
Why We’re Building Collections - jordanlee
http://blog.collections.me/post/37870399216/our-vision
======
benwerd
Cool! Here's what I would really, really like to see as part of a file manager
re-imagining: a unified, programmable activity stream for my actions across
both my local machine and the Internet, stored locally but accessible via API.

Imagine this:

I save a photo, with Photoshop, to my Pictures/2012 folder. It's immediately
added to my local timeline. It's private to me.

I copy the photo to my Pictures/Web folder. Again, this is added to my
timeline. I've programmed the timeline to also send the photo to Flickr when I
do this.

I copy it to my Pictures/Clients/John Smith folder. It's in my timeline, but
here I've programmed it to send it privately to John Smith via a web service.

I'm on a company network. I copy a file to a shared drive. It shows up in the
timelines of all the other people who have access to that drive (although some
of them may have chosen to filter these actions out). A couple of them have
actions programmed in; they automatically copy the file to their own private
folders, or to their mobile devices, etc etc. One of them decides to leave a
comment on the shared timeline.

I can search my timeline by type, person, action type, etc etc. And do the
same even when I'm disconnected from my computer and network, although not all
of the files are necessarily available.

~~~
jredwards
Sorry to use the "X for Y" cliche, but this sounds like IFTTT for the desktop.
And I like it.

~~~
sk5t
INFI WTF is IFTTT. HTH. HAND.

~~~
ghiculescu
<https://ifttt.com/>

------
egypturnash
I'm squinting at the pictures and wondering. How on earth is this thing going
to handle real _projects?_ You know, where you have like twenty different
kinds of files all related to the same project, which should be grouped
together because they're about the same thing, even though they're in
different apps.

I mean, here's what I find in the directory for my current comics project:

    
    
      a bunch of Illustrator files (this is what I draw it in)
      a few CBZs of the content
      some PDFs of the same content
      a bunch of web-res gifs of the pages
      some Indesign files (related to publishing the book)
      a couple .csv files used in an Indesign data merge
      various other gifs/jpgs/tiffs
      a Word doc
      a link to an external directory full of print-res TIFFs
    

Plus a subdirectory structure to chunk all of this into stuff related to book
production, model sheets, fan art, and whatnot.

This is the use case where every "We're going to replace and simplify the file
browser!" effort seems to fall down. Recognizing that real people's projects
sprawl across many file formats.

~~~
pooriaazimi
My understanding is that it's intended (for the most part) for average people
(who don't have projects and illustrator files).

If you want to be a "power" user, use Finder (or Path Finder) - you're not the
intended audience for this "app" (nor am I).

~~~
icebraining
_average people (who don't have projects and illustrator files)._

Sure they do. They might not have illustrator files, but they have aggregated
mixes of text files, spreadsheets, images, videos, etc grouped by projects -
which might be as humble as organizing their kids' party, but it might also be
something very professional in a non-technology area - there's more to life
than boring, repetitive jobs and high-tech professionals.

------
radley
Seems more like Adobe Bridge than Finder.

<http://www.adobe.com/products/bridge.html>

~~~
nicksergeant
I don't even... not even close, no. Sorry.

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RaphiePS
It really bothers me when I click a download button only to be greeted by
"Hey, you can't actually download our app, but why not sign up for our
newsletter?"

~~~
jordanlee
Apologies, fixed this.

~~~
marginalboy
It also seemed to break my back button after I went to the sign up page. I had
to type the HN url to get back here after I finished. That was annoying.

------
tferris
Just build a new Norton Commander for OSX and we are happy. Anyway, don't get
why YC/PG invests in such ideas. Though nice this idea is no venture case
(easy to copy when successful).

~~~
tomasien
Since half of YC's portfolio is in a company that was considered "a feature"
by Steve Jobs, I don't think he needs to justify these investments to anyone.

I have this argument at my job all the time: should we be worried, when
consulting with clients attempting to build startups, about the giants in
their industry stealing their ideas? My answer is always no: worst case
scenario they'll try to buy you in order to copy you. Next worst they'll try
to copy you once you're already becoming successful. Neither of those are bad
scenarios.

Big companies don't try to copy unsuccessful ideas, it never happens.

~~~
SqMafia
"Big companies don't try to copy unsuccessful ideas, it never happens."

Have you ever worked at a big company? Big companies are so dysfunctional.
It's not that the individuals are stupid but the broken dynamics of people
working together can generate some pretty dumb decisions.

Big companies copy bad ideas all the time. This is one reason why startups can
disrupt them.

"worst case scenario they'll try to buy you in order to copy you. Next worst
they'll try to copy you once you're already becoming successful. Neither of
those are bad scenarios."

This makes no sense. If they buy you, that's NOT the worst case scenario. The
founders walk away wealthier. If they try to copy and succeed, the founders
walk away with nothing. That is worse than them trying to buy the company.

I don't understand why "Neither of those are bad scenarios." The first one is
possibly good, depending on what they're offering for the company.

~~~
tomasien
You're missunderstanding my point: big companies have tons of bad ideas
internally, but the ideas they try to copy are ones that are rapidly gaining
traction.

------
nicolaus
I was a boy when I first saw that icon of a hard disk on a Macintosh System 6
desktop. The moment I saw it, I knew, instantly, EXACTLY what it implied and
felt a deep sense of satisfaction that the person who came up with that
(ostensibly a PARC person, not an Apple person, of course) was indeed a poet,
probably someone who could gaze at a Magritte painting for an hour, just
enjoying it.

The file-system-as-a-tree was and remains a powerful and useful abstraction
... that very few people are aware of. Not morons: my wife is brilliant, but
when she saves that complex XCell doc with all its pivot tables, formulas and
summations, she still appears to have no clue what happened to it.

And since the rest of the engineering community has also decided that the file
system tree is "too hard" for people to understand, they are doing away with
it on tablets now too: ever save or download something on your ipad (or apad
for that matter) and struggle to find it?

So if mere mortals cannot understand where a file went on the file system
tree, I sincerely feel like these poor guys writing Collections are handing a
machine gun to a cave man by which they will be clubbed to death with.

------
jawsh
A sophisticated solution to a putative problem of non-sophisticated users that
only sophisticated users would use.

------
newman314
Is this not Nautilus/Eazel all over again?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eazel>

------
Kluny
I think you're hanging out in a reality distortion field where people actually
do try and use Dropbox, Drive, iCloud, etc. I get it - all my friends use them
and talk about them and stuff. But my friends are tech nerds. Normal people
grow their file system organically. They don't use dropbox - they email stuff
to themselves. They are disorganized, and if they ever tried to get organized,
they'd just end up forgetting where stuff is.

This thing looks like it's going to add a whole bunch of work to my life while
I try to figure out where the hell stuff is.

------
chacham15
How is this app going to make money?

~~~
erikpukinskis
They could just cut a deal with Google for search, the the way Firefox did.
You could potentially eek out a couple of dollars per user per year if you can
get people to "live" more in this new "file system"

------
anakanemison
This product (might someday) solve a real problem I have: one significant
impediment to picking up a new web app is the need to learn yet another way of
interfacing with the content I "own" on it.

If Collections can provide a compelling consistent interface on top of
existing web apps, and an API for new web apps to target, then they might get
to own some valuable conceptual real estate in user's minds: "I'm willing to
try this new service because I already know how I'll be able to manage my
content on it".

This also makes the world a better place by making it easier on the newcomers
--it's unfair to them that established players occupy the "I know how to use
this already" space in users' heads, that their service has to not just be
better, but be _that_ much better than the established players, to reach
people.

Then they could use that conceptual real estate to promote those new web apps,
and that promotion could yield revenue. Another option would be to wrap their
own reference implementations of the services they're abstracting over in a
premium layer. Another would be to work with web apps to provide value-added
interfaces to the web apps' premium services and take a cut of whatever the
web apps charge. Another would be to offer a premium corporate version that
plugs into internal corporate datastores (in a way that, presumably, doesn't
suck, distinguishing them from other products).

Collection's play for native integration (e.g. extending that consistent
interface over _all_ your local content) distinguishes them from Dropbox,
which prefers to own that content.

A similar problem to this, that Collections isn't targeting (yet), is to
provide an abstraction not over _data_ but over _operations_. It's already far
too complicated to juggle email, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Gmail, G+, SMS,
tumblr, etc. That means that I have to really think hard about letting a new
web app into my routine.

An intermediary that presents a consistent interface to all those services,
and opens itself up for use with new services, could try to win over valuable
conceptual space with users and make the world a better place in exactly the
same way.

------
redguava
It would be cool if your slogan "Finder for the cloud" was replaced with
"Explorer for the cloud" (or whatever windows users call it) if they are on
windows.

You could detect this pretty easily and it would prevent alienating a large
percentage of visitors.

~~~
icebraining
Considering they're building a Mac application, I don't see why would they
want to attract Windows users, at least for now.

------
emehrkay
I have absolutely no problem with the finder and would not like a file manager
that links to my social websites. I would mind a separate app that would
aggregate that info, but wouldnt want use it to manage my local files

------
aaronbrethorst
I was literally thinking about how much I needed this five minutes ago, but I
want it for Flickr! Any chance you'll be adding support for other services in
the future, or adding a plugin model so I could do it for myself?

~~~
Terretta
You can fuse Flickr into your file system already.

Here is one of many implementations:

<https://github.com/patrickjennings/FlickrMS#readme>

------
marcamillion
This looks amazing, but it sounds too good to be true.

This is the quint-essential problem of our current time, for techies and non-
techies alike. Media overload.

No easy way to organize everything and find it.

Whenever I take pics with my iPod and put them on my PC, I don't take the time
to rename them from DSC_001.JPG to something useful. Just drop them in a
folder that is named appropriately and am off.

It is suboptimal. So if you guys can figure out how to fix that, there is much
potential with that.

But....iono...I am a bit skeptical, would love to be proven wrong though :)

------
nraynaud
Just my 2cents: have you read About Face ( [http://www.amazon.fr/About-Face-
Essentials-Interaction-Desig...](http://www.amazon.fr/About-Face-Essentials-
Interaction-Design/dp/0470084111) ) In this book they explain a whole vision
about computer things (memory, files, interfaces) that Apple is slowly
implementing in tablets and Mac OS X (extending it with iCloud). I'm always
pestering people at work with: "have you checked in the green book before
doing this?"

------
rdl
Maybe I'm not representative, but I live in zsh on mac and linux/freebsd.

What I'd really like is a way to specify files within zsh, then open a new
finder window with just those files in it, without moving them. Right now, I
can do "open ." and get a Finder window with the current working directory,
but what I want is something like "openw [1-5]*/" and get a new finder window
containing just things matching that. They could easily be in multiple
directories too.

~~~
icebraining
Should be easy to do; create a temporary directory, hardlink the files there,
run the file manager on that directory, then delete the directory and links
when it closes.

Something like:

    
    
      mkdir "$HOME/.virtualdirs" 2> /dev/null
      tempdir=$(mktemp -d -p "$HOME/.virtualdirs")
      for file in $*; do
        ln "$file" "$tempdir/$(basename $file)"
      done
      thunar "$tempdir" #replace thunar with your file manager
      rm -r "$tempdir"
    
    

Ok, now that it works, you just need the other 999.75 hours to make it into a
real application ;)

------
melloclello
Yay that's exactly what we need to make file management more coherent -
another baroque piece of crap that only adds features instead of refactoring
existing ones.

------
samstave
uh... it was actually not always this bad.

The problem is that we have opted too much for the visual metaphor for a
desktop/folder etc...

Back in the day (~1987?) there was a file manager called "PathMinder" -- this
was a GUI file manager for DOS -- it was AMAZING!

You had a full keyboard navigable system for your file system... now, this was
a directory centric model (the idea of collections/groups/tags/etc had not
evolved yet) -- but hte fluidity of navigating the structure was AMAZING.

I had fully memorized many many paths (just like memorizing the path to
various dungeons in Bard Tale) via the keyboard.

It would be great to have the ability to have a meta-tree of navigation.

E.G.: assume you navigated to \Downloads - you could then highlight a file,
say, a .PDF -- then in one more stroke, show me ALL .PDFs -- or what if I had
tags on my files - even AUTO-TAGS (like Received Via [work/personal] email) -
show me all PDFs I have received via my work email. or Show me all attachments
received from my mom.

Collections of content is a weak premise... I would rather auto-tag content
based on how I receive/procure it...

It is more about threading the communication channels than it is putting shit
in the same bucket...

------
colinsidoti
I find it interesting that this was in the same class as Filepicker.io

Is cloud-based file selection something that should be offered by a web
developer, or by the OS?

~~~
erikpukinskis
> _Is cloud-based file selection something that should be offered by a web
> developer, or by the OS?_

You're hinting that it should be handled by the OS, and I certainly welcome
that sort of change. That's the kind of thing that I think could set ChromeOS
apart, so perhaps Google will make the first move.

That said, one of the reasons why the Web kicked Windows and MacOS's
collective asses in the developer platform wards is that this sort of thing
_is_ often left to the developer on the web. There's only so much a
centralized team at Microsoft of Apple can do. Tens of thousands of web
developers constantly trying to one-up each other just have a MUCH larger
creative output, and there's a strong natural selection programme at work. And
so it's the Web where you've seen interface graphic design flourish, where
you've seen leaps forward in the interfaces for sharing content, etc.

So part of me wants to say yes: let the developers play with this stuff. Build
out the low level APIs in the browser (cameras, native data structures, etc)
and let the best ideas duke it out in the marketplace. Good developers copy
good ideas and standards emerge.

------
salman89
Good software idea as you're going after a market that existing cloud vendors
cannot (in terms of interoperability) in fear that it might cannibalize their
own market share. In the end though, I can't see this being much of a consumer
app, but rather a power user app. In the consumer world, I see whatever file
manager and eventual cloud system that's baked into the OS ruling.

------
NZ_Matt
Windows 8 starts to head along this path with cloud-based file selection from
within 'Metro' style apps. For example you can add a picture from Facebook or
Flickr to Onenote directly from the file picker in Onenote.

It'd be nice if they did what Collections proposes and extended this by
allowing apps to natively integrate with Explorer and not only the Metro file
picker.

------
mikhaill
Interestingly enough, one of the first YC companies from Summer '05, Memamp,
tried to solve the Desktop search problem with replacing Finder.

I remember watching their demonstration during demo day and and being very
impressed. Now the problem space is even harder, with cloud and hosted
solutions in addition to all the desktop files.

------
whichdan
I'm always open to Finder replacements. I use TotalFinder to add tabs, but
there's definitely room for improvement.

~~~
markdown
I used TotalFinder until I discovered xtraFinder just yesterday. Giving that a
trial run now.

<http://www.trankynam.com/xtrafinder/>

~~~
pooriaazimi
I used TotalFinder for over a year, but gave up on it a few months ago. It was
nice and everything, but the number of times it crashed when I was moving
large files (via USB or LAN) and basically ruining everything was alarmingly
frequent. After a while I would (subconsciously) 'killall TotalFinder' before
moving/copying any large file...

Been using XtraFinder for the past month and it doesn't have any problems.

------
marginalboy
I think it sounds promising. As much as my habits are solidly in the "file
explorer" space, I can see its limitations.

But, in order to even convince me there's a viable alternative, the user
interface of something like Collections has to _really_ knock it out of the
park for me. So much so, it seems daunting.

------
Tyrant505
This could be great. I have endlessly thought of how obsolete the current UI
is on the system trees are. Really wish the best for you guys, of course
signed up!

------
kvnn
This is important in order to track all of my personal assets that reside
(somewhere) on the web.

Looking forward to a good product - don't dissapoint! ;)

------
DaanDL
I think the whole concept of storing files in folders and folder hierarchies
is outdated. Why don't we use tagging for our files yet?

~~~
mercurial
What is tagging but a 1-level folder hierarchy with symlinks? It can work for
some use cases, but it doesn't scale well for more complex things.

------
isabre
Interesting idea. Looks promising. Good luck!

------
pazimzadeh
As much as I usually love native apps, why can't we just have a web version of
this? A new type of "web portal."

~~~
damian2000
Because it wouldn't have access to the local/device filesystem? Although a web
interface to a program running on the device would be useful.

------
gedcarroll
Don't forget to include links from pinboard.in as this is an important part of
personal knowledge

------
sethbannon
An interesting take. Collections seems to be a sort of compromise in the
native vs cloud debate.

------
pfisch
If this is making local copies and syncing them like dropbox it could maybe be
awesome but is likely read only. If it doesn't work like that then it will be
terrible and constantly be loading, imagine trying to open a big image
collection if it is making the requests right then.

However if it is dropbox style it might use a lot of people's hds.

------
asfdfdasfafdsss
Is this Midnight Commander 2012?

------
RK
Is the new Ubuntu / Unity Dash somewhat like this (without as many services)?

------
ghiculescu
How will this handle music?

------
alexpopescu
"Request an invite => "Subscribe to the list"

Something's wrong here.

------
ricgolbez
This looks neat. Looking forward to trying it out!

------
noonespecial
Pet Peeve:

The big friendly button labeled "Get the App"... doesn't.

~~~
jordanlee
Sorry this was misleading. Fixed now!

------
sonicvoxel
I think this is a good premise - the current form of file management is
definitely outdated and not nearly as functional as it could be. It seems like
you guys want to do for every storage/sharing service what Dropbox does for
Finder/Explorer by making management as simple and as transparent as a regular
directory on your filesystem. Here are my thoughts on this: first, I think you
(or the users) are going to run into a problem eventually of redundant data.
If I am sharing my photos across 3 or 4 different services, how do I keep
track of the individual files? If I make a change to one, do the changes get
propagated across the other services? Or do I have to do manual copies? What
if I upload pictures from a mobile app or a web interface, and then upload the
same files to another service? From the screenshot it seems as though you
divide up functionality by individual service, which makes sens, but what if
you included a 'Pictures' or 'Music' or 'Whatever' view, much like smart
folders work in Finder now? And like smart folders, these views would be
customizable. Would you have this integrated into spotlight or roll your own
indexing feature? A good search is going to be essential for this kind of app.
I like benwerds idea of a programmable activity stream, but in order to reach
a general audience with this app that kind of functionality would have to be
built in. I think its safe to assume that most users aren't interested in
extensive customizability and personal scripting, so even though a truly
programmable file manager (possibly to replace both the command line and the
file manager?) is a wonderful idea for technical users and I think something
like that is in our future, but I feel like that is beyond the scope and focus
of this app.

Here are a couple of specific things I would like to see:

\- transparent music management. If I am browsing my music 'collection', I
would like to have them appear side-by-side with my favorited songs on
soundcloud, or my amazon cloud drive or spotify or youtube. When I click on
the song, it will stream it from whatever source it belongs to, but will all
use the same play/pause/scrub controls. This idea could also be applied to
videos, or even photos and text. However of course this would mean creating
your own viewers/players (so maybe not something for a 1.0) but I think a
feature like that would be necessary to create the total "transparent cloud"
experience, because otherwise the task of music listening becomes a chore of
managing different apps, web and otherwise. "Buy/Download" buttons next to
each remote song would be cool, and once bought, all that would happen is the
button would disappear and the song would show up as being on your local (or
on your cloud drive or whatever). It would still maintain the same position on
your playlist. Now that I look at the screenshot more, it looks like you're
already doing some of this with pictures.

\- Dual/split panes, a la commander. Please. It makes life so much better.

\- Command line support. It doesn't need to be scriptable, but I think somehow
exposing your objects to the filesystem like dropbox does would be a good
solution, even though you may not be able to do it like they do by storing the
files on both the local machine and the server, since I feel that would defeat
the purpose of using cloud backup services. Which objects to expose and how
might be a tricky question for some services (like twitter), but I just want
to be able to cd around and cp files to and fro, so for services that just
store/share media, this would be pretty straightforward.

\- Hotkey show/hide. I love TotalFinder (<http://totalfinder.binaryage.com/>)
and TotalTerminal for this reason. It makes general maneuvering about on my
box so fluid (thats what she said), and its become a dealbreaker enough for me
that I've passed up a number of "better Finders" for this reason. It doesn't
have to slide in from anywhere, but I just want it to show up when I press
something and hide when I press something.

More than I expected to write; I guess I've been thinking a lot about this
kind of app.

------
hayksaakian
This post blew up quite fast. 31 votes and 6 comments in ~30 minutes?

~~~
aik
Yeah impressive. I'm on a windows machine and find the windows explorer, and
especially "search" to basically be broken. I have so little confidence in the
search that I avoid it at nearly any cost. I find that it was much better on
Windows XP (and I'm not saying it was anywhere near good on WinXP).

I'm not sure to what extent this is a replacement (on the site it sounds
ambitious), but I'm very curious.

~~~
djeikyb
I've a machine with Windows Vista and accidentally found
"\Windows\System32\where.exe". It's pretty dang useful, similar to gnu locate.
Doesn't address the larger issues of Vista or file explorers in general, but
helps get stuff done.

------
fotex
Go go Collections!

------
etrain
Emptiness.

