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Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

> You still need a BMP editor to put anything meaningful in there. The same is true for a PowerPoint presentation, and an Access database. Although, creating an empty Access database and then opening it will presumably get you the Access program. But if I want to create a new PowerPoint presentation, I will… um… open PowerPoint

I think that really highlights the paradigm-shift that happened in UX in the last decade - what you could call "documents-centric" vs "application-centric".

Until recently, UI was centered around files. You used programs to edit and manage those files, but the programs didn't "own" the files: A file was generally independent of the programs that are used to open them. On the other side, a program does not "know" about a file until you explicitly prompt the program to open the file.

Compare that to the "application-centric" paradigm that dominates on the web, in mobile OSes and recently in desktop OSes as well: Here a program "owns" its data and you are supposed to interact with the data only through the program. It's an implementation detail how the data is physically stored - but from the user's PoV, there is no unified file system. Instead, the assets managed by each program are living in separate universes.

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And what a loss it is. Now we must split reminders from the documents they remind of, bookmarks from code repos, product photos from product text, emailed design requirements from design work. It’s enforced organization by format, rather than by subject, and it’s so bad that it’s experienced the ultimate software failure: it’s subconsciously routed around. We copy-paste URLs instead of using bookmarks, we just remember to go back and search for design requirements, we type out document names into our reminders. Personally, I often find myself wholesale abandoning an otherwise excellent program for the sole reason that all its features together aren’t as valuable as simply being able to organize data by subject.

If I paste a spreadsheet link in Gmail/Slack it will create an excerpt from the document and display it's contents/title in the message I am sending.

This works way better than sending files.

What's the point of bookmarks if you have URLs? How is not having URL a bookmark in itself?

Not only that. Your work application is used for personal stuff, it's super difficult to share a bunch of information scattered over many applications.

What we need is a "file server", and applications that can handle files, instead of saas.

SaaS was nice, because of the distribution model. Also because of licensing, but that can be done without servers too. We now have good distribution and update functionality, so we should go back to self-hosted files, where we are better in control over our own data.

> We copy-paste URLs instead of using bookmarks

Bookmarks are such a convenient and intuitive way to organize, I'm still baffled how few people actually use them. They exist like forever (1993 according to Wiki), yet there is always someone asking for links to sites/files/Tools/apps they use basically daily.

> Bookmarks are such a convenient and intuitive way to organize

Despite bookmarking websites I find interesting occasionally I almost never visit a site from bookmarks. I don't remember if I bookmarked something, I forget what something was called, I expect I didn't file it in a folder that makes any sense etc. I really want to love bookmarks but like so many people I just find myself not using them for various reasons.

All browsers give very little thought to the UX of bookmarks and what users need of them. It seems to have boiled down to developers thinking that because bookmarks are technically a nested data structure of folders and links that all they need to do is give the ability for the user to manually manage this tree structure and call it a day. I think there's a wealth of missed opportunity with bookmarks but this comment would get very long if I carried on babbling.

I've been essentially using my start up page and tabs as bookmarks for fifteen years. It's terrible but at least it's _under my nose_ and I'm reminded of those links' existence through my regular habits, which is something bookmarks do not do, out of the way as they are.

I rarely click on my bookmarks, but I use them very frequently. It's a way to pin an important thing into the personal search engine that is my (Firefox) address bar.

The part of the bookmark UX flow I dislike is having to organize them. Especially on mobile chrome. The UX there for folder org is so bad I just have a "log" folder and basically everything goes in there, like a sightly more durable and focused history.

I use the exact same trick - just let the search bar index it.

What I really want is a system like a personal search engine. Bookmarking starts a flow which downloads the page, strips out all the garbage, indexes it in something like Elasticsearch or Bleve, tags some metadata, and organizes it by facets.

Google is decent at getting back to places I once found, but there are still 404s that Archive misses. There's also sites like stackexchange where it's easy to get drowned out by irrelevant results. It would be nice to have a more personally curated view into it.

> Bookmarking starts a flow which downloads the page, strips out all the garbage, indexes it in something like Elasticsearch or Bleve, tags some metadata, and organizes it by facets.

This sounds very useful (especially the downloading part). I don't know how many times I've tried to go back to some obscure page I've bookmarked, only to find the page has been moved or removed. Not daily or weekly, but often enough. Sometimes I'll save the info in a text document, but then I have to run a separate search on the filesystem as well as the bookmarks folder.

I've started leaving myself notes in the name of the bookmark as well, since I find myself forgetting what page names relate to which topics or projects. I know I could organize them into folders, but then I'd have to keep them organized, and I have enough trouble keeping my downloads, documents, and projects in order.

Joplin actually solves this quite nicely with the browser extension. Unfortunately it doesn't really work on mobile.

I'll check it out, thanks!

Programs like Devonthink promise such a thing, but I've found their use not quite convenient enough to keep up. Unfortunately - the promise is amazing.

There are usually several more options to access/use bookmarks than manually crawling a tree structure:

- in most browsers when you type something in the url/search box it can search through your bookmarks too

- bookmark toolbars allow you to use bookmarks as a top-level or drop-down (folders on toolbar) menu

People have migrated away from bookmarks (in fact I'd argue that non-technical users never embraced them fully in the first place) because there is no longer any trust in that the URL you used yesterday will still be there today. Link rot is now so prevalent that even the concept of a URL as a destination is starting to become less and less important. Look at Google and it's on-going attempt to de-scope the URL bar in Chrome.

I have a personal Web based Bookmarks app, that I have self hosted for years, but even now I hardly revisit it unless I'm really stuck and a Google search can't find the site/page I need. It's got 1,000s of bookmarks in it, and I dread to think how many no longer work.

Chrome wants to ‘descope the url bar’ because if there are no urls there are only keywords entered into Google.

That experiment was halted because it didn't move the security metrics as much as they wanted. It is therefore very obvious that the conspiracy surrounding the motivation was ridiculous.

Actions can have multiple independent influences. For example, aggressively doing searches around the URL bar is decent UI and provides valuable data for search engines. It’s such a central part of the interface that a lot of innovation and experimentation occurs around the search bar.

>That experiment was halted because it didn't move the security metrics as much as they wanted

So they hypocritically said. In fact it was halted because there was blowback from users and pundits concerned with this.

>It is therefore very obvious that the conspiracy surrounding the motivation was ridiculous.

Well, I have a bridge in Brookly to sell...

You may be right, it's logically possible. We don't know.

But you seem pretty darn sure about that, and people who are too much sure about something can be easily sold another kind of bridge.

Perhaps, but it's one of the safest bets to make that huge multinationals with billions of private interests do things for profit, rather than for "the customers", "to change the world", and so on.

It takes a special kind of naivety to believe something like Google's early "Don't be evil" slogan.

I used to save a whole web page as HTML when I got started experiencing the early web because the page might be gone next week I had experience and afraid to lose the reference. Now a days I just use bookmarks because there's less chance the page will be gone in a few weeks. Hosting was expensive in the old days and now it's so cheap sites don't suddenly disappear anymore.

Browsers really should have an option to automatically cache your bookmarks offline.

> Browsers really should have an option to automatically cache your bookmarks offline.

Isn't that the default already, and has always been? I mean, most browsers I've ever used save your bookmarks to a file on your computer.

(Maybe not Google Chrome? Yet another reason to avoid that, then.)

I guess spideymans meant caching the bookmarked site rather than the URL.

Ah. Yeah, I already do that, too: I cache every site to this personal cloud of mine, that I call... The World Wide Web.

I used to have a lot of bookmarks and I used them a lot to return to stuff, but after half a decade a significant amount of them went no where. So I migrated to using note apps + web clipping or screenshots.

I’ve gotten in the habit of running a page through the Wayback Machine and bookmarking the archived URL. Would be nice if that was automated.

I now use bookmarks both as a shortcut to sites or apps that I use frequently and as a sort of process helper: I group bookmarks of apps, documents and even annotated pictures into a folder and open all in new tabs as a means to getting set up for a particular task.

For example when I do my bookkeeping, I can open the finance app, an instructions Google Doc, a spreadsheet for recording stuff that's causing me problems and 1-2 more pages I need in that context literally with one click of my mouse's wheel button (yeah, I'm a mouse person).

Same for when I process my inboxes, GTD-style: with one click, I open Gmail, my calendar, a picture of my notebook, a picture of the spot where I keep paper documents, the Facebook Leads Center etc, and then I just process each tab one by one in order.

Many people use their open tabs or their recently visited sites as a replacement for bookmarks.

The problem here is that there are too many barely working crutches.

Guilty. There's not a great level of abstraction between bookmarks (I definitely want to remember this) and open tabs (I need this in my working memory for a day/week/month, and/or this is interesting but I don't have time to read it).

I guess session savers? Never really got into them because (at the time a few years back) they weren't great for indexing within pages. Might give it a try again.

The ability to search the history is so good that it seems unnecessary

Automatically syncing bookmarks were a game changer for me, in Chrome and Safari. The fact that desktop Safari and all my iOS devices have the same bookmarks and automatically sync changes is fantastic.

It would be nice to be able to sync between Safari and Chrome, and I'm sure there are extensions for that, but it's not too much of an issue.

I had extensive bookmarks when I first surfed[1] the web. Then, that computer broke for one reason or another and I found myself staring at a fresh install of IE with none of my catalog. From then on I never built a bookmark catalog again.

I've replaced the functionality with various tools and tricks, from Google Reader to, nowadays, a simple dump list in Evernote with a loose tagging system. I guess now that you can sync bookmarks with Chrome and Google Account my original problem is solved but that solution came too late and old habits die hard (not to mention private data concerns).

I did take to bookmarking again lately though but mostly for work purposes: obscure pages in our wiki, some internal systems, the system we use to book leaves, etc. But if I have to change my work computer I would definitely have to ask around for those URLs again.

[1] Funny how using this term really dates my actions.

> not to mention private data concerns

You can set a sync password to encrypt all chrome sync data before uploading it to Google. This will prevent sites like https://passwords.google.com from working because Google can't see your data.

Bookmarks on mobile are an utter clusterfuck.

On Chrome, they're little more than an intentional history, with no ability to spatially organise or annotate them. Sometimes Chrome will utilise bookmarks as a type-ahead autocomplete resource, sometimes not. It mostly favours browser history, which may be useful but often is not.

On Fennec Fox, there's a vestigal organisation available (folders), as well as the ability to add descriptive text (but not specifically tags). There's no ability to re-order links within folders, or folders within the overall hierarchy.

On both, text input is so painful that any real organisation is all but impossible.

The tool that I tend to find most useful these days is the old-school "bookmarks page" --- a manually edited listing of sites that I've organised into some ad hoc folksonomy that suits my use at the time.

Desktop and console browsers are still more useful. Firefox has a hierarchical listing that I find useful, and will still occasionally use. w3m effectively creates a hierarchical page I can then further edit and navigate. I actually use that as the basis of some of my freestanding edited bookmarks pages.

Am I the only person on the planet who drags-and-drops from the location bar into the filesystem (in a folder for a project usually) to create a .webloc file?

As a comp-sci graduate, as someone who grew into computing through the late 80s and 90s, the files-based paradigm makes a lot of sense to me. But is it really the ideal model/UX for most people? Files are hard to manage. Most people don’t do library work, or habitually create relationship hierarchies. (I do it all the time; I love a taxonomy, but it’s work, and the general pattern for memory is association, not hierarchy).

I worry the “apps” paradigm focuses users on brands and encourages lock-in, walled gardens, and so on.

I think we need a third way.

Something that is evolving for certain common types of files (images, for example) is an application-mediated storage, but where apps "share ownership" (or rather, declare awareness) of files rather than owning them exclusively.

So e.g. my camera roll, Google Photos, and Facebook comments can all give me a window onto my photos.

Those "windows" are currently inconsistent and kind of painful, but I see the germ of an approach there.

> Those "windows" are currently inconsistent and kind of painful, but I see the germ of an approach there.

There is an approach here, but I can't see it as anything other than a hostile takeover.

The "shared ownership" of application-mediated storage is not under user control. Depending on the implementation, it's either controlled by the platform and otherwise sandboxed (i.e. you can't get at the data from outside of a participating app), or - more commonly - it's controlled by mutual business agreements between app vendors. In that latter case, you still can't get at the data directly, and the app you're using can suddenly stop being able to access the data, because the vendor that provides access revoked API access to the vendor of your app.

For a random example, see e.g. Spotify revoking API access to SongShift for no good reason, and then restoring it later, possibly due to GDPR pressure by a fellow HNer[0].

Regular files are bits on your storage. They stay forever independent. Application-mediated storage is just a window into business partnerships.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24764371

I don't think your criticism is accurate. The shared Photos folder on my phone is a bit different than the database of photos Google Photos has access too. But don't get me wrong. I want to criticise the shared ownership model. I just think the model the PP intended to mention was different than the one you criticised.

The Photos folder is just a folder. Applications that have requested and been granted permission can access it using a user interface of their choice. This is the "shared ownership" location.

The Google Photos database is stored on Googles servers. Third party applications do not necessarily have access to it. It is thoroughly owned by Google.

The "shared ownership" model somewhat blurs the lines between the two of them. I think this is a considerable part of why this approach is poor: it is considerably more confusing than the old filesystem approach.

With the filesystem, you know exactly where the file lives. Most people know how to copy files and send files and can understand putting something onto a shared drive. The shared ownership notion blurs the lines with exclusive app ownership, and the idea that there are files which I can manipulate becomes obscure. It is hard even for experts to distinguish between local files and remote database entries. The distinction between copying a file and using remote tools to share access to the same file (or a copy of the file) becomes frustrating.

The way forward needs to be about respecting and empowering the user. The user wants to feel in control of their data - that is why we have the GDPR and other comparable laws. The user doesn't want to subordinate usability to data trust; they want companies to fulfil both, and since there is a hole in the market, they have turned to regulation to help plug it. Unfortunately, companies have not responded in ways that give us grounds to trust them.

A new model based on user-controlled resources and programs that can access resources (given to the program by the user) without gratuitously logging in should be the way forward. This doesn't mean a reversion to the old approach. It had its problems. But the future should look more like the past.

My boomer dad used to hate folders. His home directory was completely trashed with files. Impossible to find anything, and his aversion to folders became a self reinforcing problem.

But with the lockdowns he was spending more time behind the screen and actually started to structure the mess. Now he’s even happily using a NAS to archive stuff.

I guess the principle of having apps manage files is even easier to grok than folders. However if my dad can do it on his own then it’s not like people just can’t learn folders. It’s really only a matter of how do you motivate them.

I'm 100% with this idea. Managing the file system in a decent way is extra effort and a skill in itself. One that is just adjacent to the concept of using a computer for work.

In fact I'd dare to say having the filesystem as first and foremost UI, is bad UX. We just grew with it, so now it feels like the most natural way to work because we've spent decades getting used to it.

This became apparent to me when trying to teach computers to some people who were like a "blank slate" so they brought a fresh perspective to everything. The concept of applications seemed about right for them. But opening the dreaded File Explorer and swim through drive letters, virtual and real folders, having to be well organized, having to worry about backups of specific folders, etc... was (and still is) a daunting task for them. And one that is just tangential to the work they wanted to do in the first place.

> The concept of applications seemed about right for them. But opening the dreaded File Explorer and swim through drive letters, virtual and real folders, having to be well organized, having to worry about backups of specific folders, etc... was (and still is) a daunting task for them.

Dude, I grew up with computers in the mid-90s and that's all a daunting task for me, too. In fact, it may be WORSE for me than for a "blank slate".

I had switched to Linux on my personal machines for a number of years and then tried to help someone with a computer issue they were having with their Windows computer- I had NO IDEA where their "Pictures" folder was, or why I kept seeing the same file in multiple places as I clicked around the file explorer. I also feel like I was confused about something to do with "Desktop", but I don't quite recall what it was. It was honestly pretty disorienting- I thought I was in a weird carnival house of mirrors.

I don't honestly know --right now-- if you can save a file to one of these virtual "Pictures" places or not. Or, if you do, where it would actually go.

To be honest, I don't know either because I avoided them since the first time they got introduced.

Those folders is precisely Microsoft acknowledging there is something wrong about the files-first approach, but as usual, in trying to make it more approachable, they ended up with an even more confusing solution, virtual folders that try to abstract the actual filesystem hierarchy with some virtual collection folders based on file types.

> Those folders is precisely Microsoft acknowledging there is something wrong about the files-first approach, but as usual, in trying to make it more approachable, they ended up with an even more confusing solution, virtual folders that try to abstract the actual filesystem hierarchy with some virtual collection folders based on file types.

I don't think those are "virtual collection folders based on file types"; they're just virtual folders (=directories) that point to two (or more?) actual folders (=directories). AFAICR you can save .JPG or .PNG files in other folders, and they won't show up in any magic "Pictures" folder; you need to save into one of the actual "Pictures" folders -- your personal one, or the shared/public/all users (WETF it's called) one -- for that to happen.

But yeah, it feels like the "solution" is at least as confusing as the problem was to begin with.

You're right, of course. I was talking from memory, it's been years since I haven't seen those folders.

> ...tried to help someone with a computer issue they were having with their Windows computer- I had NO IDEA where their "Pictures" folder was, or why I kept seeing the same file in multiple places as I clicked around the file explorer. I also feel like I was confused about something to do with "Desktop", but I don't quite recall what it was. It was honestly pretty disorienting- I thought I was in a weird carnival house of mirrors.

As I understand it, there are actually N+1 of all these categories of "semi-magical" directories on-disk -- where N is the number of different users registered on the machine -- but each user only sees (and has to care about) two of each category. And the confusing bit is that Windows tries to make it look, to each user, as if there is only one of each.

That is: There is a "Pictures" directory for each user, stored in something like C:\Users\<<TheirUserID>>\Pictures. Then there is also a shared C:\Users\All Users\Pictures directory (though see further below at [1]!) for, well, pictures that you want all users to be able to see... And finally, to top it off, there's the "virtual Pictures directory", kind of an alias (or Shortcut, in Windows lingo) to two directories at once: the users own, and the shared one. Just to make it look all un-confusing and user friendly, "here's the Pictures folder, where you keep your pictures". Road, paved, etc...

So, N+1 Pictures directories where each user interacts with their own + the shared one -- and likewise for the other "magical" per-user-plus-a-shared-one directories: Desktop, Start Menu, Music, etc.

> I don't honestly know --right now-- if you can save a file to one of these virtual "Pictures" places or not.

Oh yes, sure you can.

> Or, if you do, where it would actually go.

AFAIK, the default is the user's own directory; if they want to make it shared for all users on their machine, they have to jump through the hoop of explicitly digging out the "All Users\Pictures" directory to save to.

[1] Now, that said, this is apparently based on out-of-date information: As I looked through my Windows 10 box to check on the directory names right now, I noticed that "C:\Users\All Users\" is apparently also, in turn a "shortcut" (=alias) nowadays, pointing to somewhere in C:\ProgramData... So the above is as of now an oversimplification. But AFAICR that was actually how it worked, with the shared all-users directory being an actual physical directory on disk, in Windows NT, 2000, and I think XP. Dunno when it changed; maybe with Vista, 7, or 8.

I've also been using computers since the age of DOS and felt like I loved taxonomies but once I grew up I found out I hate them. A non-system/code file should better only have meaningful (and also easy to view, edit and query) extended attributes (long and short titles only targeting humans, optional description, creation and last update timestamps independent of when you have technically put it into to the file system or changed some metadata about it, content author field, tags letting you "put" it into several categories at once, type-specific properties like the type itself (so we wouldn't have to use stupid "extensions"), picture size, music bitrate etc). Creating strict single-place (symlinks don't help much in this context) short-named taxonomies for real-life non-programmer files is a huge pain and they often feel unnatural. Coming up with file names targeting both humans and traditional file system (e.g. where you can't use colons and have to keep names rather short because of full path length limits) while also optimizing them to leverage searching isn't a pleasure either.

I am sad WinFS never arrived and I am in a constant search of a good cross-platform tagging file manager.

I've been using hash tags in file names (e.g. "eat more veggies #todo.txt").

To group by tags, I use the smart folders functionality on windows/macos/googleDrive to save a search for items with the tag in the name.

Definitely not as smooth as an OS-level tagging feature, but it works in a pinch. Should be easy to port to other systems with some scripts in the future when/if this functionality becomes mainstream.

There is the problem of one document not necessarily being one file. Sometimes you have sidecar files or some meta data that is stored somewhere else in a database of sorts. So it can be messy, especially dealing with antiquated formats like dcim (easy file name conflicts), gopro leaves extra thumbnail files scattered around, wtf is even DS_STORE, etc etc. I also think that file managers are not powerful enough for searching and managing all kinds of data, the fact that we need photo management software proves it.

It's not perfect, but the macOS way of creating "bundles"; where a directory looks like a single file if it has a particular extension is 99% of the way there. The average user double-clicks and it opens in the relevant app. The power user can right-click and choose 'view contents', which opens it like any other directory.

This can also be done via compressed files with an application-specific extension. We use it at work for Python zipapps, and of course everyone probably knows .docx and .xlsx

> file managers are not powerful enough for searching and managing all kinds of data, the fact that we need photo management software proves it.

I don't want to be responsible for manually managing all my photos, copying them off cards or downloading from online services or whatever. I also want to view the photos in various ways: I'm regularly browsing them via the map view, or person tagged in an image, and so on. Hence the photo management software that handles all that for me.

But the photo management could certainly be better integrated into the OS, ie open your Photos folder and rather than seeing raw image files, it would load the photo management.

Honestly, I think a third way would be good, but sticking with a way would be even better.

A huge, huge chunk of my last year was spent teaching dozens of teachers (long story) who were used to, and very productive with, the '90s way of using files were everything, how all these new cloud things work. The whole thing was extraordinarily confusing. Lots of things that they depended on didn't quite fit with the "let's do away with files" approach, and the fact that they couldn't do it more than compensated for any productivity gains due to easy collaborative editing and the like.

We're all computer nerds here and love to learn new things about computers but most people aren't. People have treated the sick, built the largest buildings in the world, gone to space and developed new vaccines using this clunky, inefficient, Stone Age file-based interface. I'd say it's not too shabby.

Unless a hypothetical third way enables measurable, verifiable improvements (and I mean measurable, not "we asked 10 interns to rate how easy it is to perform these actions", that's an anecdote, not a usability study), that third way would be a net loss for virtually everyone except us.

FWIW: I think the constant UX churn in our industry is just the symptom of an identity crisis. It's what happens when a company (or, as is often the case, an entire industry) is increasingly unable to produce meaningful fundamental improvements, so it's churning visible, but practically inconsequential changes in an effort to justify the money it burns through. In our bubble we all go ooh and aah over the latest UX improvements of whatever piece of software we run into again, but truth is most people just go aww fsck, how the hell do you do X now, over and over again?

We're living in the age of search engines.

So ... just dump files in one big folder, and use a search tool to find them?

It's called Search Everything, and it's probably the best and most useful Windows utility ever written. I easily use it a dozen times a day, there's likely been days with over 100 searches.

That's more or less my approach.

It doesn't have to be "dump everything in one big folder", traditional file systems are still useful as a way to uniquely identify a file (literally a URL), but more and more, I use search to interact with data.

And that's the way we are going. For example, the Start menu in new Windows versions is best used with search. You can still do it the "old way" but for me, it is clear that it is now secondary.

We're so far into the age of search engines that you're even ending statements as queries

> the general pattern for memory is association, not hierarchy

But we organize our real lives in hierarchies, too. We have our clothes in their own wardrobe maybe, socks in one drawer, underpants in another.. not the green shirts and socks with the green books and the vegetables, and the forks and knives in one box with our screwdrivers, pliers and pencils.

It's never perfect, of course, some people are messier than others, but the general idea everybody knows and sees the merit of. We navigate and create hierarchical taxonomies so much, every waking hour, that we barely acknowledge them as such. The digital version of that is not fundamentally different from that.

IMO the question shouldn't be "where did I put this, so I can have it?", but "if I had this, where would I put it?". If you know your own or an agreed upon structure for something, it's faster and less taxing, both mentally and time-wise.

Also, I don't just look for things I remember, I also remember things by browsing the shelves so to speak, and that becomes more fruitful and enjoyable with some order :)

There's a difference between the way our minds work and the way reality works. In reality a physical object can only exist in one place which naturally leads to hierarchal organization being the dominant paradigm. On the other hand our minds operate associatively.

When we started to build out computer systems we based the UX on metaphors of real-life tool equivalents. I would posture though that as we become more of a computing-literate society and as computing moves closer to becoming an extension of our minds as opposed to an extension of reality, the dominant paradigm will shift towards associate models of organization.

You've eloquently expressed something I've been feeling for a long time, but couldn't put into words myself. Bookmarks and file systems are frustrating ways to organize digital thingies.

So what would be a less frustrating way -- tagging everything with as many (or as few?) keywords as possible, and then ad-hoc searches as looking through "virtual folders"[1,2] with the tag as the "folder name"? And more systematic ones as (SQL-style?) queries of tags with "AND" and "OR" logical operators? Or something else?

___

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27916648

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27916467

Yes - extremely rich metadata combined with robust search features.

For example: "I want to see all..."

- excel files

- that I myself have created (not downloaded)

- anywhere on my hard drive

- tagged with a particular project name

- containing a particular word inside the file

- sorted by "last opened" date

Then ideally you'd be able to save this search/filter/view for future use.

This isn't impossible to accomplish today, but it's so painful and slow that you're basically forced to fall back to folder hierarchies for organization.

> On the other hand our minds operate associatively.

The mind doesn't just "work" one way or another (certainly in no way that can be boiled down to a single adjective) and does everything it does that one way.

And hey, that we consider a thing a physical object distinct from its environment is a distinction we made with our minds, rather than the other way around, and that I have folders like "docs/images/photos/people/$city/$person" or "docs/images/created/cheatsheets" is also not because I'm used to that it being that way in real life.

The whole point of a taxonomy is for things to belong somewhere in it, roughly or neatly. You don't have to remember the place, you just have to be the same person with the same heuristics. That enables a very fast binary tree search, so to speak, both when looking for a thing and when looking for a place to put it.

That's a positive, not a limitation or baggage from the physical world, that makes it so great and quick. That's why we used them since forever, including for purely platonic ideas even that have no resemblance to physical reality, and way before computers.

And are we really becoming that much more computer literate, or are machines that can read the books for us becoming more widespread? There is a difference between proposing a better way to store and find things, and proposing someone else do it for us (until they don't).

> When we started to build out computer systems we based the UX on metaphors of real-life tool equivalents.

They started out as tools that were sold and learned and used, now they're turning more and more into a foot in the door for companies to capture consumers however they can.

https://theconversation.com/the-internet-of-things-is-sendin...

Taking care of one's own documents and personal affects is part of what makes a person an adult, and if these documents and media get moved into the digital realm, where vast amounts of them can be ordered and re-ordered within seconds, that is all the more reason to think about what they are and how to order them. If that's hard, then that's even more reason to not put it off.

How do you tell the difference between a.) the company gets to be the middleman not being good enough to find what you are searching for, b.) that company censoring you, or c.) you having misremembered that thing existing?

File-systems work very well for people who understand how a computer works. And I'm afraid your right about the "apps paradigm", it looks easy within the app but the extended usage is difficult.

Looking at Signal (the messenger app) on iOS we see the problems, they struggle creating save backup. The are not allowed to store the backup on the file-system only inside the app, which counteracts the idea of a backup. The other option is a cloud backup, most likely and third-party servers, which counteracts the idea of security and avability. Okay, but through some weird menus you could copy maybe something the a crippled third party app, let us say Files (not a file-browser!) from Apple.

PS: I still wonder how many people could have grasp how file-systems work, if Microsoft Windows didn't provided that weird desktop metapher. Which was placed within the the "own files", which incluced the "Desktop", all accompanied by the drive letters. And UNIX? This is a tree!

iOS backs up application data normally. The Signal developers blocked it. And they said it's likely they'll remove file export and import from the Android app once it has history transfer like the iOS app.

Storing an encrypted database in iCloud isn't a problem. And you can back up iOS to a computer instead.

I agree completely. We need a way to facilitate interoperability without requiring normal humans to know/care about bytes on a disk in some hierarchy (directory tree) where, frankly, your hierarchy WILL eventually be wrong.

Remember back in the old days, organizing your music files into a directory hierarchy- often organized by band? Then, inevitably, two bands you listen to release a song where they collaborated. Now your system is fucked- where do you put that song? It's why "tagging" things became a thing (emails, magical "Pictures" directory in your OS's file manager, etc).

There has to be some kind of extension to the idea of "tags"...

From what I’ve observed working with users, a pretty huge chunk of them (if not an outright majority) really struggle with file management. Some might not be motivated enough to organize files, and others just fundamentally do not understand how the abstract concept of hierarchical file systems work (programmers are great at dealing with these abstractions; end users generally are not)

The long term catastrophe will be in archival: nothing rots faster than an abandoned application.

We already face the same problem with media. I have source tapes for which no reading device has been manufactured this century. This new trend can only magnify the problem.

> Compare that to the "application-centric" paradigm that dominates on the web, in mobile OSes and recently in desktop OSes as well: Here a program "owns" its data and you are supposed to interact with the data only through the program.

Which is a great step backward, unfortunately.

> You used programs to edit and manage those files, but the programs didn't "own" the files: A file was generally independent of the programs that are used to open them.

That must be why .XLS(x) files have had the Microsoft Excel icon and the text "Microsoft Excel Document", .DOC(x) the Microsoft Word icon and the text "Microsoft Word Document", and so on and on, in File Explorer for the last three decades or so.

IOW: WTF are you talking about??? It's the absolute other way around; applications have always "owned" their respective files.

Sure, extensions identify the format of a given file but the point is that you can even access the documents as individual files at all, as opposed to having some sqllite db or other combined, binary format that isn't at all portable from the application which owns it.

xlsx files have the MS Excel icon __because__ you've set Excel as default application to open these files. Go install LibreOffice and see what happens

Depends: do I check the "Set as default app to open Excel files?" check box during the install, or not?[1]

But, anyway, I'm not quite sure how that disproves my point that in general, "applications own file(type)s" on Windows. Actually, I'd say the fact that you can set another app to take over ownership of some type only reinforces it.

___

[1]: OK, I'm actually not sure that's there any more. But many apps that are capable of taking over each other's file formats at least used to have those.

Defined like this, the old world is way better and mobile OS are a bit handicapped to be diplomatic.

Not that anyone asked, but IMO it’s a problem of our attention-based capitalism.

Now that there is real money to be made from applications that are mediocre at best, every application has to compete for “engagement” and “brand awareness”. Instead of working to be the best utility for File X, they are driven to be the brand with the most installs, likes, and comments. Those are two radically different goals.

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