
The disappearing file system and the new UI metaphor - ttunguz
http://tomasztunguz.com/2011/09/16/the-disappearing-file-system-the-new-ui-metaphor/
======
orev
I'm guessing the author is young and this is their first time through all of
this (like most of the posts on HN)...

As with all things in computing, trends are cyclical. First you have big
central systems, then distributed systems, then big central ones again.

Same thing goes for UI metaphors. First of all the filesystem is a required
part of any OS, and the OS could not exist without it, so it will never go
away. The GUI on top may or may not choose to present it. The Newton, original
Palm OS, and now IOS take the route of sandboxing the files and the app into
the same place, and the user just sees everything as part of that app. Plenty
of other OSes don't do this.

Sandboxing has its obvious set of problems, such as the inability to use
different apps to access the same data. There might be APIs that allow for
certain types of access, but that just not the same thing as allowing anyone
to access any type of file.

~~~
ttunguz
Author here. I agree things go in waves. I haven't seen the sandboxing reach
mass scale success before though. And I think this time it's different (last
words, I know). The metaphor is now so popular, it's hard to change.

I hope intents solve the problem of sandboxing.

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ryan_s
While I love the simplicity of iOS, the second you need to do anything
remotely complicated your stuck.

If I want to send said Keynote document, Keynote must know about my email
program, conversely if I receive a Keynote file my email program must know
about Keynote. I have little faith that my daily file handling can be
completely abstracted.

~~~
ttunguz
Android does a good job of this with intents. Google is also bringing this
standard to the browser. It's an elegant way to solve this problem

[http://tomasztunguz.com/2011/08/30/liberating-user-data-
with...](http://tomasztunguz.com/2011/08/30/liberating-user-data-with-
intents/)

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guimarin
What is it 2007? An interesting article would draw the comparison between the
three waves of filesystem access (command line, desktop, and no-filesystem
filesystem) and search. Then we might get an interesting discussion about how
search is really just a CLI where none of the commands are published, so a
psuedo-CLI. Want to be the next google? figure out the desktop metaphor for
search.

~~~
rahoulb
Slightly tangential, but this is my favourite Gruber article (from 2004 - some
would say he's been going downhill since then):
<http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/location_field> \- "The Location field is
the new Command Line". The article itself is mainly about the Win32 API (and
Spolsky's excellent "How Microsoft lost the API War") but what you said about
pseudo-CLIs made me think of it.

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nraynaud
This was described by Cooper in "about face" a long time before iPhone was
out. And I was really pleased to see it in real life, at last.

