The disappearing file system and the new UI metaphor

I'm guessing the author is young and this is their first time through all of this (like most of the posts on HN)...

As with all things in computing, trends are cyclical. First you have big central systems, then distributed systems, then big central ones again.

Same thing goes for UI metaphors. First of all the filesystem is a required part of any OS, and the OS could not exist without it, so it will never go away. The GUI on top may or may not choose to present it. The Newton, original Palm OS, and now IOS take the route of sandboxing the files and the app into the same place, and the user just sees everything as part of that app. Plenty of other OSes don't do this.

Sandboxing has its obvious set of problems, such as the inability to use different apps to access the same data. There might be APIs that allow for certain types of access, but that just not the same thing as allowing anyone to access any type of file.

While I love the simplicity of iOS, the second you need to do anything remotely complicated your stuck.

If I want to send said Keynote document, Keynote must know about my email program, conversely if I receive a Keynote file my email program must know about Keynote. I have little faith that my daily file handling can be completely abstracted.

What is it 2007? An interesting article would draw the comparison between the three waves of filesystem access (command line, desktop, and no-filesystem filesystem) and search. Then we might get an interesting discussion about how search is really just a CLI where none of the commands are published, so a psuedo-CLI. Want to be the next google? figure out the desktop metaphor for search.

This was described by Cooper in "about face" a long time before iPhone was out. And I was really pleased to see it in real life, at last.