The Finder is dead. (sachin.posterous.com) |
The Finder is dead. (sachin.posterous.com) |
Finder was just rewritten from the ground up, from scratch. Heavy investment.
Spaces is about windows management, which has nothing to do with Finder. Same with Expose.
iPhone and iPad deal with files, one way or the other.
For mere mortals, the 'file' as a concept is further up on the pyramid of taxonomy; most people think about their stuff in lower classifications like photos, movies, documents, etc.
When you see a bear, you don't say "Look, an organism!" You say, "Look, a bear!"
Similarly, iPhone and iPad deal with files one way or the other, but the point isn't how it works underneath -- you could have a team rewrite iPhone OS to use Newton-style "soups" and have essentially no change to the user's experience. Files are a convenient abstraction for programmers (and, remember, an abstraction is all they are -- in the end, disks are just a linear stream of bits that the kernel/file system layer "artificially" organize into "files"), and there doesn't seem to be any need to hide a file system from programmers. But users are, in most cases, better off dealing with app-specific document managers.
Spaces and Expose are not "Finder" directly, but they are still concepts trying to deal with the issues around windows, multiple apps, and sharing between apps.
Limiting the amount of interaction the end user has with a hierarchical filesystem may well be a Good Thing. Increasing the degree to which each application is a black box containing all associated data is a Bad Thing. Making each application responsible for the mechanism by which data can be transferred, archived and synchronized is also a Bad Thing.
Not that the systems we have now are anything to be proud of.
Think of this as a "meta-filesystem". Instead of asking the OS for files and folders, an app just asks the OS for "photos" or "music". Most people, and by most people I am referring to the lowest common dominator like your grandmother, don't care where a file is and actually constantly loses where files are.
As with all things Mac, since Apple obviously dogfoods their systems and servers with their computers, the filesystem will not go away. But it will be hidden from the bottom 99% technical layperson who simply doesn't care. Files and Finder, like Terminal.app, will be there for those of us who do care.
You need to differentiate between what's good for the people/commoner and what's good for the developer/pro-user, since they are in extremely difference market segments given technical proficiency.
Loads. They are called working scientists. Sometimes there is a perception that the world is divided into geeks and "appliance" users. There is actually a non-trivial amount of grey area in between.
Ask ten random Mac users how to find a file by name via the command line.
Please don't try to hide the guts of a system from me. It is the thing I value most about my Mac.
Complicated tools to do complicated things.
I don't see any reason that the Mac should ever move away from having Finder and Terminal (though they will become less and less used by the average user), but the vast majority of things that "end users" do with computers don't need to deal with this sort of stuff. The tools to make end user tools (end user tools such as device OSes, apps, and server software for end user apps to interact with), will always necessarily be of another level of complexity.
Let the Mac stay a Mac (read: UNIX), I say. But I don't want to do most of my non-techie stuff on it anymore.
If I want to copy, rename, share, or email a specific file I find it easiest to do it in the file. I find it almost as easy to do it in an app that facilitate it easily like iPhoto (with it's built in share and email buttons). I find it much more difficult to do it in an app that doesn't make it quite as easily facilitated through the UI, like iTunes.
I would love for the finder to go away, but I'd hate for it to go away at the expense of every app developer having to rebuild mechanisms into each app to expose general file manipulations that the finder handles quite well right now.
Hierarchical file systems aren't terribly usable--how many people do you know who just splay all their files across their desktop--but I can't imagine Apple replacing it with just an app model. (Personally, I like Gmail's archive/label/search system for a filesystem UI, but it's hard to see what wrinkles we'd run into translating it into a general FS.)
The future is one big black box that it difficult to manage or migrate.
iTunes does pretty well but doesn’t make it all the way. More a fault of the of metadata than iTunes. You are be able to access your music the old-fashioned (crappy) way – which doesn’t make any sense for music – but there you go. All nicely organized in folders. That’s how it should be. I want specialized apps, I don’t think any generic file browser could be as feature rich as specialized apps without turning into some kind hybrid monster and usability abomination.
So it’s possible. Sure, it’s also hard.
Postulating that the current model of user's interacting with files mostly because Applications are now called Apps is faintly ludicrous.
On the other hand I think that hiding the intricacies of the filesystem in a user-friendly way would be welcomed by most people that use a computer for non-technical purposes. It certainly reduces the likelihood of problems caused by accidental deletion of config/application data.
Having the more general layer underneath gives you more power when you need it. It also gives all apps a simple, standard place to store their data. The raw file system has been slowly losing its prominence over time, but I really don't see a benefit in scrapping it altogether.
Web Designers: Wake Up And Smell The Touchscreen Coffee! http://ebooktest.wordpress.com/2010/01/31/web-designers-wake...
Edited to add: This does not necessarily mean access to the CLI will be taken away. I think Devs would revolt over that.
If this seems far fetched, look at it this way: most desktop apps are becoming more like browsers given how they use the network. Spotify is a perfect example (for those who've used it).
1) It'll be a hell of work to parse everything. Should my music clips go into the music folder or video folder? Sure, you can associate file extensions, but what if the software isn't installed yet? If two programs have to share files? The relations can fail in too many ways.
2) All software to ever run in this machine would have to fully implement it's own "file explorer". The picture manager will have to be able to rename, organize move files, as will the document editor, the video player, the text editor...
3) Less freedom of movement. What if I want to send a set of videos, documents and audio files to someone else? Would I have to open each app and politely ask it to send an email (which they will have to implement, too)? What if I want to backup an entire hard drive, with hundreds of different file types?
3) It'll be a complete hell if things go wrong, and you will have to resort to file management anyway. File lost extension somehow? Major file extension conflict? Unknown file type? You are screwed without manipulating the files themselves.
And don't even get me started on the reliability of your "in the cloud" future.
In fact Finder capabilities should only grow as many people choose to de-centralize and sychronize their storage.
Is this really what we want?
I cringe every time I HAVE to drop to shell just to manipulate a specific file the way I would like to.
src: http://www.tgdaily.com/mobility-features/49169-report-androi...
I guess my disagreement stems from the fact that I don't see what I type into those boxes as commands (even though some search boxes, like the one in the Windows start menu, can work that way). I think of those boxes as fixed to one command, search, and all I get to type are parameters.
in iPhoto, there's a preference to set which email client it sends to
Intents on Android do something like that, but I am not sure how much they live up to their potential yet.
I am new to iPhoto and don't know about the config. I saw other people having problems with emailing photos from iPhoto, too.
Not everything Apple does or want is automatically the best way of doing things. This model they push works best if all applications are from the same vendor. Guess who has a vested interest in pushing that model?
Will all apps have the same kind of config? Or will I have to learn each new app, to make it work with another app? If I don't want to listen to my MP3s in iTunes, what do i do? Suppose I can send photos from iPhoto to Photoshop (or should I request them from within Photoshop, or should it work both ways?). Can I send them to The Gimp, too? If the Gimp adds a "request from iPhoto" button, will it add a "request from <Flickr|someOtherPhotoApp>" button, too? Will Photoshop?
Because the file system is pretty simple and universal. It's true that a lot of people have some trouble with it, but there might be trouble with the alternatives, too.
I think something like desktop search has maybe a better chance than the shiny GUIs.
The email export function is implemented with AppleScript. To add support for Thunderbird (for example) just means writing a similar script for it. Indeed, it appears that someone has already done so: http://softpixel.com/~cwright/programming/iPhoto/
Note that this is a minor hack, to get the button within iPhoto to support Thunderbird. It isn't necessary to get the same function as a regular Scripts menu item. Such scripts can be written in AppleScript, Ruby[1], Python, and Objective-C.
This is not really a solution to the more general problem being discussed, but I thought it worth mentioning.
[1]: http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/cocoa/C...
Apple has an iLife media browser. It lets any application access any of the media on your system, including photos and music.
Seriously though, from the user standpoint, typing "vim" into the shell and typing "TextMate" into Spotlight are more similar to each other than either of them are to navigating through the Finder and double-clicking TextMate, or even clicking it on the dock. The shell is smarter, but perhaps too smart for some users.
Not a snarky question: I'm not very familiar with scientific computing and am curious (from a UI perspective) why, say, applications for office work manage to keep things essentially all in the GUI, but apps used by scientists can't. Is the problem that scientific apps don't devote enough resources to good/comprehensive UI or is it that what scientists do is better done from a command line?
Regardless: as I said elsewhere in this thread, this is why I'm starting to think of PCs/Macs as the workstations of this era. There will always be a need for them. But they're probably needlessly complex for most uses.
Certainly in my area (astronomy) I have seen some attempts to provide gui based intefaces to data reduction, and even mocked up a few myself; but the effort to reward ratio isn't worth it - especially since you are dealing with people who can, in general, follow instructions.
Also, do not underestimate the higher effiency of the commandline - after all, there is a good reason we all use it. Even if there was a system administration gui out there, would most sysadmins use it? It's actually faster to type.
I think the "appliance" model of computing (eg. iPhone/iPad) is perfectly valid for a good percentage of the population at least for some of the time, but it won't render "classic" computers obsolete.
I also have to say that personally, I have generally been dissatisfied with attempts to disguise or flatten the filesystem by, for example, using tags instead. I actually think pretty damn hierarchically, so I often organise my material as IF it was a filesystem, when the application will allow me to do so - maybe it's just me?
An iPad running a terminal emulator and with a keyboard attached would be a comparable experience. Though, clearly, it's not the best solution for most such users. Linux/etc all the way for that.