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Comment by martingordon | Hacker News Reader

Everyone I know loves managing their files, so it's great that Microsoft is finally improving Windows Explorer!

WRONG!

For the hundreds of nerds complaining that they don't have access to the file system on their iPads, there are millions of normal people who are delighted by a computer that they can use rather than manage.

How much longer can Microsoft keep making a 20th century operating system? What's going to be the great innovation of Windows 9? Yet another reshuffled toolbar driven by all of their wonderful data?

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I was just thinking this myself. Windows 8 is moving towards a tablet-like structure, they need to go all the way on this and get rid of the filesystem for 90% of users.

Open almost any Windows laptop, and you'll see users who basically think of the hard drive as a file dumping ground. You'll see files stored on the Desktop, or everything just goes into one big directory. How many conversations have you had where you ask "Where did you save the file?" and the reply is "I don't know, just the place that it says when I press save"?

Windows should have had a services infrastructure, where programs explicitly define an export (how to access files the program has generated) and import (which files the program can handle). Users don't really think of files by directory but by type, either Word documents or photos or whatever. The file system should just be a dialog box which is essentially a search. "Show me Word documents I edited in the last 5 days." "Show me all my photos that I took in Hawaii." That's how users think about data.

I would say having logically named directories and a strict HIG could solve this.

When I hit "Save" on a Mac, the file picker shows me a field where I can type a file name, and a drop down where I can choose between "Documents", "Pictures", "Movies", etc. or the last directory this particular program saved a file to. Most of the time the application will even pick a sensible default location. Only if I click the small arrow at the right of the drop down to I see the advanced file chooser.

On Windows, when I hit "Save", I get the advanced file picker by default. Unless the application is smart enough to set a sensible default location -- which most Windows applications are not -- the Windows file picker defaults to Desktop. This is the reason most people have all kinds of shit on their Windows desktops.

I can search for files on Windows now, so at least Windows has one thing right.

Mac OS X already has that, but I still would not like to see the filesystem hidden from me. It's just too valuable idea for it to go away and it takes us further away from general computing to turning our computers into appliances owned by our OS vendor.

I think the idea of the parent poster is that there would be no file system (at least not in the sense of a tree hierarchy of directories), just a large database with some SQL like language exposed through the GUI.

All manner of people have suggested and planned ways of doing this, but as yet, none of them are really any good.

See: http://nascent.freeshell.org/programming/TagFS/ https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/WinFS

and many more.

Even though Mac OS X filesystem is not a relational database, it does support a query language that allows you to search for built in or user defined attributes and their values.

This search functionality is available system wide (Spotlight search box), from any file open dialog or from the command line. For example things like this are possible:

Find me all pictures I tool this year and where I used flash, and aperture f4:

kind:image fnumber:4 date:"this year" flash:1

You type this in either spotlight or search box on open file dialog. You can do the same from the command line

mdfind -interpret "kind:image fnumber:4 date:"this year" flash:1"

The nice thing about the mdfind command is that you can restrict the search to a directory of your choice only.

Some people pay good money for photo organizers on Mac OS X, not knowing they already have this functionality built in. And finding what attributes are available is not that hard either:

mdimport -X

prints the entire metadata schema.

I wasn't necessarily heading in that direction, I just meant modifying how data is presented to users (and, in fact, the platform APIs too). I guess once you reach that abstraction, it doesn't really matter whether it's a filesystem or WinFS or whatever else.

It looks like they are in fact implementing something at least kinda-sorta like what you describe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p92QfWOw88I (skip to around 3:30)

This reminds me of BeOS's metadata database filesystem, taken to its logical conclusion on the front end:

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/06/the-beos-fil...

Interesting idea! There is no indication of what "My Documents" contains. What do I put in there? What is a "document" anyway? I'm frequently annoyed by files being saved somewhere I don't remember, or into huge folder hierarchies where I troublesomely navigate into. This is just simply stuff a user shouldn't need to think about. Couple your suggestions with a proper realtime search engine like we have with http://www.voidtools.com/ and this could be good.

My Documents is the worst possible solution to "I can't find my files."

First of all, they designate only one part of the visible filesystem as "safe", when it should be the opposite. Everything that's obviously accessible should be safe, and system-critical stuff should require going elsewhere.

Secondly, there is nothing personal about "My Documents". Every program routinely dumps files there that you can't do anything with directly. Game saves are the worst offenders here. They're cryptically named and you can't double click them like every other file.

And then people complain that normal users don't understand files.

Yeah, many users even don't understand the file system metaphor. MS unleashing the full fury of cut/copy/paste/files isn't really helping user experience.

But MS is a highly engineer dominated tribal culture. I don't see how they can overcome that. I guess the windows explorer will survive another decade.

How do you copy a bunch of documents and pictures from and to a USB drive without a filesystem?

I'm not saying you don't need a filesystem. There are other ways to interact with data besides a file browser.

On the iPad, I can use the official Photos app (or any of the other photo apps) to get my photos where they need to go, whether that's a phone, computer, website or printer.

I don't read my email by going into the "My Emails" folder on my C:\ drive, I access my email through a UI specifically made for accessing email.

I don't manage individual contact files, I access my contacts through an address book app.

I don't manage individual music files, I use iTunes.

Most operating systems already encourage separating files by type, I'm taking it a step further by suggesting that 90% of users would be better served by many type-specific file browsers than a single general purpose one.

My wife and I split the cost of an iPad last month, and we absolutely love it. There are a few things that really make me shake my head in frustration, but whatever, no product is perfect.

And last week I managed to score 2 32gb touchpads at the $150 price -- with the thought that we'll play with one for a week or so and see if it fits in our family. If not, we'll give both away at Christmas.

The touchpad just made me love my iPad2 more. It's nice enough, and will be a great gift for my mom and her dad, but it doesn't hold-up to the iPad2.

All that being said -- I sorta think of my primary computer as an oven to my iPads toaster-oven. The iPad can do a lot of the same things, and several things it can do far better than my oven and far easier.

And apple doesn't even want me to replace my oven -- they're producing toaster ovens by design.

What that means to me is that there's a lot of design decisions that work on a toaster oven that just don't make sense on an oven.

:) Now please forgive a somewhat clunky analogy.

And what happens if there's a file type the OS doesn't support? In my case that often happens with mkv files.

How do I tell iTunes (or any other music player) to import some of the music on my USB drive? iTunes doesn't even allow you to do that with iPods...

I would say you're out of luck then. What good are those mkv files if you don't have an app to read them?

There are a lot of things I'm used to doing on a computer that I can't do on an iPad. Everyone has their examples of things that make X inferior to Y. Apple has shown that they can be successful by offering less of "business as usual" while slowly introducing new ways of doing things.

The only way to advance the state of the art is to let go of a lot of the notions of what we think a computer should be. Is rearranging toolbar buttons really going to bring delight to people around the world? How does this help the guy who is miserable at his job because he's forced to use a 10 year old PC running Windows XP? How does it help the person who lost all of their vacation photos because they downloaded a photo editing app that turned out to be a virus? How does it help a four year old that's learning to read?

I would say you're out of luck then. What good are those mkv files if you don't have an app to read them?

I have a really nice app to read them called Media Player Classic -- I just don't have an app to manage them. Writing apps to manage every single file type I have is very inefficient compared to using a general purpose file manager. You abstract out often-used code rather than copy-pasting it all over the place, don't you?

The only way to advance the state of the art is to let go of a lot of the notions of what we think a computer should be.

The fundamental definition/theorem/axiom/whatever of computer science is the Church-Turing thesis. We haven't come up with a practical notion of computability more general than that, so it is by default the state of the art. Following from that, I think a computer should be a real-life manifestation of a universal Turing machine -- something that can run anything computable (taking into account resource bounds but also providing all the resources it can) without being beholden to another entity. Anything less is an appliance, a toy, and is not fit to be called a computer.

Files without a dedicated application will be the exception rather than the rule. Movies, Photos, Documents, spreadsheets, databases, music, books; you will usually open in a dedicated application. It's not hard to envisage an improved UI for files that do not have a dedicated application: they could be presented in a view showing all the files that are not associated with a program, for manual association. From then on, the system would know which file types to present along with that application. In addition, it goes without saying that full access to the underlying file system should be possible for developers and those that need it (which will be a tiny fraction of the userbase).

It's a ridiculous idea IMO because when I want to copy 2 docs, a jpeg and an html file from one device to another, I'd have to open three separate programs in order to carry out the task.

With a dedicated file manager, you open the one program and do it all in one step.

I have an application to manage movie files. It's called UNIX.

"There's an app for that."

I would imagine that Apple's envisions a world of these things being done wirelessly.

What is interesting is that Apple and MS have two totally opposed philosophies in handling the issue of the user not understanding the file system.

Well, yes, Apple designs products for rich people in the first world who have always-on fast internet (have you seen the sheer size of Apple point updates?!). Microsoft designs far more inclusive products.

Lion 10.7.1 was a whopping 79.3MB. That's nothing, especially for an OS point release.

And judging by the popular success of the iPad I have to disagree with the suggestion that Apple is less inclusive.

Lion 10.7.1 was a whopping 79.3MB.

Well, they might have fixed it then. All I know is that I balked at the 1GB OS X update waiting for me.

And judging by the popular success of the iPad I have to disagree with the suggestion that Apple is less inclusive.

The iPad is only popular in rich first world countries. You will find tons of PCs running Windows in not-so-rich countries, orders of magnitude more. That is exactly my point.

> The iPad is only popular in rich first world countries.

At very least in Bangkok, which is obviously not belongs to rich first world countries, I can see iPad (and Galaxy Tab) everywhere on a train or even in a not-so-expensive restaurant. My not-so-rich neighbor bought an iPad few weeks ago and ask if I could help him setup Wi-Fi, etc.

Maybe I have an Apple-fan Attraction Field turned on or something, but I've found iPad-availablity around me to be pretty amazing. It's hard to deny that Windows-running PCs are still orders of magnitude more but it's still amazing.

Apple is on an incredible roll in Thailand. Our tiny town of Tak just got its first superstore ... and an Apple (iBeat) store at the same time. Dumbfounding.

The iPad is only popular in rich first world countries. You will find tons of PCs running Windows in not-so-rich countries, orders of magnitude more. That is exactly my point.

New technologies tend to be adapted by first world countries first. This was as true of the original IBM PC as it is today for the iPad.

But the iOS model of syncing everything to the cloud or whatever is simply incompatible with the current realities of those countries. Microsoft's taking that into account rather than just shrugging it off.

Windows 7 SP1 is not exactly svelte - it's around 1GB or so as well.

The size of Windows 7 SP1 is based on how many updates you already have. It's generally 60-100 MB. Only the absolute full ISO download is a gigabyte, and most people simply won't need that. Not to mention that non-SP1 Win7 kept getting security updates for quite a while.

To add to the other voices here, it's massively popular in Eastern Europe not so much as a computer replacement but as a symbol of wealth, regardless of whether you actually possess any.

Well, the iOS way would be that documents would end up in a place that is shown when you open a word processor, and that pictures would end up in a place that is shown when you open up an image navigator.

You still haven't answered my question.

I have a set of documents, a subset of which I'd like to copy onto my USB drive. I also have a set of pictures, a subset of which I'd like to copy onto my USB drive. My USB drive already has a set of documents and a set of pictures, and I'd like to get a subset of the documents and a subset of the pictures onto internal storage so that I can plug out my USB drive afterwards and still access them. Can you come up with a way of doing all that that doesn't involve a filesystem or a poor imitation of it?

I think others have explained this, but I'll give it a try anyway.

Plug an SD card with photos on it into the iPad camera connection kit, and plug that into the iPad. The Photos app opens, you tap the photos you want to import, and you're done.

Your other cases are simple extensions of this example. The fact that an iPad can't do this right now with more file types or with a USB drive is not an inherent limitation of the approach.

You really think we should write an app for every file type? As a developer who believes in abstracting common code out, I find the notion frankly idiotic.

I'm not sure what type of "documents" you're referring to, but the images could be handled as with any other media import upon attaching the drive – i.e., within the image browsing app. As for moving images to the USB drive, that's an export from the image browsing app.

Ok, didn't expect I had to do this on HN but here goes:

-> Write code, -> Dump logs to app.log, app.err -> Is there an err browsing app you're aware of ?

If that ever happened to someone on HN, the consequences:

-> If apple implemented something so broken, some nutter would explain to me what extension to use. -> If MS implemented it, there would be a #1 post on HN with the title "MS file management is broken beyond repair and company is irrelevant"

I expect to be downvoted for this but it is impossible to have a fair discussion about Microsoft products.

"...write code..." Congratulations, you are part of the less than one percent of the world workforce that are developers. As a developer, even I only need full filesystem access when I am developing, which is a fraction of my time. Having full filesystem access is an important use case, you can have it. For the rest of the world, it is a usability barrier.

I'm not sure what type of "documents" you're referring to

Aha, therein lies the rub. These documents could be essentially arbitrary files, and there's no substitute to a general purpose file manager for them. Writing an app for every single file format that could be present on the USB drive is highly inefficient compared to the usual file manager.

My basic point is that filesystems are a well-established standard, and practically everything on your computer supports them. If you'd like to deviate from such a standard, you'd better have a very good reason for doing so.

I think the point you're missing is that most people only manipulate data that clearly belongs to some application. So, for most people, the relevant application managing their data and abstracting away the underlying file system is a valid option.

If that doesn't work for you, then okay. You're not most people.

Oddly, Microsoft used to be app centric and moved to being file centric with Windows 95. The idea being that you cared less about the app and more about the document you were using. Apple is going back and saying you care about the app as the dominant focus.

This is interesting. For example, my mom knows the document she wants to open is her 2009 tax return document. The fact that it is a PDF or she reads it with Adobe Reader -- I'm fairly certain she doesn't know. If I were to layout every application she has installed and told her to find the one to open to access her tax documents I honestly don't think she'd have a clue. She'd probably try Word. I suspect she's not alone on this.

I'd bet that nine times out of ten, she's going to open that PDF as an email attachment. Then it's up to the OS to match the file with the app. I often think that email is the real file system today.

The tool drives the user. Your mom works this way because, as you said, windows 95 is file oriented. If it were app oriented as Mac OS X is, I bet she would have the opposite behavior.

You're missing the point. iOS devices have file systems. The simple fact is that people just don't understand them very well. Most normal users just put everything on their desktop because it's the only way they can ever find them again.

Maybe you can provide a practical example of a case where you need to move files onto your system that can't be opened by any of the applications installed on your system. I can't think of a single time I've needed to do that. Files don't have inherent value. They're only useful if you have software that can make use of them.

Maybe you can provide a practical example of a case where you need to move files onto your system that can't be opened by any of the applications installed on your system.

I never said the files couldn't be opened by any of the applications on my system -- I just said the files couldn't be managed by any of them. Note the very important difference.

Regardless, here's an instance that came up just a few days ago: I have multiple computers and have software to deal with a certain file format installed only on some of them. I needed to back up the contents of a USB stick containing some such files on a computer that didn't have the software.

If the file type is arbitrary, and doesn't correspond to an app, then you're using your internal hard disk as a file store. There are better solutions for that.

Such as?

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