I've strung together something using bleve full-text search and some OCR libs to scratch my particular itch but it still doesn't quite get all there.
I actually like the hierarchical organisation, and I don't like the 10 year usability trend, particularly driven by Microsofts attempts to patch over their horrid structure with even worse workarounds.
The solution to learning my mother were to find her documents is not hiding the place 15 levels deep and having 10 symlinks to it.
Fast, unobtrusive indexing and a good structure is all that is needed. Humans organise and memorise things in hierarchies, and while categories is another helpful abstraction they tend to be confusing if they do not point to a fixed position in a hierarchy in my opinion.
You can also explore a hierarchy; Not so with a cloud of things connected to a bunch of tags.
I don't think I've seen tagging systems that let me tag tags out in the wild.
The tagged objects define the relationships between differing tags which allows you to define that arbitrary graph. The graph can be viewed as an effectively infinite depth tree if you wish to.
You can see this twin representation conceptually as Artist->Album->Song and also as Compilation->Artist->Song, the latter being a small folder with symlinks to the actual song directly.
It's really just two different trees.
I think that this is extremely important. You mention iTunes, which does its best to pretend that there's no hierarchical file system underlying it. There is, of course, but—ugh, one look at it will make you long for a totally flat file structure.
I think that it's important that any hierarchical-file-system 'killer' actually not replace (or render meaningless), but only supplement, the often-useful hierarchical structure; and it looks like this tool does that.
(In case that looks like an argument, let me say explicitly that I am agreeing with you.)
Big claim. Proof?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_theory#Basic_level_c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype#Cognitive_functions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_learning
Maybe less abstract: if you try to remember where your phone is, do you follow a pattern like "which room", "which coat/pants/desk", then "which pocket/drawer"?
Conceptual categorisation + language + ? is totally how we humans comprehend and analyze the world around us, granted. (The devil is in the details of course.) But I don't see how we can go from there to "it relies on a hierarchy of defining attributes"
I don't buy your example because the concepts in our heads seem to be organised in context-specific word bags, i.e. tags.
I think I would believe you if cognitive science discovered that tree-hierarchy navigation relied on built-in neuro-spatial machinery or something like that :)
I _want_ to believe you but I also want proper proof! :)
edit: thanks for the heads up on prototype theory, can't believe I'd forgotten about this. also, thanks for making me ponder more deeply about stereotypes.
I'm not a developmental psychologist btw, just have an interest in cognitive development. The proof you're looking for would be more the field of cognitive neuroscience.
There definitely are graph-like connections between concepts all over the brain, I didn't mean to suggest that our brains work hierarchical only, to the exclusion of all other relations. As an example: if our brains were strictly hierarchical, we would be unable to see the similarity in colour between a grey table and a grey hare. I just meant to explain my thinking on how abstract thought is tied to a attribute/property hierarchy, not proclaim that I know how the brain works.
(edit: snipped on-topic content, best reserved for a separate post)
File systems are arranged hierarchically. Fluke of development? Library catalogues are organised hierarchically. Lucky coincidence? Books themselves are laid out hierarchically. I see a pattern emerging, but is it a trick of the light?
Seems like we like to chunk and splay amorphous informational units into graph-like rooted structures. Maybe cuz of its flexibility?
For something we use all the time and something we do all the time language-use and conceptualisation are deeply mysterious.
I'd say it's fundamental, not any kind of mystery.
Btw, Frege, following Hume has pointed out that abstraction is an equivalence relation: http://logic.uconn.edu/2015/01/21/reference-and-invariance-i... I wouldn't lump simplification and abstraction together, and characterising them both as associations feels wrong.
What I'm trying to say is that your time would be better spent in not correcting every instance of mild hyperbole on HN :)
And mine too. :)
What I'm trying to say is that your time would be better spent in not correcting every instance of mild hyperbole
What was I correcting, exactly? I was giving a casual opinion. To call a casual, armchair hypothesis that differs from someone else's "correcting"... well let's just say you failed spectacularly at understanding human language patterns.
I think it is fundamental. A hierarchy forms naturally from iterative steps of aggregation and differentiation: first, group all similar objects together; then, for each high-level group, look for differences within each group, and split the groups into smaller subgroups. Rinse and repeat until you've reached an acceptable number of items per group.
Humans also track a lot of things based on spatial memory, which no OS since Mac Classic has even tried to make use of, which is a shame.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_file_manager
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_manager#Navigational_file...
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2003/04/finder/2/
Any software developer interested in designing usable software should read and digest this. Alas, nobody working at Apple did, so I'm no longer an Apple customer.
So you had the option of remembering "Excel is the icon below the Special menu" and you could be confident that the Excel icon would always be located below the Special menu, exactly where you put it.
One of the reasons I switched from OS X to Windows is that Apple threw that brilliant design in the garbage. Shame.
Well, sure, if things do have a hierarchical relationship, but a hierarchy is just one form of network. It fails for concurrent dependency problems, e.g.
I have more than 5 todo.txts scattered in my system. I have cloned my webpage's git repository countless times in my local drive. I have countless LaTeX documents named letter.tex.
Of course, if I search for letter.txt I get a hit, but what other documents in my system did I create around the same date? were any other associated file changes? these questions are hard to answer in a hierarchical filesystem.
While we're at it, we should separate the task of document naming and classification from document saving. Right now, if I create a document in say, Microsoft Word and I want to make sure it gets saved, I have to pick not only a discoverable filename but also the right place for it in the hierarchical tree. I am just trying to type up a quick letter and get it printed, not grapple with the philosophical question of "where does this file belong and what should I name it?"
I know that I'm not always searching for files along the same hierarchy: sometimes I want to search along a timeline, because I know that I edited two files around the same time. Or I remember where I was when I wrote something, and I'd like to search on geolocation. Sometimes I know that I've implemented a similar feature for a different project, and want to copy/review what I did then.
All these searches still have hierarchical components in them: in the "date" case, I would expect to browse to a generic "N weeks ago" directory, look at a few specific items to get my bearings, and start browsing deeper to narrow my date range, or move forward or backward in time. In the geolocation case, I'd want to pull up a map, click on a country, then a city or area, and look at the files I accessed while there. As for the project example, I probably have the project files lying around in a hierarchical directory already. But I'd want to access only the relevant feature file, not browse the entire project structure again.
For me, the problem with non-hierarchic interfaces isn't just the lack of metadata: it's a lack of tools for visualizing non-hierarchic matches. Every search I described above requires its own GUI...
All of the other files I work with on a day to day basis I don't really want to query by structure or tags. I just want to know where the %^&*@ they ARE! And a simple hierarchy is actually better than tags for that.
We inherit all the information from your existing file system structure, as well as the people files are shared with, and provide a powerful content-based search on top of that.
Check out our website if you'd like: https://www.meta.sc
That and the fact that it's available offline on my machine.