Alex Payne: The Case Against Everything Buckets
al3x.net
al3x.net
I believe the chief causes of the confusion are (1) different apps save newly created/edited files to different places (2) many users are clueless about navigating the file system within the Save As dialog (3) many users rely on an app's Recent list (4) many users don't know how to search their own file systems.
(1) Some apps always want to Save As to the Documents folder. Some always want to Save As to wherever you finished off your previous Save As. Some always want to Save As to the folder of the file you most recently opened in that app. Etc. No one can remember each app's convention.
(2) People don't realize they can navigate within Save As to someplace other than wherever the app feels like plopping the file by default at that moment. True even when shown over and over and over how to do this.
(3) Once you move a file, its entry in an app's Recent listing is probably borked. This sends people who rely on Recent for finding and opening files into a panic.
(4) They don't know how to click on the desktop and hit cmd-F or to click on Start->Find. And once they do, the Find window looks nothing like Google or a web browser. They don't understand what the various search criteria are or how to enter them. They don't know how to read the results.
(5) Different apps want to open files in different places. One app's Open dialog wants to look in the directory you finished off your last Open. Another app wants Open to look in the directory of the file you most recently opened by double clicking on its icon. A third app wants Open to look in the directory where you completed your most recent Save. Etc. As in the Save As problem, no one can remember each app's Open convention.
I know several older people (in their 70s) who sorely miss the days of yore when they worked with their user files on floppies. Each project lived on one or two floppies. Even if the OS allowed subdirectories, they didn't bother creating them. So, on DOS or early Windows, say, the users could always find their work at A:\ (unless there was no hard drive; then their work was at B:\). No getting lost in Open or Save As, no Recent nonsense, no digging down through folder icons, and hardly a need for built-in search.
We've been living with hierarchical file systems for several years now. And the upshot is, the Finder (or whatever it's called) and desktop apps plus newfangled browser apps don't present a consistent interface to the file system.
As soon as you toss out the idea of separate folders, then your points become moot and are solved (except for maybe point 4, though I think a new OS would want to heavily promote that).
The strawman argument here is that if you just dump all your crap somewhere you won't be able to make much focused use of it later. Well, no shit. But let me trot out my own scarecrow:
Every time you add a program your repertoire you're replacing productive time with administrative time. Of course a great program is worth the extra time you spend alt-tabbing to it, filling it with data, and then exporting and munging it to work with the other 100 programs you have.
You know what? After 20 years of being a hard-core computer geek, I've ultimately found that huge percentage of electronic tools end up being less useful than simple pen and paper. A personal wiki bridges that gap and allow me to keep todo lists, code snippets, quotes, ideas, and whatever else I need to be easily accessible in a single easy-to-browse window. I can put any one-off content in there I want, and re-organize and hyperlink at will. Alex's suggestion that a directory structure and a bunch of text files is more useful is laughable at best. His advice is ill-informed and unimaginative. I'd like to see what he does with his random bits of information that he need regularly.
I'm not sure what else you would do.
A few types of structured data, like addresses/other personal info, does go in a specific program - but mostly because I need to export/input that data between applications. Generally phone numbers get input in my cell, exported/integrated to Outlook, and then exported to Skype (and to my wiki).
He's right in that these apps are a horrible filesystem replacement. That's why I cringe when I get emails from users trying to use it as one. I think there's a lot developers in this category could do to position and market their apps better.
But what's really happening here is that people are grasping for a better Finder. Using one of these apps, for some people, makes managing certain types of data more concrete and understandable. But using it instead of a folder, for heaven's sake, is folly.
Many users do not understand hierarchical filesystems. Few users care that "Computers work best with structured data." Why in the world would one argue against making a computer do work by searching for information?
Use Google to search for your home address. Try a UPS tracking number. Enter the first few characters of a word and wait a moment. Enter your zipcode followed by the word weather. These are the types of solutions that we should be working on.
What makes you think more software, more solutions, will make computers easier to use?
find, locate, dir /s and the horrendous file search in Windows XP (I haven't used Vista) are not solutions for most users. Under what circumstances are Spotlight, Google Desktop Search and Windows Desktop Search context aware? If I'm in MS Word will any of these tools show Word documents before other types of documents? If I'm using a browser will they perform a web search?
Filesystems work. At least, Windows simple filesystems work, Linux's mess is less pleasant. People who want to can learn to put files in My Documents and find them later - it's not massively complex, there's a place for shared documents, a place for your documents, a place for Programs and a place for Windows. That's about all you need to care about.
At some point I object to the "Why should people learn anything? It's all the failings of the computer!!!!" attitude of your comment - there's always a trade off - any alternative will come with alternative problems. A more complex system (e.g. context awareness) will have more complex problems with it.
I often wish for more context awareness in software, but when I stop and try to visualise it in detail, it seems much less desirable.
You opened a "document" by pointing the program at a directory. It then spidered downward and found all directories whose names ended in .node, and added them to the tree. When you selected one, what was displayed on the right was the content of the file "[name].node/[name].txt". (The files themselves weren't rich-text; each file was actually stored in Markdown, and styled by a "document.css" file at the root of the tree. This was to discourage playing with styles while working in favor of getting in, doing your work, and getting out.) It was autosaved when you stopped editing for a few moments or navigated away from the node.
It had no other functionality beyond that. For example, to search for something in the document, you'd just press Ctrl+L to get a "Run command on current subtree" dialog and type "grep foo". I've since stopped maintaining the program, and thus it no longer even runs on my computer, but I still use the "documents" I created with it, simply browsing them in Explorer or in a shell and editing files the old-fashioned way.
If anyone's interested, I might put out a new version. Apparently I'd have to change the name if I wanted to find it on Google, though :)
Usually I use Evernote to collect some ideas or articles that I want to read or think again later. I wont use bookmarks(or delicious) since it's hard to recall from title/tags. I won't print them since I have no printer and don't want anymore paper. I won't save them to my disk since its not synched across devices and it's still PITA to open all the files separately. Also I want to record some automatic metadata and not to input all myself.
I haven't used an "everything bucket", but it actually sounds like a very good idea. I want a program to let me throw whatever is on my mind in to a single place, attempt to make some sense out of it and let me find it later without having to do much manual organization.
The article suggests these programs are poorly implemented. Even if that's the case, Good and Wrong is a start.
This is a "look at me" article that doesn't amount to much more than a lot of whining IMHO. Waste of time.
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/01/27/diy-how-to-write-a-b.ht...
Even though a schema may have a fixed set of core attributes, there's no reason why some app couldn't extend that in any way it sees fit. This way, any "file" generated with this app would be readable by everybody else while at the same time include the application specific extensions. Once the extensions become used by a large enough number of apps, they can be rolled into the standard.