Desktops like KDE can preview images in a directory. But BeOS was on another level with this stuff. Imagine if (1) your filesystem was a high-performance nosql

Desktops like KDE can preview images in a directory. But BeOS was on another level with this stuff. Imagine if (1) your filesystem was a high-performance nosql database; (2) your desktop was just a thin layer around this, optimised for navigating around and querying the stores. But NoSQL has never since been so smooth and beautiful to interact with. The mail system: a daemon drops files in a directory and makes a ding sound. The user then just browses the directory containing the mail messages. (The file explorer detected the metadata and displays this as columns.) When you double-click on an icon, you get a special-case form that displays the contents of the data. http://archive.arstechnica.com/reviews/3q99/bemail/bemail-screen-4.html http://archive.arstechnica.com/reviews/3q99/bemail/bemail-sc... If a unix were to do this stuff, it'd stop being unix: metadata on files is incompatible with the everything-is-a-stream-of-data philosophy. ryanweal writes below, "think everything is an icon instead of everything is a file". Brilliant. Haiku team should take "everything is an icon" as their motto.