Death of a Folder
Apple and others tried to kill the application in the 90s with document-centric systems; then the 2010s came and killed the document itself with the app.
The most exciting thing, to me, in this whole iPad business is the fact that, for the first time that I can remember, a more-or-less general computing device has done away with the file system, totally and completely.
It’s an obvious move, if you’ve been watching Apple and the consumer electronics industry for the last decade. And it’s a move that needed to be done.
I figure it’s like this: the reason we use “folders” and “files” as a metaphor is due to the old way of filing actual paper things (I know, they’re rare, but seriously, they still exist.) Could you imagine if you had your tax returns for the last ten years, your TV’s manual, that book on weird weapons of World War II, and maybe a couple issues of the Trib in a big stack on your desk? It would be madness. Madness, I say.
But, let’s say you had a big pile in your office. A huge, impenetrable pile. Everything from the really bad novel you started, to a few Magnetic Fields albums, to a couple of DVDs, to notes from your Copyrights class. Also, every other CD and DVD you’ve ever owned and anything you’ve ever wrote. Just for good measure.
That would usually be grounds for eviction, or maybe a spot on that show where they bring in professionals to clean out a house that still has mayonnaise from the Nixon administration.
OK, so we do this: we keep the pile, but we add a magical and revolutionary robot at an unbelievable price, which can retrieve any item from that gigantic pile in seconds flat. Plus, we hide the pile in the back room, so we never see it.
So, what do we get? Any document, video, or song we own, instantly delivered, without having to look through DVD towers or CD stacks or bookshelves. Who cares if it’s in a pile that looks like it belongs in WALL-E? I don’t. That damn robot got me my ALF DVD in like .231 seconds.
Awesome, huh? Well, we’re almost there, and there’s been a lot of things pointing us in this direction.
My first experience with this style of media-keeping was, predictably, iTunes. I had some MP3s back in the mid 90s in college. Mainly I was amazed that my 120MHz Pentium could keep up (sadly the Apple IIGS remained at home.) I’d play them, sometimes, by clicking on “C:/Music”, then clicking on the Artist folder, then the Album folder, then clicking on “soul_coughing_live_at_metro_030496_track1.mp3”. Winamp pops up, and BAM! you’ve got your music.
I never went beyond the bits of music I could get online (at that time) because it was such a pain in the ass to administer.
Then, iTunes comes out, and after getting used to it, I found myself having marathon sessions with my PowerBook at the office feeding a few hundred CDs in for import. (Oh, if I only looked ahead; I’m still saddled with 128kbps versions of some albums which I no longer have the physical disc to after many moves.)
At that point, music listening wasn’t about MP3 files, like it was with Word docs or text files, but songs, artists, albums, and playlists. Windows Explorer or Finder was not my general-purpose and ill-suited window to my music. iTunes completely abstracted the filesystem and all I had to do was click “Frank Sinatra.” “A Swingin’ Affair.” “Night and Day.” I get my Sinatra. Simple.
Mac OS X has been doing this for all their iLife apps. If I need a photo for uploading to a website, I can get to it from the file dialog (if there wasn’t a clue to what they were planning there…) in the media browser. As far as I care, IMG_0123.JPG doesn’t exist. “Carole and Chris in Boston Eating A Lobster” does though. And when you make it easy for me to upload and tag things, I’ll do it. OK, I’m not tagging anything with Lobster, and Faces will at least get us. But still.
I don’t understand why many friends and colleagues have a million email folders for everything. Not folders that you have rules on so that you don’t get overwhelmed by new email, but folders that you move all your email in after you read it in the inbox.
I don’t care if my inbox has a billion messages. (just checked- it has 4,547.) The inbox to me is just Where Email Goes. If i need to find an earlier email, I just click the search field and type something. Why should I waste my time categorizing stuff when a computer can do it way better? If Mail.app let me add my own tags to emails, it would even be easier.
Since Spotlight came out, I’ve felt the same way about documents. I used to keep everything in nice pyramids of folders and sub-folders. Sure, my development and web projects still live in hierarchical directories. But anything else? Throw it in ~/Documents. I can get to it with a command-space and three letters on the keyboard.
Computers are way better and faster at searching than humans are. Yet, we’ve been doing it the manual way since the ‘84 Mac 128k came out. Millions of people are now used to iTunes and iPhone apps—if there was ever a time to introduce a new way, here it is.
I’m hoping that the iPad brings forth an era of document control that’s more futurescape than Steelcase.
