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Comment by oconnore | Hacker News Reader

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".

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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.

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