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1990's called, they want their technology back. [1]

It's been tried times and times again. I've seen it on Symbian on SE P910 (virtual directories per file sense, like video, audio etc), Windows 95 & later(`My Computer'), KDE, N900. You have seen it on other software, and probably will see a few more times.

The `no filesystem' is a leaky abstraction [2]; sooner or later programs start exposing files and directories, because that's what people understand and want to use. `No filesystem' is flimsy magic, files feel like physical objects you actually own. `No filesystem' is the limited menu of your DVD, files and directories are your house with rooms with drawers with shelves with boxes with items.

Your way.

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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian

[2] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LeakyAbstraction

"No filesystem" is only a leaky abstraction when people rooted in the 1980s write filesystem software and try to wrap it in a filesystem-less interface.

Files and directories are what you--and people like you--like and want to use. The rest of us don't give a damn about them, especially the way you build them for us.

Now I will return to your snarky quip. Your contention is that if something failed in the 1990s, it will necessarily fail in 201x? This makes no sense to me whatsoever. Almost everything that succeeds today failed in some form in the past, it's just that times have changed and things previously impossible or impractical are suddenly reasonable.

The whole point of $500 thingummies is that they exist in a very different world than $2,500 whatchamacallits.

> Your contention is that if something failed in the 1990s, it will necessarily fail in 201x?

Nope; the reasoning for the inadequacy is based on the fact you can't please users by including just 80% of features. Sure they use 80% at most, but everybody has different 80% [1].

A collection of objects (here: files) can only (reasonably) be a: 1) set, 2) directed acyclic graph - a.k.a. tree, 3) relational database (in the general sense)

1) is pretty much pointless,

2) is what my mom and little sister understand and use as it requires little querying,

3) requires a powerful query language (that's what right & comfy for us nerds, right?).

So far the filesystem-less software has been two-prong: mounting filesystems at certain pre-designated mountpoints (Windows & friends), nevermind that; and presenting a querable database with a bunch of predefined queries -- AND NO WAY OF CREATING ANY MORE QUERIES. That's the 80% your users aren't looking for.

Now if you come up with a query language that's quick and easy to use from GUI, I'll buy you a week-long supply of your $FAV_BEWERAGE, cross my heart. (drop me a line at dexen.devries + the usual gmail suffix).

But it will not `look like' -- semantics-wise -- as the curret breed of Symbians and iOSes. QED.

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[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/12/09.html

Well, how I could I possibly argue with a guy who worked at Microsoft and by extension, with the argument that produced the design of Microsoft Word? Is that what you are selling me, a future where every tablet includes every feature of a PC right down to having a filesystem I can format? I don't want one. You go ahead, be my guest.

This argument attempts to bludgeon me with logic into believing that filesystems are somehow natural, when nearly forty years of hands on experience with computers tells me otherwise. They aren't natural for a guy like me, only a mathematician would suggest that a DAG is the right answer for storing all the world's information. Your argument falls into the Turing Tar Pit of embracing a single design where everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy.

Now about my sister. Consider iTunes: She can type the name of a song and listen to it right away, that's my own Joel Spolsky quote. She can look at her albums. She can look at her artists. She can look at the songs she's purchased. She can look at the songs she has added to iTunes in the last few weeks.

If you want to call it a database, fine. If you want to call it a hierarchal filesystem, fine. If you want to call it a set, fine. I don't care what you call it under the covers, from my sister's POV, iTunes is NOTHING like looking at song files in the Finder.

My sister also likes her third generation iPod. She has never once complained that it doesn't have music files on it. If your sister wants a filesystem, I'm sure somebody makes music players with visible filesystems where she can be comfortable, and I'm ok with that.

Now I think I am going to go my own way and wish you much happiness as you go yours. If you would like something pretentious to ponder, here is my post on what's wrong with OOP:

https://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2010/12/...

I suggest to you--with absolutely no justification whatsoever--that organizing programs as towers of classes all inheriting from each other is isomorphic to organizing deeply nested hierarchies of files.

Another poster [1] in this thread made better argument than mine: it's not that non-hierachical file organization is bad. It's good (especially for small, homogenous data sets, I guess).

For other data sets it can be improved, and it will be: by adding support for somewhat hierarchical structure. They did it a few decades ago and it will happen again and again.

The example of music is very, very specific [2] -- all files come with diligently filled-in metadata, and all files have same metadata fields. Each song can be uniquely addressed by (artist, title, version) and mostly uniquely by some other tuples.

But that won't work very well for average Excel and Word files, at least not in the way they are created right now; they largely miss metadata or it differs from file to file.

MS Word? Creeping featurism, bullet-point engineering, yea. They painted themselves into a corner. They broke out of it with Ribbon UI. I like it :D

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raganwald, I'm terribly sorry for being irritating in the above posts; I'll try to social up :-)

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[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2301548

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2301942

I don’t buy it. I haven’t touched any of my 4,822 audio files in the filesystem in years. They are in my music library and I couldn’t care less about where on my drive they are or how they are organized there. The same is true of all my photos. The abstraction works perfectly for me in those two cases, I’m missing nothing.

(My parents would be delighted if Word or Excel had a similar library of documents.)

The media library presents you the files pretty much as an OLAP cube. That's possible only due to metadata diligently assigned to music and photos (location, geotags and date and time). It makes much sense to filter by one or two attributes to pick the music for to-day. Try testing your media library with all the metadata removed...

Since the Word and Excel documents often have no such metadata, and the possible attributes are numberous, it's no wonder no `document library' got popular as of yet. The best you get -- the state of the art of desktop search -- is full-text-search with some semantic analysis, right?

My parents (the only, well, “casual” users I know really well) have all their documents in one folder with no hierarchy whatsoever, any sort of library would improve their experience. There is enough metadata to make it useful, I think. There is the time of creation, the time a document was last edited, its name – that’s more or less just as much metadata as I use for browsing my photos. (I don’t spend much time organizing my photos and my photo library is not very powerful – I cannot, for example, only display all photos taken with a certain shutter speed. Despite that I would really never want to go back to organizing my photos in the filesystem.)

A sort of document library could be just as good or better than the filesystem for managing documents, I don’t think that you have to end up with a leaky abstraction. (Browsing documents on Google Docs, for example, doesn’t feel wrong but you are not using a filesystem to access your documents, you are using a sort of library view.)

I think it’s kind of astonishing that no one has really tried to do just that. There are half-hearted attempts but one of the things about abstractions is that they have to be good to be successful. It’s certainly not easy but I think it’s possible.

> Post-PC Device : Build me a computer - No Local Filesystems Allowed.

I'm not sure I would agree with the post. It is difficult to argue with the success of the tablets, but I am not sure if diskless systems could really qualify as a ". Post-PC computing system" unless they replace the PCs.

Harddiskless computers have been around for quite a while now, but i'm not sure a standard workstation could be replaced by one anytime soon. Even though most data is stored remotely, local work copies are at the foundation of most of the tools we use.

These tools would have to be rewritten either to no longer make local copies or to hide their locality from the user. Both of the solutions are nontrivial and their benefits are non-obvious.

What is the exact gain of doing a checkout to a remote disk instead of that of my workstation? That i can ligitimately slack off at the coffee machine when the network goes down?

But maybe it is just that im not open-minded enough to allow my PC to need anything other than power for me to be productive.

Someday the iPad developers will realize that users want to access their content from several different applications in a compatible, centrally accessible manner. They will want to combine a picture from Hipstamatic with a song from iTunes with a thank you letter they wrote in some editor, combine them into a greeting card and then send it via email.

In order to orchestrate this, they will need a central repository of their data, that they can search around, and is hopefully organized (ie, they remember that their picture was taken in 1997 at that trip to Chicago, or that the song was a rock song they heard on the radio in highschool).

Apple, recognizing this need, will release a new app that will allow users to create hierarchical categories for their stuff, search their stuff, move it around, and make copies of their stuff. The app will probably be named "Finder", and these pieces of data might be named, "files".

What makes you think that a hierarchy is the right way to represent shared data? I don't use a hierarchy to organize my documents, I use search. The problem with a hierarchy is that it appeals to ontologists, people who like to organize things in one and exactly one way, and they like to do it up front.

Search, and its cousin Query, are the other way of looking at things: Put everything somewhere and give me a way to get what I want. I predict that if and when Apple provides something along the lines of shared data, it will look more like Microsoft's original vision for WinFS than the Finder.

Or maybe... just maybe... it will look like Newton's soup ;-)

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/WinFS https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Soup_(Apple_N...

Hear, hear. Since forever, I've used my ~ folder as pretty much my whole document base, and use search tools to sift through the contents.

I add simply ontology when specific tools require their own unpolluted namespace (ie, pine/mail) or need to be installed for multiple users (local box binaries).

iOS devices (as an example) just take this to the next level. In fact, I don't even use the main screen for launching many apps, I just type in the search screen to get it. If I could speak it in a seamless way, I'd do that instead.

I never wrote that hierarchy is the only way to organize data. Search and tagging are very important, too.

But where did you get the idea that hierarchies are useless?

'Apple, recognizing this need, will release a new app that will allow users to create hierarchical categories for their stuff, search their stuff, move it around, and make copies of their stuff. The app will probably be named "Finder", and these pieces of data might be named, "files".'

They will be heralded for their visionary move; "game changing", some will say.

Meanwhile, Android fans will wonder why they didn't already have the equivalent of a shared "find resource" Intent.

Bickering will ensue.

In order to clarify, I assume when you say "no filesystem", you mean "no user-visible filesystem, but is still muggle-usable (and might well have a filesystem under the hood)", yes? Because we've had computers without filesystems for about as long as we've had computers. Computers with filesystems are a significantly more recent innovation.

Yes, iOS uses a filesystem under the hood. The applications just never expose it to the user. As an application developer you should be aware of it, but as a user? it doesn't matter one bit.

A computer without a filesystem that predated personal computers can be called a pre-PC device if you like ;-)

If a device has a filesystem for its own use but does not expose the filesystem to users or to applications, that's a post-PC device. If we merely denude the device of the Finder but all the apps use the filesystem, I'm on the fence. It's a post-PC device in all the ways that matter to users, but it feels transitional to me. Future generations of post-PC device won't expose a filesystem to developers or users.

So yes, iOS devices are post-PC devices, but they can become even more so.

A computer without a filesystem that predated personal computers can be called a pre-PC device if you like ;-)

I was pretty sure this was going to be part of the answer, but I laughed out loud when I saw it anyway. Thanks for clarifying your ideas. :)

It's only half a joke. The great PC revolution was that users became their own data processing departments. So pre-PC devices had users that were blind to the question of which Mag tape or removable hard drive platter held the data they needed for a report. PCs put us all to work as data processing minions, just as rotary dial telephones put us all to work as operators.

So if you turn your head sideways and squint, there are some similarities between pre-PC and post-PC devices.

The concept of "files" were an abstraction in the first place. The icon, or the row in my directory list output that says "/Documents/file.xml" is simply an abstract way of visualizing "where" and "what" that particular data represents.

What is different (compared to personal computers) is the filesystem (the location of your data) itself is becoming abstract and disjointed from the physical device you are using. Data is moving into the cloud and our devices become stateless interfaces. It's simply an undoing of what the personal computer did which was to tie your data to the physical device.

Thin-client with a new buzzword.

Agreed. The file system is hidden away as an unnecessary distraction from the user's view of the task at hand. The iOS devices are arguably more task-oriented than PCs.

Also in calling them post-PC devices Jobs is signalling his intent to continue moving in a new direction, one that separates them from the pack. Contrary to the article, Jobs did not claim that tablets are post-PC, just that his iOS devices were post-PC.

>"'Post-PC Device' doesn't mean tablet or phone, it means 'No filesystem.'"

"No user accessible file system" is probably a more appropriate meaning in terms of Apple (other vendors may vary). Another way of describing the Apple model is that the user cannot access the file system without Apple's explicit permission (e.g. iTunes and MobileMe mentioned elsewhere).

> one way it doesn't suck is that I don't care where my songs are

Until it's time to back them up, right?

What is "backing them up?" Why am I doing this? What purpose does it serve? It sounds like something that people with pocket protectors care about... They like the arcana of playing with PCs whereas I like music.

In all seriousness, if losing all your music when you lose your tablet is a fatal flaw, the solution is to expand MobileMe so that it syncs my music to the cloud, not to ask me to know what FAT32 is and why some hard drives can hold a 1080p movie but others can't even if they claim to have enough disc space and...

Oh, my head hurts just trying to describe the awful experience that is using a PC.

> the solution is to expand MobileMe so that it syncs my music to the cloud

Is this something MobileMe is currently capable of, or are you saying that it's up to Apple to implement that solution?

So far, there are rumours suggesting that Apple will implement music syncing via MobileMe, but right now it only syncs "productivity" data like contacts, bookmarks, and email accounts.

If someone's too air-headed to understand the utility of backups, why would they pay $100/yr to do it?

And that $100 would only get you 20GB, so you'd be limited to a total of around 2.5 of those 1080p movies you're apparently throwing around (assuming a conservative 8GB each). And it'd take approximately a million years to sync them on any typical home broadband connection. And you'd better not be doing that over 3G, oh boy.

No, moving to THE CLOUD just gives you a different set of problems.

Let's have a little empathy for people like me who aren't so technical, please. "Backup" is jargon for one particularly brittle and error-prone way to solve the problem of "What happens to my music when I drop my tablet into a vat of acid?"

It's no surprise that people don't understand its utility. Quite honestly, it seems like most companies don't implement backups particularly effectively. If "professionals" can't get it right, how does giving someone a filesystem solve the problem?

My suggestion to you is to think about how a post-PC device should solve the disaster-recovery problem in a way that appeals to postPC users. If you can invent something that a luddite like me would use, you have a YCombinator startup right there.

Think about DropBox as an example. It's a folder. And it syncs. DropBox is right on the edge of PC/Post-PC. It still works with files, but all of the moving parts are out of sight.

So go out and invent the post-PC disaster-recovery mechanism. Make it like DropBox, not like backing up music. Just don't try to drag people backwards to being sysadmins. That's not going to work.

Someone needs to make a much cheaper and more user-friendly Drobo-style solution, perhaps with compatible cables for iPads, iPhones, etc.

You plug your device in, it synchs, and then you're free to fling it out the window. No monthly fees to keep up with, and if done well, it's basically a one-time $100 back-up investment. Make it work easily with OS X and Windows, and people like my parents would never have to worry about the dog eating their laptop again.

Which is why the OS (Win7, iOS, OSX at least) reminds you to back up the system and makes it easy to do so (ie, attach drive with sufficient space, go).

iOS requires iTunes on a PC/Mac to back up, but this is likely a business decision to make more $$, and could easily be replaced by a clouded or local backup appliance.

In this mechanism you have to willingly ignore the backup requests... it's like the seatbelt beep in modern cars - at that point, it's 99% PEBKAC if no backup exists.

I tell Time Machine to back up. It will do just that for me, I don’t need to know where the actual music files are for that. This is really no problem. (This is from the perspective of a casual users.)

>To summarize, my contention is that "Post-PC Device" doesn't mean tablet or phone, it means "No filesystem."

It could mean "Locked down to need app approval and 30% cut of services" too.