Hey, someone remembers! (I did the Newton object store.)
I spent years of my life trying to get rid of treating direct user access to the filesystem as a foundational UI metaphor, at both Apple and Microsoft. As I liked to say, why is the UI based on a filesystem debugger? (If you can see /dev or C:\windows\system32, then yeah, you're running a debugger.)
Many people who aren't programmers don't seem to get deep hierarchy (deep meaning > 2 levels). Searching works, tags kind of work, but few people really know how to set up and use a folder hierarchy.
The reason it works to let the app deal with navigation is that the app knows how to do type-specific, contextual navigation. People like concrete things (whereas programmers like abstract things—a constant struggle). If you're trying to find a song, you want to have a UI that knows about songs: they come in albums, the same song may be on multiple albums, they have artists and composers, etc. Any attempt to represent that in a filesystem hierarchy can be nothing but a compromise.
This has nothing to do with defining standard formats for exchanging units of data. Just how you find them once you've stored them.
>> Many people who aren't programmers don't seem to get deep hierarchy (deep meaning > 2 levels). Searching works, tags kind of work, but few people really know how to set up and use a folder hierarchy.
Yep. Search works. (But forget tags and taxonomy. Taxonomy is sooo 1994 Yahoo! Library science! LOL!)
Imagine if the whole internet were below /. Now, where's Walter? Lessee. His initials are wrs. He did the Newton object store. Hmm.
Finder can't find. Explorer can't explore.
However, if I simply type "wrs newton object store" into my Chrome address bar, it instantly coughs up the Newton Hall of Fame! https://www.msu.edu/~luckie/hallofame.htm
Seriously, though: For a song, that works fine. But what happens when it's a note I jot down in a hurry? And then an address I tap in for later. And my grocery list.
Now, I have to keep this mental mapping of where my data lives. I have to, essentially, remember file types and associations myself.
Not saying I need a file browser, but the current iOS facility for this isn't good enough. Look at the card-wallet thingy for iOS6. Maybe what would work is something like that for each general type of content. You want to see any stored gift cards and boarding passes? Open your wallet. You want to see any stored notes and grocery lists and what not? Open your moleskin.
You've clearly thought about this more than I have, though. So what's your take on it?
Well, your examples are kinda covered in iOS already: the note goes in Notes, the address goes in the Address Book, and the list goes in Reminders. But I think I see what you mean -- where do you throw random bits of stuff and how do you get it back?
I think in the sort of usage you're describing, you just make random things and save them, and you get them back with search and a chronological list. The three things you describe don't sound like you'll need them after, say, tomorrow afternoon. So why put a ton of effort into organizing them?
It is of course useful to be able to organize arbitrary files in a more permanent way. The repeated mistake (to me) is that the process of organization is not itself considered a concrete application based on specific use cases. For some reason, a document format is considered application-specific, but as soon as you want to group two documents together you're dropped into this pure universal abstraction of a filesystem hierarchy. In other words, applications get to define how files work, but not how folders work.
For example, you could have a "project" that let you group various things together (maybe some CAD drawings of an office remodel along with various random notes and a budget spreadsheet). That's what a folder does, but a project would be much more specific--maybe do some time tracking, have some client-based organizational functions, etc. And of course you'd look at projects in the project application, not in a filesystem debugger.
I spent years of my life trying to get rid of treating direct user access to the filesystem as a foundational UI metaphor, at both Apple and Microsoft. As I liked to say, why is the UI based on a filesystem debugger? (If you can see /dev or C:\windows\system32, then yeah, you're running a debugger.)
Many people who aren't programmers don't seem to get deep hierarchy (deep meaning > 2 levels). Searching works, tags kind of work, but few people really know how to set up and use a folder hierarchy.
The reason it works to let the app deal with navigation is that the app knows how to do type-specific, contextual navigation. People like concrete things (whereas programmers like abstract things—a constant struggle). If you're trying to find a song, you want to have a UI that knows about songs: they come in albums, the same song may be on multiple albums, they have artists and composers, etc. Any attempt to represent that in a filesystem hierarchy can be nothing but a compromise.
This has nothing to do with defining standard formats for exchanging units of data. Just how you find them once you've stored them.