical file system, and in many cases have much more flexibility as you get virtually unlimited extensibility (often at a cost of performance). Additional layers built on top of filesystems will make the way we interact with files obsolete, but the file system will not become obsolete.
ars 13y ago
I hate this concept - the app doesn't own the data. Apps that assume they do are rapidly removed from any system I use. There are some single purpose apps that have data directly tied to them, but everything else is not like that.
- cstross 13y ago
  The app developers would like the app to own the data. That this isn't in the users' interests should be self-evident. Vertical data silos with doors owned by gatekeepers who want to charge admission: just say no!
drivebyacct2 13y ago
Yeah, whatever. For practical purposes, it nearly has, and it won't really technically go away, the interface to it will get progressively dumber. See also: mobile (native) apps.
kryten 13y ago
Not this again. I've heard this argument recycled for the last 20 years. You can't abstract everything away into nothing. At some point the meat sacks (like myself) operating the devices will need to reach a compromise that the machine agrees with too, much as the compromise that I must turn the steering wheel and press the pedals on my car. The filesystem is a pretty good compromise. Denying its existence is another step towards our future of epsilon semi-morons operating mindless consumption devices.
grannyg00se 13y ago
"it’s a matter of time before the traditional desktop disappears and is replaced by one interface regardless of device that just operates on apps, metadata, and search." If you have to tag your data with metadata, you might as well make a place for it and put it in its place. I don't see a big advantage one way or the other. Unless the meta information storage becomes automatic. But then I probably wouldn't trust it to catalogue the information the way I want.
MortenK 13y ago
With a metadata based file system, the metadata must describe the content in a variety of ways for content to be searchable. Problem is until computers can understand what a certain document is automatically, it's up to users to manually categorize or tag each one, which is hugely time consuming. Better approaches than the hierarchal file system has been researched for decades, so far with no clear breakthroughs in sight.
jackmaney 13y ago
Complete and total FUD. Desktops and laptops--which are merely older form factors of the tablet, mind you--will be around for a long, long time. And rooted phones and tablets will allow file system access. Hell, I regularly use the file system in my (non-rooted) android phone.
- icebraining 13y ago
  I don't think that have some kind of backdoor access to the underlying filesystem makes it incompatible with the argument. The argument is about normal UI and workflow, not implementation details. Besides, the author is talking about content, and what if that's stored online? There's no files except for the server sysadmin. And no, the fact that you and I may continue to use it is not an argument either. The claim is "obsolete", not wiped from the face of the Earth.
shurcooL 13y ago
I never use the prepopulated Music/Photos/Videos/Documents folders because some apps pollute them with their settings and whatnot without my permission. Instead, I make one folder and keep all my manually created content there. I _used_ to try to organize by categories, but due inability to easily place same file in many folders, and things become harder to find as time passes, I shifted to my current favourite way to organize stuff. It's inspired by Camera Roll. Just a single folder with folders for events, sorted by time.
ams6110 13y ago
I guess I'm about as opposite as one can be from this point of view. I manage all my files from the shell prompt. I don't use GUIs as they are just too limited and slow.
twald 13y ago
I believe there will always be a file system NEXT to search. Think about it. You're at home looking for your keys. First thing you do is ask your girlfriend if she knows where the keys are. If she doesn't know you start looking for it in a categorical way: Which rooms were you in today? Where do you usually leave your keys? I feel like search is the convenient way and will be number one. Folders are a human's natural tendency to create backup plans in case of unexpected uncertainty.
- icebraining 13y ago
  But unlike your girlfriend, the machine knows about every single file in the system, even if it can't recognize it. So you can ask it to find files that match certain characteristics, instead of going through folders. To keep with your example, you'd ask "the object is made of black plastic and metal", "I used it last yesterday", "I use on my car", etc.
r0s 13y ago
Sure, focus on metadata... but then, the path and other data about a file location on disk is just another facet. This is as logical as saying file sizes are obsolete. Maybe storage gets so cheap users don't need to know sizes, and only developers need that info. Does that make file size information obsolete? No, absurd. Just like all metadata, some is higher priority to lay users, and those doing serious work need detail.
vonskippy 13y ago
What I came away with from reading that drivel is - Kids today are stupid, and they're that way because they use a iPad. Did I miss anything?
jroseattle 13y ago
Maybe from some UI, but underneath the covers -- this isn't happening anytime soon.
MichaelGG 13y ago
This is exactly the idea Microsoft had and demo'd at PDC 2003. Longhorn's WinFS was supposed to deliver all this metadata searching and so on, presenting a unified interface. Also, as far as extensions, Windows has been hiding them forever. Because you don't need to know the extension - that has nothing to do with the filesystem, that's just because extensions became the standard way many systems decided which app to associate with a file.
- WalterGR 13y ago
  This is exactly the idea Microsoft had and demo'd at PDC 2003. Longhorn's WinFS was supposed to deliver all this metadata searching and so on, presenting a unified interface. It is. It's a pity that WinFS never hit 1.0. Interestingly, though WinFS was one of the "pillars" of the ill-fated Longhorn, it didn't die with it. The team existed until 2006, and even released a beta and a beta refresh. I was on the team, and most of us got moved en masse to SQL Server. That was a heart-breaker. The team's blog is still on the web: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/winfs/ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/winfs/ I haven't kept up with Microsoft's post-WinFS storage initiatives, but it sounds like Microsoft Semantic Engine may be keeping the spirit alive.
  - dharmatech 13y ago
    Question about WinFS. I saw a video presentation of it floating around the web. They demonstrated various kinds of objects representing contacts, documents, music files, etc. Where these object types extensible? I.e. were the metadata fields static? For example, if the "song" type had the standard fields (title, artist, album, year, etc) could I add another one (e.g. "producer")?
    - WalterGR 13y ago
      Where these object types extensible? Yes. I.e. were the metadata fields static? Well, yes, but that doesn't preclude extensibility. In WinFS terminology, object types were called Item types; object instances were called Items. From the docs: "An item is the equivalent of an object in object-oriented programming. It has a complex structure, specific behavior, and operations described by the 'WinFS' schemas." So one way to extend an Item type was to create a derived type (i.e. use inheritance.) WinFS also supported what it called item extensions, which were basically "small objects" that you could associate with existing objects. They were for things like reminders, which don't mean much on their own and could apply to many different Item types. For your scenario, creating a derived type would probably have been the right solution. EDIT: Well, now that I think about it, what if every different music app created its own Song subclass? So inheritance might not be the right choice. Ahh, that's the kind of thing I deeply love thinking about! I hope that one day I can rejoin the ranks of the lab-coated guardians of epistemology. (Nod to "Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia" by Cory Doctorow. http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm)
LoneWolf 13y ago
I really hate this idea, one of the things that most annoys me is the lack of a way to see my files in the filesystem on my windows phone 7. It is one of the things I can't live without, the abstract idea of Pictures, Documents etc doesn't work for me I want FILES not categories and types of files stored somewhere I DONT know where or how.
gryphon65 13y ago
Whenever I see a post like this I think it's circling around a different problem. It would seem that the overall task or project that a person is using the computer for in a particular moment is important but there is no modern OS (that I know of) that keeps track of this context. Such a system might be a sort of metadata API for tasks or projects. The system would have a built in task tracking application that would interface with this API. (Which could be pluggable) The metadata for a task could hold a lot of information. For example a default directory where files for the task are stored could be created when the task is created. Other applications like a word processor could query the API to find out where to store its files. Web browsers could store what pages a user looks at for a task. E-Mail clients could offer the current task as a folder to store messages in. When the user switches tasks the currently open applications would be messaged and could open files the user had open when they were perviously working on that task. Finally when a user marks a task as completed all the files and messages related to that task could be archived together. For the novice user of this system things like the file system go away. Their view is the projects that they are currently working on. The file system will still be there under the covers but user doesn't need to see it. The power user might have tools for developing common project workflows.
- XorNot 13y ago
  This is a very complex way of reaching the idea that we have a master "Project" folder on my drive. The key innovation you're actually pushing is that we need less applications insisting on storing data in "their" format. I would love it if I could just map IMAP folders straight to actual folders on my hard drive for mail messages, so when I drag stuff out of my inbox its getting saved to the appropriate place that I can later zip up and backup wherever.
- marcosdumay 13y ago
  From their early documents, it looks like the KDE4 developers got out to create exactly what you describe. But they created something with very little semblance with this. What you describe is hard, and may not be possible to define well enough for implementing. It's good to know that some people try it, maybe someday somebody will get there. But, anyway, no you'll still need a filesystem to organize the data you use on each task. Do you use only one level of directories?
egypturnash 13y ago
I'd love to see how a post-filesystem device would organize the content for my graphic novel. I've got about a hundred Illustator source files, one for every page. A similar number of pngs for posting online. A subdirectory full of source files for my model sheets - mostly Illustrator files, and some 3D models for a swoopy car. And another subdir for rendered copies of those model sheets. On an external drive (space is at a premium on my Air) I've got print-res TIFFs of each page, two for some pages due to crazy printing tricks I'm doing. And an InDesign template that I use to generate an InDesign file that includes all those pages, which I finally use to generate a PDF that I send off to the printer. This is not an especially sophisticated thing to do. People have been drawing comics for ages, and have needed much the same kinds of organizations well before the computer. A pile of illustration boards in a closet, labeled as being this story or that story. A filing cabinet with my notes, models, and reference. Et cetera. As long as the OS and apps have no real global concept of "a project", we'll need file systems to, well, give us a system to organize our files. Or maybe I'm a Luddite who can't imagine the critical change in usability that will result in being thoroughly free of directory trees. It's quite possible. But I sure don't see it in what we have now.
- icebraining 13y ago
  As long as the OS and apps have no real global concept of "a project", we'll need file systems to, well, give us a system to organize our files. I think that's exactly what the author says will happen: "(...) This will help apps automatically organize and index relevant information so that the interface’s search function can access and integrate content in a much smarter way, making the file and folder concept obsolete. (...)"
- XorNot 13y ago
  I tend to be of the notion that pushing data organization into the application space is just asking for trouble most of the time. I'd prefer to have one big, consistent way to organize things, then a few dozen applications each with their own take on it. To me the ideal system is one where the filesystem (or probably a very thin abstraction layer) can be intelligent enough to do sensible things with files when they get saved, and my applications work with whatever scheme I tell it to enforce.
jiggy2011 13y ago
The filesystem provides structure, even if it's not the perfect structure. When I start a new project the first thing I do is create a folder and put everything related into the folder. What the filetypes are isn't important, it's the logical grouping of "things" in a tree structure which is easily understood. If I zip and email that folder then I know I have got the whole project. Having a big gallery of every single image file on my computer isn't that useful. Maybe I can break them down into galleries, but then do I have to tell my other applications which gallery corresponds to which project?
- incongruity 13y ago
  Exactly. The counter to that (as discussed in this post) is that you can just search for documents based on keywords, etc. which can definitely work well in many cases – but I don't believe it is (or has to be) an either-or. Searching is not infallible either - at least not until search becomes semantic and truly smart, lest I misremember crucial keywords, substituting a synonym (or any of a number of examples). It's been my experience that organization becomes essential when tasks become complex. This goes beyond computers. This is the case with human systems or physical objects. I think the same goes here. Mobile devices have largely been about consumption or simple creation, with simple workflows. To me, it's an open question of whether or not their current interaction and organizational scheme can hold up as content creation gets more complex.
  - jiggy2011 13y ago
    Keywords is an option, but then again if I send someone else my files what happens if there is a keyword conflict on their system? So we need namespaces or a way to track file origin/ownership across the entire planet? urgh. Of course filesystem aren't the only way to organise data and there are applications that already do this. An example that springs to mind are playlists and media libraries. The file/folder hierarchy is also pretty well ingrained in the web.
malkia 13y ago
I can see real books disappearing first, before files. This concept is so much ingrained in the actual development of apps, that it can't simply go away. Starting with scm, make/project files, editors, runtime functions, access to devices - it's all file based, and it's the lowest common language between 99% of the systems in this world.
roamzero 13y ago
The biggest issue of storage in the coming years will simply be the management of personal files. How should people handle the accumulation of a lifetime's worth of data as they migrate from older computing devices to new ones? Some things are generic enough that you can assume you can pull them off the internet buffet style as you need them, but there are also some things that definitely do not fit that category such as family photos, etc.
vy8vWJlco 13y ago
The need for a filesystem is proportional to the owner's expectation of control. Filesystems are part of the general purpose computing toolkit. Assuming we don't all turn in our computers for appliances in a forced buyback to get hacking tools off our streets, filesystems are here to stay, if only to allow the Morlocks to create new jellybean interfaces for the Eloi.
vectorpush 13y ago
So I have this group of bytes that generate a sound when processed by an application. You can call that group of bytes whatever you like, and maybe you can even come up with a novel abstraction for it, but be you iPad novice or kernel hacker, that group of bytes will always need to be recognized as a discrete unit for it to be useful; that unit is a file.
freework 13y ago
I'v been working on a non-hierarchical filesystem (if you want to call it a "filesystem") called Library Transfer Protocol. It created a new type of file called a "library item" which is different from a file in the sense that library items are immutable. An image, a video, or a finished blog post can be a library item. Since all library items are immutable, we don't have to worry about the CAP theorem, and therefore the "filesystem" can be distributed. You can see the code here: https://github.com/priestc/Library-Transfer-Protocol https://github.com/priestc/Library-Transfer-Protocol Click on the presentation at the bottom of the github page to see more info.
- dharmatech 13y ago
  This is very cool. Do you know of any other comparable systems or past work? You mention in the presentation that WinFS is a similar system (I agree; sounds similar in some ways).
_sh 13y ago
For those who argue that the hierarchical filing system isn't going anywhere, consider Yahoo vs Google. Yahoo was once a hierarchical filing system for the web, Google's philosophy was 'search don't sort'. For those that argue that tags aren't hierarchical filing systems, consider that '/Documents/Theses/TagsVsHierarchies' is the same as tagging 'TagsVsHierarchies' with 'Documents' and 'Theses'. It's turtles all the way down.
Spooky23 13y ago
This argument sort of has water because of the improvements in search. Look to email as an example -- you have filers (ie people who maintain filing systems) and pilers (people who use search for everything). Big inboxes and GMail made piling popular. Piling is the easiest way to operate, because many workers don't have a natural filing methodology to use. Search fills the gap and lets you organize on the fly based on standard metadata and content. But depending in what you do, it breaks down quickly. If you are an attorney, or a procurement agent or a project manager, you have a natural organizational unit for content: the case, purchase opportunity, project. It's easy and natural to break down information within the structure that you work with. It's also hard to search for... How do you search for a NDA regarding case A signed by party B? Typically people predicting the death of folders are selling a solution that doesn't lend itself to using folders. The author in this case is the founder of a photo organization startup. This is a use case where folders aren't cutting it, digital photography created this situation wherr we're all drowning in photos that are impossible to organize manually.
informatimago 13y ago
I don't mind keywords ("hashtags"?). Until we start to have more than 7 of them. Then I want to put some order on my keywords. I think I'll adopt the following scheme: all the keywords for my private stuff will be prefixed with private. (private.accounts, private.pictures, private.mail) All the keywords for my software sources will be prefixed with src. (src.public.lisp, src.pjb.test-project), etc. Oops, I reinvented the hierarchical file system!

70 points by ukd1 13y ago

ebbv 13y ago

This again? Nonsense like this comes up every so often and it's always based on a myopic and naive view of computing, and of the general public's use of computers. File systems are necessary because files need to move between applications and devices. File systems are already an abstraction, and they will continue to be useful until someone comes up with a better one. Which, at this point, seems unlikely. Yes, your exposure to the file system on an iPad is much lower than on a MacBook Air. But it's still present. Try saving an image from the web, an email attachment, or using the Drop Box App. You may not be at a command prompt but you're dealing with the file system. The more complicated things you want to do with a tablet, the more you're going to have to interact with the file system. A better abstraction does not yet exist, so the file system persists. Declaring its death prior to the appearance of a better abstraction is silly.

kunai 13y ago
Exactly. Who the hell writes this? I'm 15 years old, possibly part of the "generation" this author is referring to, and I do not want my information stored on remote servers that I have to access with high-latency and low-throughput connections. I do not want to launch an app to find one file I can get to easily with search. I do not want a curated application experience. All these things should be reserved for auxiliary machines like tablets. On a general-purpose computing device such as a laptop or desktop PC, I do think that file hierarchies will be deprecated, but they won't die completely. Search will be king on the desktop, and eventually will integrate both locally and remotely on the Web. Cloud computing's uptake upshoot is ephemeral. Once it's gained as much ground as it has to, the growth rate will stagnate and the cloud will plateau. I don't see SaaS being successful much either.
- dclusin 13y ago
  It seems like there is still hope for the younger generations. Says the 28 year old.
- zanny 13y ago
  Of note, even if you store your information remotely, it still makes more sense to organize it in a file system. That photo app is best done with folders and hierarchies, you organize your email in the same way, discrete information is best organized in groups, and that is all a filesystem is.
  - JamisonM 13y ago
    I emphatically disagree on the photo app example. The only folders I use for my photos is by date and the only reason I do so is because of the limitations of the design of the computer on which those files are stored. Photos do not particularly lend themselves to hierarchies - one person's "Family and Friends" grouping might be arbitrary to someone else, that's why tags came along - they add information instead of putting items in silos.
    - andrewflnr 13y ago
      I hope what makes the traditional filesystem obsolete is something with better support for non-treeish data, including tags.
      - ori_b 13y ago
        A tag based file systems are equivalent to a hierarchy with symlinks (or directory hard links). If you don't allow tagging of tags, it's equivalent to restricting your hierarchy to one level. Tags and directory DAGs are the same.
        andrewflnr 13y ago
        True. Maybe we just need better interfaces for managing multiply-referenced files.
macspoofing 13y ago
>File systems are already an abstraction, and they will continue to be useful until someone comes up with a better one That's the entire point of the article, The author argues the File System metaphor is going away. It doesn't mean the File System itself will cease to exist, or that it won't be ever-present in every major operating system. What the author means is that it just won't be exposed to the end-user. And good riddance. The File System is by far the most confusing aspect of computing to newcomers and even those that have been working with computers for a while. Understanding directory structure and the way it is organized in any given operating system seems to be a big problem for people.
- jarrett 13y ago
  > The File System is by far the most confusing aspect of computing My experience has been the complete opposite. I find the file system, far, far more intuitive than all the ad-hoc ways various applications attempt to manage my "content" for me. With these apps that abstract away the filesystem, you can never really be sure you have the right mental model of your data. The way apps like iTunes store your data is just so opaque. Indeed, iTunes is the perfect example of this problem. I can't count how many people have come to me utterly confused about how syncing between your hard drive, iOS, the iTunes store, and iCloud works. They can't understand it because Apple imposes an ever-shifting system of abstractions onto your music storage. You don't have music files anymore. You have songs stored in certain libraries, and those libraries can be "synced" with each other in ways that often result in strange error messages and loss of data. Imagine instead that things worked like the old days: You just have MP3 files, and you can put them in folders. The iPhone, when connected to the computer, can be accessed like any other filesystem. You move files in and out of a folder called iPhone/Music. In this alternate reality, you'd understand exactly what you're doing. You wouldn't have to guess at how "syncing" is going to change the state of your data.
  - altcognito 13y ago
    I think this is the best argument against ditching the file system metaphor. Having a generic, well-understood resource like a file-system is the power of general purpose computers. If Apple (or Google) can blur the concept of portable data, they can argue that data is "just too nebulous and complicated" to be useful to you mere mortals.
noonespecial 13y ago
File systems are necessary, but not necessary for users. They are needed for computers, os's and applications but users could do fine with tags (the primary of which is the application that handles the file, traditionally the extension) File systems will fade into a protocol like HTML and slip from users minds, but will remain the hard core tools of the makers and admins of systems.
- GhotiFish 13y ago
  I made a presentation on that subject actually. Tag based file systems. There's alot of ways you could make it more effective than the hierarchical structure we use right now.
  - ctdonath 13y ago
    And a major feature of the latest OS X incarnation is...file tags.
  - dharmatech 13y ago
    I've used Tabbles on Windows for file tagging. What other systems are there? http://tabbles.net/ http://tabbles.net/
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
sthommes 13y ago
A better abstraction will happen. It is inevitable. And my impression of Jan is that he is neither myopic nor naive. Files are an old, ugly metaphor born of the file cabinet. Remember when you had to label a file and then figure out where to file it: alphabetically, client name, recency, importance, by project, etc. You even used different color labels: green meant go, red meant it's hit the fan, etc. What seems unlikely is that the following WILL NOT happen in the next 5 years: A way to effortlessly tag any content, anywhere and on any device in a predictive and n-dimensional way so that content is broken down to its most granular, atomic and consumable unit- a quote of a book, a lyric of a song, a smirk or a smile in a photo, a highlight clip of a video, the exact anniversary gift you intend to buy- each having its own 'GPS coordinate' on the Web, or in some emergent meta-layer fabric that hovers above and interweaves our now-Web This much-faster way to navigate is a hyper-jump teleport to discrete coordinates, probably crowd-sourced like Waze. With combinations of tags parallax-sextant-triangulating there way more efficiently than today’s ubiquitous search query paradigm, another antiquated metaphor falls. A metaphor, no matter how popular today, I imagine not playing a major role in the future Internet What is this next new thing? My 10 year old would say he already has it: Minecraft
- marcosdumay 13y ago
  Yeah, I first heard that by the earlier 90's. Except that the timeframe was 10 years, not 5. Most of the time, people don't want to bother with several ortogonal tag sets. That's because most of the time, just one hierarchical set is enough, and when it's not people simply put lots of data inside a single file, and use application specific tools for dealing with it. AI will probably change that. But untill then, no, people won't organise their data in an n-dimensional space.
adventured 13y ago
Conceptually it's the same mentality that leads smart people to think HTML5 style apps will win out against native apps. A significant misunderstanding of average users, what they want, and why.

abruzzi 13y ago

The first think I think of when somebody (usually a developer trying to predict the future) says the file system is going away, is: So, without a file system, how do you organize the Linux kernel code? Or the WebKit code? The reality is the lack of a front facing file system (like iOS, even thou there is still a file system down there) would probably work for 80% of users, but what do the rest of us do? And the reality is that 20% are developers, music editors, video editors, enterprise, and similar types of users where not having the file system isn't an inconvenience, but a show stopper. I'm in that 20% for some of my uses, and I'll say that my #1 complaint about my ipad (which I love) is the lack of a file system.

macspoofing 13y ago
>So, without a file system, how do you organize the Linux kernel code? Or the WebKit code? He means the File System metaphor. There most certainly is a File System underpinning iPads and iPhones but the end-user need not know it even exists.
seanmcdirmid 13y ago
One could build a development environment that was not dependent on a filesystem for code organization. Actually, its been done at least once with Smalltalk's class browser and persistent images. Also, music and video editors really only care about their content, not fancy directory structures. I've never wanted a filesystem for my ipad. What use would it be?
- aidenn0 13y ago
  I don't own an i{Pad,Pod,Phone}; how would you (for example) open up an MP3 in a music editor, make some changes, and then open up the same MP3 in the music player? The solution on the desktop is to give it a unique identifier in the form of a hierarchical filesystem.
  - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
    This is a really niche use case, but let's try anyways since you can do it with Garage Band [1]. Music exists in its own data space on iOS organized by artist, genre, album, and so on...you know...what the user wants for playing music. Now, this definitely wouldn't work very well for meta-data free content...but how many users deal with data that lacks meta-data? File system path is just one awkward form of meta-data that they could manually specify. [1] http://www.midnightmusic.com.au/2012/08/how-to-get-garageband-songs-off-your-ipad/ http://www.midnightmusic.com.au/2012/08/how-to-get-garageban...

kaiwen1 13y ago

The removal of the file system is anti-feature. Users with no knowledge, no interest, and no need of a file system metaphor may do fine, but as it turns many users do need this metaphor. They need to operate on files, and share them between apps, and know things about their metadata. This is no just programers. It's users create and consume diverse content. I wrote about this more here: https://plus.google.com/100198164384432656847/posts/JUPAUCe8jQK https://plus.google.com/100198164384432656847/posts/JUPAUCe8...

nvmc 13y ago

In other news, trolling will soon be obsolete due to bloggers like this one.

crazygringo 13y ago

> Kids today who start out with iPads and iPhones will never or rarely be in touch with a file or a folder. On what planet? They're not going to be writing papers in high school and saving them on their computer's SSD? They're not going to be putting them in separate folders by year or subject? Even Google Drive lets you organize files in folders. > The next generation wants to be able to... I'm not sure I've ever seen a writer start a sentence like this, and then end it with something true. If there were any truth in what he was saying, he'd actually be quoting "the next generation" directly and backing it up with evidence, instead of putting his own words in their mouth.

NZ_Matt 13y ago
>They're not going to be putting them in separate folders by year or subject? Even Google Drive lets you organize files in folders. I think the point is that this will be taken care of automatically based on the metadata. A lot of people don't take the time to sort everything into folders, instead they end up with one messy documents folder with all their documents.

Fice 13y ago

“There should be no distinction between a file name and a file. A human mind can more effectively use a fast, whole-text search engine, so that any word or phrase from the file can serve as a key to it.... An unlimited length file name is a file. The content of a text file is its own best name.” (Jef Raskin. The Humane Interface)

brisance 13y ago

Don't know why the title was changed to use the provocative "obsolete"; the blog post linked to reads "Files and Folders". I do agree with the article in the general sense. That's not to say that the file system hierarchy is going away. Just that a search field is generally far more efficient when it comes to retrieving data (specific use case). Kind of like how Google does it. Does Google drill down to a folder 3451 levels deep to return a link? Maybe it does, I don't know. :)

beat 13y ago

For the application development side of this, see http://www.12factor.net http://www.12factor.net. One of the tenets is that processes should be stateless, and therefore filesystems are ephemeral. Don't expect a file to stick around from invocation to invocation. This is explicitly true on Heroku, where they guarantee that they will kill every process sooner or later - and with it, the VM that it runs in.

groby_b 13y ago
How is the filesystem ephemeral? The local filesystem, yes. But a shared FS is nothing but yet another backing service.
- beat 13y ago
  A filesystem as backing service is a different problem (or more to the point, a different solution). But the filesystem used to store the application runtime is itself ephemeral. In Heroku, when the app shuts down, its VM goes away permanently, along with any local storage, and any instance of an app can be shut down at any time.

mitchty 13y ago

For average users, maybe. But as long as I have source files, scripts, executables/etc.... I don't think the filesystem is going anywhere. The other thing is even if people get used to the "new" way of doing things, the old way won't go away entirely. Look at guis versus command line. Most people never use the command line, but that doesn't mean its gone, or obsolete. It has just moved to being an advanced tool.

thenilly 13y ago

What about the people who create content? Sure the consumer doesn't care but what about the sound engineer, the digital artist, the film maker, the architect?

foobarbazqux 13y ago

The conclusion here that the file system will soon be obsolete is overstating the argument. A more accurate conclusion, in line with the rest of the article, might be that the file system will soon no longer be directly accessible by non-developers.

KaiserPro 13y ago

But that assumes that the "app" is able to manage its assets competently. the iphone deals with assets that lend themselves to simple organisation. Photos work quite well as tiles, Contacts in name order. But what about text files? How do I move from one product to another if it doesn't have a "export" function. If we go down this route, we are going to end up in the bad old days of lots of small incompatible app with no way to share between them. Its great while its still hip and fashionable, but what happens when everyone stops using it? Whatsapp, voxer are a good example, how do I get my messages out of that service?

jimbobimbo 13y ago

"Accessing data on their own terms"? Like in terms "I created a silo of valuable data with some obscure app and now stuck with this app"?

stormbrew 13y ago

The end of hierarchical storage has been heralded for as long as I can remember. I doubt it'll ever happen. It's not like it was an abstraction we were forced into by computers; hierarchies dominate every aspect of real world information storage, digital or otherwise.

kintamanimatt 13y ago

The file system isn't going away. Even when I'm in consumer mode I access the file system on my phone daily. Maybe I've just transferred a file to my phone that I want to read. I'll look in the appropriate folder where files that are transferred by Bluetooth are saved, this being the easiest way to open such a file. Or perhaps I'll open up the Dropbox app and use its pseudo-filesystem to find a file. I delete large folders manually and I sometimes dig out a profile photo that Grindr cached if I'm creating a new contact in my phone and don't want to forget who they are. Also, the desktop isn't going to disappear, it's just going to be used in more niche cases, like development, graphic design, and even gaming. Some people just have a preference for that form factor, especially because it can be more comfortable for longer stretches. For casual users? They'll probably just have a laptop, a tablet (or a tablet with a decent keyboard), and a phone. People love to consume on phone and tablets and create on laptops and desktops with real keyboards. As long as a real keyboard is necessary true mobile devices are going to be a supplement but not a replacement.

andybak 13y ago
Files obviously aren't going anywhere as even document-based metaphors are files by another name. Folders? Well - maybe tags but hierarchical tags are essentially the same thing as folders with one restriction relaxed (a 'document' can be in more than one place). But removing them altogether is a step back to MS-DOS 1.0 with a single flat hierarchy and I don't see that helping anyone. The desktop however - I'm not even sure what you mean. A surface on which multiple overlapping windows are arranged? I don't think overlapping windows is anything other than a Xeroc PARC-induced collective mistake. I'd much rather have a tiling window interface of some kind. The only thing left for the desktop to provide is some kind of launcher and location for recently used files. It doesn't do a very good job of that when combined with overlapping windows (they tend to be blocking the desktop most of the time...) so I think that is something we can happily improve on.
- kunai 13y ago
  Think about what you said for just a minute. > A surface on which multiple overlapping windows are arranged? I don't think overlapping windows is anything other than a Xeroc PARC-induced collective mistake. I'd much rather have a tiling window interface of some kind Now, rearrange that a bit: > A surface on which multiple overlapping papers are arranged? I don't think overlapping windows is anything other than a paperwork-induced collective mistake. I'd much rather have a tiling desk paper interface of some kind. Sounds a bit absurd, right? Desktops on PCs are virtual analogues of desktops in real life, and desktops in real life are designed to be modular, flexible, so they can stack and scale to any given task.

Millennium 13y ago

People have been saying this for years. I remember in 2003, when people whined about how the nascent Mac OS X (as it was called at the time) still had a concept of folders and files that needed to be in specific places. They wanted to "keep everything in a database" instead, like BeOS (never mind that BeOS also had files and folders in specific places; that was beside the point). Ten years later, the filesystem hierarchy is still around. Nowadays, with the Internet's hierarchical domains and URI paths, I don't think there's any risk of it going anywhere. That notion of files in a space hangs around because, simply put, it works. People know what files and folders are, and hardlinks notwithstanding, they generally behave the way people expect them to. It's too easily-understood to throw away, not matter how hard people try.

sliverstorm 13y ago
The file system is just, IMO, too fundamental to replace. It isn't that we haven't thought of alternatives- it is that there aren't any! Or, well, there is one- a flat database, which is just a flat filesystem- but as soon as you start using it, you will start wishing for some organization... In summary: If you give a mouse a cookie...
- foobarbazqux 13y ago
  The problem is that digital file systems are digital versions of the physical file systems that we are all familiar with. Most notably these don't let one file be in two folders at the same time. But our mental file system does work like this. By this I mean that the same memory can be reached by multiple routes. Couldn't you design a filesystem that was a flat database with file metadata being used to both browse and search for files, thus avoiding the need for tree hierarchies in current systems? Wouldn't this be closer to our mental model? Crucially, could you develop software like this?
  - krichman 13y ago
    But you can (on Unix) put the same file in two places using ln[1]. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ln_(Unix) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ln_(Unix)

freyrs3 13y ago

Completely sensational, file systems will continue to exist as long as we use storage devices. The end-user interacting with the low-level interface may be phased out though.

icebraining 13y ago
I think the argument was purely about UI semantics. People here seem to be missing the point completely, in my opinion.
- freyrs3 13y ago
  Then the author is conflating the term "file manager" with "file system".
  - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
    No he's not, you are just twisting the argument so it is easier to knock down, which is a completely normal relevance fallacy even if you didn't intend it as such. File systems, physical memory addresses, and processing units exist in iOS, the user just isn't exposed to it. What many of us our proposing is that filing cabinets as user-facing abstractions in particular are not very useful. How many users save their files to more than a couple of locations (Documents and Desktop) these days? Rather, they just throw them all in one place and rely on search or LRU caches to find things.
    - Gigablah 13y ago
      > rely on search or LRU caches to find things Which is pretty awful in current implementations. Search in Windows is slow (contrast that with a 3rd party app like Everything, which gives results almost instantaneously). As for Mac... maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I've almost never managed to find anything with Finder.
  - icebraining 13y ago
    But it's not just the file manager, it's the file themselves as user interface semantics. Right now, the file system is more than just a data storage layer, it's also a set of concepts (files, directories, etc) with which the user interacts through almost all applications. For example, when I click on a link to a paper, I'm not just viewing an abstract document, I'm downloading and opening a PDF file, and this is exposed to the user as the UI to manage the content. OP is talking about the file system as that set of concepts, and claims they'll be obsolete and mostly replaced by more abstract views of the content we use.

dsr_ 13y ago

Of course the filesystem will soon be obsolete! That's why it's called ext4, to distinguish it from ext3, which came before. Oh, you think you're going to store all your data in a soup, pulling out collections of bits based on tags? That's a nice feature, and users may like it, but it's going to be implemented as an extension to a hierarchical file system. The same evolutionary pressures that guarantee we will have desktops* in ten years mean that filesystems will still be here: they've been tested in battle, and they continue to function in odd situations. *Desktops: they aren't going away. People like large displays; people like accurate and reliable text entry devices; people like expandability and the ability to plug new stuff in. These are all things that desktops are much better suited to than laptops, tablets, or phones.

protomyth 13y ago
> Oh, you think you're going to store all your data in a soup, pulling out collections of bits based on tags? Bit of history, the Newton actually did store all of its data (from an application programmer and user point of view) in "soups"[1]. It was quite interesting since some of the data could be on an external card and some internal. When you pulled the external card, part of the data would disappear. The Newton was quite fun to program. 1)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soup_(Apple) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soup_(Apple)
r0s 13y ago
Totally agree about desktops. Previous employer asked me if I wanted a laptop, but I prefer a large display, keyboard, etc. with a big fast machine and lots of working memory. Ergonomics are important to me, I have friends with permanent damage from poor posture. To see people hunched over laptops makes me cringe.
- CanSpice 13y ago
  I have two external monitors plugged into my laptop's docking station. Most laptops allow for external monitors. They also allow you to plug in a full-size keyboard and mouse via USB. "Laptop" does not necessarily imply "ergonomic disaster".

VLM 13y ago

The article assumes people don't like tree structures. What if they do? There's a good analogy with a programmer blog reporting he likes linked lists, therefore B-trees are going away. Or I prefer the syntactic sugar of recursion, therefore iteration will disappear in the future (or vice versa) I will say nothing screams "silo" like hiding metadata from the end user. Oh that plain ASCII text file, that can only be opened in MS Word of course because its a "word file" because MS Word opens when I click on it.

Nelson69 13y ago
A filesystem engineer/professor at a top-tier university told me once (well he told a whole class of us) that hierarchy is the only mechanism that the human brain has for dealing with complexity. A few people balked, they don't like 'trees' or what have you but nobody could come up with an alternative. This was nearly 20 years ago and I still haven't heard of a better idea. So what's a filesystem? It's a very good and very scalable data structure for storing lot's of items. It's pretty good at lot's of little things and big things a like and a bunch of sizes in between. This problem remains. Then be it tags, folders, something else, it's all just hierarchy to find and store your stuff in that data structure.. Where it looks like everything is going is having multiple overlay hierarchies, all your songs are in the music folder but then you tag different things to help you sort it out. Then maybe the computer can figure out some more optimal ways to store stuff. Take those fancy hybrid drives, maybe songs you don't play too often, there is no reason they can't be in part of the filesystem that is on spinning media and not in flash.
- lesedilino 13y ago
  >hierarchy is the only mechanism that the human brain has for dealing with complexity. A few people balked, they don't like 'trees' or what have you but nobody could come up with an alternative. None of you could think of anything better because you're engineers, not psychologists or philosophers. The "human brain" deals with complexity through: * causation * hierarchy * chunking * association * ordering Complexity in general is managed using all the tools of analysis: * drawing distinctions * drawing similarities * making definitions * transforming concepts using other concepts And this is all off the top of my head. It's been years since I took psychology of memory and philosophy of mind. But suffice to say your "top engineer" commenting on stuff outside his specialty and using the stupidity of undergrads to bolster his amateur argument is not convincing and is a pure expression of bathos.

abelardx 13y ago

How many kudos are from people who just wanted to see what the icon did?

jack-r-abbit 13y ago
Oh that is sneaky. what a shitty thing to do. one of those kudos is mine now and I am so NOT wanting to give this trash kudos. :( EDIT: Looks like all the sites built on svbtle do that. What kind of jack-ass "feature" is that?
- to3m 13y ago
  He has a twitter account, so you can do what I did and tell him not to count it :)
- makomk 13y ago
  The kind of jack-ass feature that's been carefully kept by its creator despite a number of people doing exactly what you did and then complaining about it. I've honestly got no idea why.
marcosdumay 13y ago
You just have to hover it for the kudo counting. How many are from people that didn't even see the widget? Or people like me, that just read it, and discovered that I was interacting with it only after it counted my vote? Anyway, it doesn't have any consequence. It's just some feelgood freature... Kind of stupid to have a counter that doesn't count anything real.

lignuist 13y ago

iOS n > 7 will have a file system browser. Why? Look at how many apps have built-in directory browsers to manage files. Moving this functionality to the core, will look like a revolutionary and elegant idea.

saidajigumi 13y ago

I'll agree with this observed trend. Colleagues of mine at a top-tier university are already seeing this in students. They have "computing" experience, but no real sense of the file system as an organizational and navigational tool. This poses a question in my mind: Are we creating a world of perpetual intermediate users? I think there are definite advantages to reducing cognitive noise in "casual computing" found in current mobile experiences. What's less clear is the path individuals will take from this world of per-app organization into one where content creation, workflow, and eventually implementation details increasingly take precedence. It's not enough to say "the king is dead" until we also have a way to add ", long live the king."

macspoofing 13y ago
>Are we creating a world of perpetual intermediate users? No, we're including users that were previously alienated from computing. The desktop metaphor has been with us for 20 years and there's a segment of the population that just doesn't get it, doesn't understand it, and just can't get used to it. It causes a whole slew of issues (e.g. the virus-pocalypse of the early 2000s).
- aidenn0 13y ago
  Yes, if users can't obtain and open external, untrusted documents then they can't get viruses. So what? Whether or not it's abstracted in a file system, people will be sharing documents.
devcpp 13y ago
We could increase the productivity of humanity in fabulous ways if we all knew how to use computers efficiently. Instead, we go the other way and only use them as entertainment platforms. Too bad education doesn't make big money.
- mgkimsal 13y ago
  Education does make big money (pearson), it's just generally people don't have a choice - they're not spending their 'disposable' income on it.

hakcermani 13y ago

The new OS X is kind of getting there isn't it with multiple tags for a file.

hadem 13y ago

The apps the author speaks of uses the file systems he claims will soon be obsolete. Maybe some enjoy not having to organize their data but I prefer having access to decide where my files are stored on my system.

batbomb 13y ago

The file system isn't going anywhere. The file system as we know it is almost effectively an extremely partitioned index organized table of BLOB information, which actually makes it more efficient when handling permission than a database would likely be. Without this hierarchical structure, permissions are nearly a nightmare to go through with. Furthermore, a database can also be implemented in a way similar to a hierarchical file system, and in many cases have much more flexibility as you get virtually unlimited extensibility (often at a cost of performance). Additional layers built on top of filesystems will make the way we interact with files obsolete, but the file system will not become obsolete.

ars 13y ago

I hate this concept - the app doesn't own the data. Apps that assume they do are rapidly removed from any system I use. There are some single purpose apps that have data directly tied to them, but everything else is not like that.

cstross 13y ago
The app developers would like the app to own the data. That this isn't in the users' interests should be self-evident. Vertical data silos with doors owned by gatekeepers who want to charge admission: just say no!

drivebyacct2 13y ago

Yeah, whatever. For practical purposes, it nearly has, and it won't really technically go away, the interface to it will get progressively dumber. See also: mobile (native) apps.

kryten 13y ago

Not this again. I've heard this argument recycled for the last 20 years. You can't abstract everything away into nothing. At some point the meat sacks (like myself) operating the devices will need to reach a compromise that the machine agrees with too, much as the compromise that I must turn the steering wheel and press the pedals on my car. The filesystem is a pretty good compromise. Denying its existence is another step towards our future of epsilon semi-morons operating mindless consumption devices.

grannyg00se 13y ago

"it’s a matter of time before the traditional desktop disappears and is replaced by one interface regardless of device that just operates on apps, metadata, and search." If you have to tag your data with metadata, you might as well make a place for it and put it in its place. I don't see a big advantage one way or the other. Unless the meta information storage becomes automatic. But then I probably wouldn't trust it to catalogue the information the way I want.

MortenK 13y ago

With a metadata based file system, the metadata must describe the content in a variety of ways for content to be searchable. Problem is until computers can understand what a certain document is automatically, it's up to users to manually categorize or tag each one, which is hugely time consuming. Better approaches than the hierarchal file system has been researched for decades, so far with no clear breakthroughs in sight.

jackmaney 13y ago

Complete and total FUD. Desktops and laptops--which are merely older form factors of the tablet, mind you--will be around for a long, long time. And rooted phones and tablets will allow file system access. Hell, I regularly use the file system in my (non-rooted) android phone.

icebraining 13y ago
I don't think that have some kind of backdoor access to the underlying filesystem makes it incompatible with the argument. The argument is about normal UI and workflow, not implementation details. Besides, the author is talking about content, and what if that's stored online? There's no files except for the server sysadmin. And no, the fact that you and I may continue to use it is not an argument either. The claim is "obsolete", not wiped from the face of the Earth.

shurcooL 13y ago

I never use the prepopulated Music/Photos/Videos/Documents folders because some apps pollute them with their settings and whatnot without my permission. Instead, I make one folder and keep all my manually created content there. I _used_ to try to organize by categories, but due inability to easily place same file in many folders, and things become harder to find as time passes, I shifted to my current favourite way to organize stuff. It's inspired by Camera Roll. Just a single folder with folders for events, sorted by time.

ams6110 13y ago

I guess I'm about as opposite as one can be from this point of view. I manage all my files from the shell prompt. I don't use GUIs as they are just too limited and slow.

twald 13y ago

I believe there will always be a file system NEXT to search. Think about it. You're at home looking for your keys. First thing you do is ask your girlfriend if she knows where the keys are. If she doesn't know you start looking for it in a categorical way: Which rooms were you in today? Where do you usually leave your keys? I feel like search is the convenient way and will be number one. Folders are a human's natural tendency to create backup plans in case of unexpected uncertainty.

icebraining 13y ago
But unlike your girlfriend, the machine knows about every single file in the system, even if it can't recognize it. So you can ask it to find files that match certain characteristics, instead of going through folders. To keep with your example, you'd ask "the object is made of black plastic and metal", "I used it last yesterday", "I use on my car", etc.

r0s 13y ago

Sure, focus on metadata... but then, the path and other data about a file location on disk is just another facet. This is as logical as saying file sizes are obsolete. Maybe storage gets so cheap users don't need to know sizes, and only developers need that info. Does that make file size information obsolete? No, absurd. Just like all metadata, some is higher priority to lay users, and those doing serious work need detail.

vonskippy 13y ago

What I came away with from reading that drivel is - Kids today are stupid, and they're that way because they use a iPad. Did I miss anything?

jroseattle 13y ago

Maybe from some UI, but underneath the covers -- this isn't happening anytime soon.

MichaelGG 13y ago

This is exactly the idea Microsoft had and demo'd at PDC 2003. Longhorn's WinFS was supposed to deliver all this metadata searching and so on, presenting a unified interface. Also, as far as extensions, Windows has been hiding them forever. Because you don't need to know the extension - that has nothing to do with the filesystem, that's just because extensions became the standard way many systems decided which app to associate with a file.

WalterGR 13y ago
This is exactly the idea Microsoft had and demo'd at PDC 2003. Longhorn's WinFS was supposed to deliver all this metadata searching and so on, presenting a unified interface. It is. It's a pity that WinFS never hit 1.0. Interestingly, though WinFS was one of the "pillars" of the ill-fated Longhorn, it didn't die with it. The team existed until 2006, and even released a beta and a beta refresh. I was on the team, and most of us got moved en masse to SQL Server. That was a heart-breaker. The team's blog is still on the web: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/winfs/ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/winfs/ I haven't kept up with Microsoft's post-WinFS storage initiatives, but it sounds like Microsoft Semantic Engine may be keeping the spirit alive.
- dharmatech 13y ago
  Question about WinFS. I saw a video presentation of it floating around the web. They demonstrated various kinds of objects representing contacts, documents, music files, etc. Where these object types extensible? I.e. were the metadata fields static? For example, if the "song" type had the standard fields (title, artist, album, year, etc) could I add another one (e.g. "producer")?
  - WalterGR 13y ago
    Where these object types extensible? Yes. I.e. were the metadata fields static? Well, yes, but that doesn't preclude extensibility. In WinFS terminology, object types were called Item types; object instances were called Items. From the docs: "An item is the equivalent of an object in object-oriented programming. It has a complex structure, specific behavior, and operations described by the 'WinFS' schemas." So one way to extend an Item type was to create a derived type (i.e. use inheritance.) WinFS also supported what it called item extensions, which were basically "small objects" that you could associate with existing objects. They were for things like reminders, which don't mean much on their own and could apply to many different Item types. For your scenario, creating a derived type would probably have been the right solution. EDIT: Well, now that I think about it, what if every different music app created its own Song subclass? So inheritance might not be the right choice. Ahh, that's the kind of thing I deeply love thinking about! I hope that one day I can rejoin the ranks of the lab-coated guardians of epistemology. (Nod to "Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia" by Cory Doctorow. http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm)

LoneWolf 13y ago

I really hate this idea, one of the things that most annoys me is the lack of a way to see my files in the filesystem on my windows phone 7. It is one of the things I can't live without, the abstract idea of Pictures, Documents etc doesn't work for me I want FILES not categories and types of files stored somewhere I DONT know where or how.

gryphon65 13y ago

Whenever I see a post like this I think it's circling around a different problem. It would seem that the overall task or project that a person is using the computer for in a particular moment is important but there is no modern OS (that I know of) that keeps track of this context. Such a system might be a sort of metadata API for tasks or projects. The system would have a built in task tracking application that would interface with this API. (Which could be pluggable) The metadata for a task could hold a lot of information. For example a default directory where files for the task are stored could be created when the task is created. Other applications like a word processor could query the API to find out where to store its files. Web browsers could store what pages a user looks at for a task. E-Mail clients could offer the current task as a folder to store messages in. When the user switches tasks the currently open applications would be messaged and could open files the user had open when they were perviously working on that task. Finally when a user marks a task as completed all the files and messages related to that task could be archived together. For the novice user of this system things like the file system go away. Their view is the projects that they are currently working on. The file system will still be there under the covers but user doesn't need to see it. The power user might have tools for developing common project workflows.

XorNot 13y ago
This is a very complex way of reaching the idea that we have a master "Project" folder on my drive. The key innovation you're actually pushing is that we need less applications insisting on storing data in "their" format. I would love it if I could just map IMAP folders straight to actual folders on my hard drive for mail messages, so when I drag stuff out of my inbox its getting saved to the appropriate place that I can later zip up and backup wherever.
marcosdumay 13y ago
From their early documents, it looks like the KDE4 developers got out to create exactly what you describe. But they created something with very little semblance with this. What you describe is hard, and may not be possible to define well enough for implementing. It's good to know that some people try it, maybe someday somebody will get there. But, anyway, no you'll still need a filesystem to organize the data you use on each task. Do you use only one level of directories?

egypturnash 13y ago

I'd love to see how a post-filesystem device would organize the content for my graphic novel. I've got about a hundred Illustator source files, one for every page. A similar number of pngs for posting online. A subdirectory full of source files for my model sheets - mostly Illustrator files, and some 3D models for a swoopy car. And another subdir for rendered copies of those model sheets. On an external drive (space is at a premium on my Air) I've got print-res TIFFs of each page, two for some pages due to crazy printing tricks I'm doing. And an InDesign template that I use to generate an InDesign file that includes all those pages, which I finally use to generate a PDF that I send off to the printer. This is not an especially sophisticated thing to do. People have been drawing comics for ages, and have needed much the same kinds of organizations well before the computer. A pile of illustration boards in a closet, labeled as being this story or that story. A filing cabinet with my notes, models, and reference. Et cetera. As long as the OS and apps have no real global concept of "a project", we'll need file systems to, well, give us a system to organize our files. Or maybe I'm a Luddite who can't imagine the critical change in usability that will result in being thoroughly free of directory trees. It's quite possible. But I sure don't see it in what we have now.

icebraining 13y ago
As long as the OS and apps have no real global concept of "a project", we'll need file systems to, well, give us a system to organize our files. I think that's exactly what the author says will happen: "(...) This will help apps automatically organize and index relevant information so that the interface’s search function can access and integrate content in a much smarter way, making the file and folder concept obsolete. (...)"
XorNot 13y ago
I tend to be of the notion that pushing data organization into the application space is just asking for trouble most of the time. I'd prefer to have one big, consistent way to organize things, then a few dozen applications each with their own take on it. To me the ideal system is one where the filesystem (or probably a very thin abstraction layer) can be intelligent enough to do sensible things with files when they get saved, and my applications work with whatever scheme I tell it to enforce.

jiggy2011 13y ago

The filesystem provides structure, even if it's not the perfect structure. When I start a new project the first thing I do is create a folder and put everything related into the folder. What the filetypes are isn't important, it's the logical grouping of "things" in a tree structure which is easily understood. If I zip and email that folder then I know I have got the whole project. Having a big gallery of every single image file on my computer isn't that useful. Maybe I can break them down into galleries, but then do I have to tell my other applications which gallery corresponds to which project?

incongruity 13y ago
Exactly. The counter to that (as discussed in this post) is that you can just search for documents based on keywords, etc. which can definitely work well in many cases – but I don't believe it is (or has to be) an either-or. Searching is not infallible either - at least not until search becomes semantic and truly smart, lest I misremember crucial keywords, substituting a synonym (or any of a number of examples). It's been my experience that organization becomes essential when tasks become complex. This goes beyond computers. This is the case with human systems or physical objects. I think the same goes here. Mobile devices have largely been about consumption or simple creation, with simple workflows. To me, it's an open question of whether or not their current interaction and organizational scheme can hold up as content creation gets more complex.
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  Keywords is an option, but then again if I send someone else my files what happens if there is a keyword conflict on their system? So we need namespaces or a way to track file origin/ownership across the entire planet? urgh. Of course filesystem aren't the only way to organise data and there are applications that already do this. An example that springs to mind are playlists and media libraries. The file/folder hierarchy is also pretty well ingrained in the web.

malkia 13y ago

I can see real books disappearing first, before files. This concept is so much ingrained in the actual development of apps, that it can't simply go away. Starting with scm, make/project files, editors, runtime functions, access to devices - it's all file based, and it's the lowest common language between 99% of the systems in this world.

roamzero 13y ago

The biggest issue of storage in the coming years will simply be the management of personal files. How should people handle the accumulation of a lifetime's worth of data as they migrate from older computing devices to new ones? Some things are generic enough that you can assume you can pull them off the internet buffet style as you need them, but there are also some things that definitely do not fit that category such as family photos, etc.

vy8vWJlco 13y ago

The need for a filesystem is proportional to the owner's expectation of control. Filesystems are part of the general purpose computing toolkit. Assuming we don't all turn in our computers for appliances in a forced buyback to get hacking tools off our streets, filesystems are here to stay, if only to allow the Morlocks to create new jellybean interfaces for the Eloi.

vectorpush 13y ago

So I have this group of bytes that generate a sound when processed by an application. You can call that group of bytes whatever you like, and maybe you can even come up with a novel abstraction for it, but be you iPad novice or kernel hacker, that group of bytes will always need to be recognized as a discrete unit for it to be useful; that unit is a file.

freework 13y ago

I'v been working on a non-hierarchical filesystem (if you want to call it a "filesystem") called Library Transfer Protocol. It created a new type of file called a "library item" which is different from a file in the sense that library items are immutable. An image, a video, or a finished blog post can be a library item. Since all library items are immutable, we don't have to worry about the CAP theorem, and therefore the "filesystem" can be distributed. You can see the code here: https://github.com/priestc/Library-Transfer-Protocol https://github.com/priestc/Library-Transfer-Protocol Click on the presentation at the bottom of the github page to see more info.

dharmatech 13y ago
This is very cool. Do you know of any other comparable systems or past work? You mention in the presentation that WinFS is a similar system (I agree; sounds similar in some ways).

_sh 13y ago

For those who argue that the hierarchical filing system isn't going anywhere, consider Yahoo vs Google. Yahoo was once a hierarchical filing system for the web, Google's philosophy was 'search don't sort'. For those that argue that tags aren't hierarchical filing systems, consider that '/Documents/Theses/TagsVsHierarchies' is the same as tagging 'TagsVsHierarchies' with 'Documents' and 'Theses'. It's turtles all the way down.

Spooky23 13y ago

This argument sort of has water because of the improvements in search. Look to email as an example -- you have filers (ie people who maintain filing systems) and pilers (people who use search for everything). Big inboxes and GMail made piling popular. Piling is the easiest way to operate, because many workers don't have a natural filing methodology to use. Search fills the gap and lets you organize on the fly based on standard metadata and content. But depending in what you do, it breaks down quickly. If you are an attorney, or a procurement agent or a project manager, you have a natural organizational unit for content: the case, purchase opportunity, project. It's easy and natural to break down information within the structure that you work with. It's also hard to search for... How do you search for a NDA regarding case A signed by party B? Typically people predicting the death of folders are selling a solution that doesn't lend itself to using folders. The author in this case is the founder of a photo organization startup. This is a use case where folders aren't cutting it, digital photography created this situation wherr we're all drowning in photos that are impossible to organize manually.

informatimago 13y ago

I don't mind keywords ("hashtags"?). Until we start to have more than 7 of them. Then I want to put some order on my keywords. I think I'll adopt the following scheme: all the keywords for my private stuff will be prefixed with private. (private.accounts, private.pictures, private.mail) All the keywords for my software sources will be prefixed with src. (src.public.lisp, src.pjb.test-project), etc. Oops, I reinvented the hierarchical file system!