
Mountain Lion's new file system - speednoise
http://informationarchitects.net/blog/mountain-lions-new-file-system/
======
eblume
I couldn't get past this part:

    
    
        Even geeks can’t handle folders in folders
    

Hierarchical file systems weren't invented because it was ancient times and
they were the easiest thing to produce. Hierarchical file systems were
invented because they are a really, really good paradigm for storing and
retrieving hierarchical data - which I strongly believe is still the case for
the majority of files.

I didn't read further in to the article so perhaps I missed where this same
idea was discussed, but I think a useful idea going forward would be meta-
tagging of data. Something very basic like the ability to flag a file and
later search or sort by those flags. Do it for specific folders, like the
Documents folders. Done.

Now the 'non-geek's can deal with flat file structures and us 'geek's can do
smarter things.

~~~
stcredzero
_> Hierarchical file systems weren't invented because it was ancient times and
they were the easiest thing to produce._

Correct. They were invented because it was just past the middle of the 20th
century, and they were the best organization mechanism for the resources
available. They're also very robust, versatile, and wonderful in innumerable
ways, especially for the audience at the time. Unfortunately, they're not the
best thing for most users today, when we have more computing power and
experience with search as an organization tool.

~~~
johncoltrane
Search is the opposite of an organization tool. It's a tool that allow users
to avoid being organized.

~~~
stcredzero
Or, it's a tool that allows users to have organization, without needing to
implement it themselves. (After all, the indexes of the search mechanism
clearly have a high degree of organization.)

------
crazygringo
> _Folders are not a feature that beginners muddle through but pro users
> require. No one can deal with deep folder structures. Our brain is simply
> not built for them._

This is ridiculous. I have computer files I've produced from over the past 20
years. As time goes by, I continually archive them in a big old hierarchical
folder called "Archive". Broken down my life phase, school year, project, etc.
Without folders-inside-of-folders that whole system would be a _mess_.

Or, programming projects. How can you even imagine organizing your
stylesheets, plugins, libraries, components, endpoints, controllers, etc.
without folders?

I'm sorry, but throwing away hierarchical folders completely is a monumentally
stupid thing to advocate. Beginners might be better off without them, but pro
users _absolutely_ require them.

And our brain is most _certainly_ built for them:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_palace>

Now, I'd love to have tags as well, but "keep your hands off my folders!" :)

------
revelation
Coming from Linux, you would think "new file system" would mean that: a new
file system.

But its just the same smoke and mirrors Microsoft did when they scrapped
WinFS: add magic folders, terrible ideas (translated folder names?) and
missing hard features (links) in a limited fashion.

Thats sad, because the file system could certainly do with a complete
makeover: metadata, builtin sync with the cloud, backup and encryption as a
first-class citizen, etc. etc.

For now, thats only available in enterprise solutions like ZFS or in the still
very alpha btrfs.

~~~
Lewisham
My feeling is that Microsoft is much closer to a post-files world than Apple
is. Apple thinks files should stay within the app, which is exactly the
opposite of why we had consumer-viewable file systems in the first place. We
want/need to be able to edit files in different programs.

Windows 8's Contracts, combined with system-wide Share, and storing everything
on Skydrive (so when you log in to another Windows 8 machine with your Live
ID, it's all there) is a much more rounded vision for a post-file world, one
where you have documents which are shared around, rather than opening apps
then pointing at files.

~~~
shock3naw
And once uploaded, Microsoft will inspect your files and ban/suspend you from
SkyDrive, Hotmail, Xbox Live, and the Marketplace if they don't like
something. [[http://wmpoweruser.com/watch-what-you-store-on-
skydriveyou-m...](http://wmpoweruser.com/watch-what-you-store-on-skydriveyou-
may-lose-your-microsoft-life/)]

------
drcube
This is bullshit, in a lot of ways.

1) This isn't a file system. It's a file structure.

2) Presumably I can still make directories inside of other directories if I
want to, right? Given that this isn't an actual "new file system", they can't
stop me, right? This was totally unanswered by the article.

3) If they actually prevent heirarchical file structure, can OSX still be
called Unix? I think you need root, /usr, /dev, /etc, et cetera.

4) In all my years of dealing with noobs, I've never seen anyone flummoxed by
a heirarchical file setup. Yeah, when they first start out, many people open
files by clicking the program and choosing "open". But it usually isn't long
before they want to start transfering files between devices, folders and
programs. And if you need to do anything like that, you need a file browser
and heirarchical structure.

I guess I've read it enough to believe it, but I can't. How can computer
professionals actually suggest it should be like this? For _everyone_ and not
just some training wheels I can take off?

------
rflrob
I find the claim that _nobody_ understands multi-level file systems a hard to
swallow. Inside my Documents folder, I have a folder for one of each of
several organizations I work with, inside of those a set of folders for one of
several different things I do for those organizations, and within some of
those, a folder for every project I have going on. I don't necessarily need to
know the complete path to everything, but anyone can generally look at the
directory listing and see what the next directory to look into is.

------
trotsky
Is it a symptom of the fact that he believes himself to be an expert on the
subject that he enjoys using the term "file system" over and over in a way
that goes against 50 years or more of common usage? Or was it just link bait
for those of us who thought there might be some new HFS+ implementation?

~~~
novalis
I started reading the article expecting to find some sort of description for a
new file system and couple of paragraphs in I discovered that it reads like
the how to frame yourself as a opinionated clueless twit manual of the year, I
am going with link bait. Priceless link bait.

------
iandanforth
Information architecture from a neuroscience point of view.

Concept building: A bottom up hierarchy

Everything you know was learned in the context of prior knowledge. You
combined prior experiences, refined them, and over time solidified them into
new constructs which you then used to repeat the process for higher level
concepts. Visual light and dark blobs become coherent shapes which get
associated with meaning and eventually those meanings get associated with
names like 'chair' or 'rabbit.'

Content access: A top down (and sideways) lookup.

In many cases we know what we want without bothering to think of the name.
Being thirsty may mean you think 'glass','faucet','stream','bubbles', and
'water.' But you don't have to think any of those words to get a glass of
water and take a drink.

Unfortunately in much of IT there is a textual interface so you first have to
pick a starting word and then use that to find what you're looking for. Any
time you think of a word it is physically connected to many other notions,
memories, experiences, and other words built over a lifetime of experience.

When we try to describe what something _is_ we access the hierarchy we have
learned. A chair is a piece of furniture, which is a solid object, which is
something I can touch. We may even use this description to create a
hierarchical description.

The tension here is that how we describe things is at best a very limited
subset of how our brain connects to information about that thing. These
mappings differ from person to person and change over time. One system of
hierarchical categorization cannot be intuitive to all people and probably
won't be to the same person after 10 years.

IMNSHO The only interface which will 'just work' for organizing labeled
objects is one that _knows you_. The best example of this is Google's one box
which searches my computer, builds associations between content that are not
directly related to the search terms I use, and modifies itself over time
based on my behavior.

~~~
awongh
this. OP should keep in mind that any user interface is built upon _learned_ ,
_flexible_ metaphors for the data it represents... files and folders are a
metaphor that break down for some use cases and work well for others...

I always have a hard time taking anyone seriously who thinks that these
metaphors can be fundamentally improved. A metaphor that's intuitive for one
person could be completely confusing and out of context for someone else.

------
kilemensi
This argument does not make sense at all. Almost everything we do or own in
the real world is based on one form of hierarchy or another. Work (CEO >
Executive > etc.), Home (Parents > Old Siblings > You > etc), House (House
itself > rooms > closets in a room, etc.) These are not just labels and there
is nothing geeky about them either. They imply a certain order or sequence of
things that can not just be moved around. If there is one thing that we as
people are good at, it must be hierarchies.

Tags on the other hand do not imply order of things. They are more about how
you'd describe or how you relate to these things. For example you can have a
'favorite' tag and apply it both to your sibling as in 'your favorite sibling'
and one of your closet as in 'your favorite closet in your room'. It says
nothing about the order of these things just that your like them. Also, tags
can be somewhat temporal as opposed to hierarchies. For example if we take a
folders and files example, I can have a top level folder called projects which
contains sub-folder for each project I've ever worked on. In each of these
sub-folders I can then store the project-specific files. I can use 'current'
tag to tag the project I'm currently working on. When I finish this project
and get another project, I then remove the 'current' tag from the just
finished project and move it to the new project leaving the hierarchy intact.

The point is not to use folders when you need tags or use tags when folders
are required. The best files system would be the one that allows you to use
both as situation demands.

------
DannoHung
When is someone in charge of such things for an OS vendor going to realize
that for any of "my" documents, what I really want is to tag them?

~~~
jgeorge
I would jettison every piece of computing hardware I own right now and switch
to the first device that would let me add (and search) tags in file metadata.

~~~
justincormack
I think there are some Linux solutions for this using extended attributes
(which are by the way pretty easy to use).

~~~
simcop2387
And one that doesn't, and is AFAIK incompatible with others. Nepomuk from KDE
does this with a separate database, I believe this is mostly to allow it to
work when xattr isn't available (say for some network filesystems). I've not
actually used it much myself, (there's far too many files for me to even begin
doing it.)

~~~
justincormack
Most Linux distros do not enable xattr support at all by default, which is
where the database thing came from. Very annoying.

------
rsync
So ... what happens if I drop to the terminal and:

mkdir -p /Users/username/folder1/folder2/folder3

... and then open the finder and navigate to my home dir ... do I just not see
past the first nesting ? Is it hidden ?

------
amitparikh
Windows did it first... My Documents / My Downloads / My Movies / My Music /
My Pictures. The author makes it seem like Mac's "default content folder"
scheme was a novel idea.

~~~
Lewisham
[citation needed]

I'm fairly sure that Mac OS X was here first, and it was copied to XP. IIRC, I
was running Windows ME at the time of Mac OS X, and ME did not have those
default folders.

~~~
akshaykarthik
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Documents>

Windows has had a "My Documents" folder since win98.

------
liquidzoot
I really don't understand what is being said here. How are folders a hard
concept?

------
russelluresti
I'll have to see what this is like by actually using it. Right now, my biggest
concern is that it usually makes for better usability if you allow the user to
organize and group content in a way that makes sense to them. I don't feel
this is an area where the OS should take control away from the user.

------
iioowwee
Wasn't the original Apple "filesystem", circa II, a flat one? That is, a list.

Not only is it easier to work with, as the article suggests, but, obviously,
it's faster!

I use globbing on a daily basis over other later approaches, e.g. regex. But
it works best with a relatively flat filesystem. Too deep, and it's off.

The simplest approach possible.

But before we can fix filesystems, maybe we need to teach people how to name
files in ways to make their life simpler. Long filenames and ones with spaces
and punctuation inevitably become a huge PITA. Yet we think of these as "must-
have" conveniences.

I used to believe that too. But over time I've realized this slows things down
immensely and introduces lots of unneeded complexity. Speed and simplicity is
more important.

If you can get by with only a "list of files", you are better off.

------
LaSombra
I think funny that it's easier to dumbi-fy the user instead of creating
something worth some like tagging and making metada easier and more useable.

EDIT: Also, I think he's referring to iCloud only.

------
jmulder
Folders or tags are hard in the sense that both of them require a user to
think about organisation, when in reality any of them just wants to find the
file 'magically' where they last left it and do stuff with it. In most cases
this is in some application or (in my opinion still a temporary stop gap) a
one level deep file system.

The applications itself will serve the needed context or metadata (type of
document, last modified time, access/sharing privileges) to find the files
you're looking for.

------
callil
For some reason I think the author is being overly wordy. The point if I
understand it, is that Apple is once again moving OSX towards iOS by switching
from a strict folder based filesystem to an App structured file system (from
the user's point of view). This allows people to find content and files more
easily because they will always be where they left them. In the app that uses
them.

~~~
LaSombra
I almost would not mind this if I could open files in new programs like the
Share feature of Android. This is one of the reasons I dislike iOS and barely
use my iPad for anything but comics and web reading.

------
crazygringo
> _We are the people that put salt and pepper on the pizza before trying it,
> because we just know best._

Salt and pepper... on _pizza_?

Is that a thing?

~~~
drcube
I put pepper on pizza. If you have meat or cheese on your pizza, adding salt
is just too much (for me).

------
quote
I guess we'll have to see how this holds up: Usually the problems arise not
from one's own folder structure (most people know their way around what
they've created) but when working together in someone else's structure. Does
this approach solve that problem?

------
stcredzero
_> But that’s not the real reason why geeks are skeptical. It’s because we are
smart asses. We are the people that put salt and pepper on the pizza before
trying it, because we just know best._

I couldn't have put it better. It goes double for us coders.

------
mbq
I'm sure this will add a lot of awesomeness to tasks like creating a web page
or an application; all the pngs and jpegs mixed together in Photos, templates
and styles in Documents...

------
1234567bob
Nothing to do with file systems, got bout half way before I realised this was
just some tool talking about how hard it is to keep his shit organised.

