The disappearing file system and the new UI metaphor

http://tomasztunguz.com/2011/09/16/the-disappearing-file-system-the-new-ui-metaphor/

by ttunguz • 15 years ago

8 7 15 years ago

guimarin• 15 years ago

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.

rahoulb• 15 years ago

Slightly tangential, but this is my favourite Gruber article (from 2004 - some would say he's been going downhill since then): http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/location_field - "The Location field is the new Command Line". The article itself is mainly about the Win32 API (and Spolsky's excellent "How Microsoft lost the API War") but what you said about pseudo-CLIs made me think of it.

ryan_s• 15 years ago

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.

ttunguz2• 15 years ago

Android does a good job of this with intents. Google is also bringing this standard to the browser. It's an elegant way to solve this problem

http://tomasztunguz.com/2011/08/30/liberating-user-data-with...

nraynaud• 15 years ago

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.

orev• 15 years ago

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.

ttunguz2• 15 years ago

Author here. I agree things go in waves. I haven't seen the sandboxing reach mass scale success before though. And I think this time it's different (last words, I know). The metaphor is now so popular, it's hard to change.

I hope intents solve the problem of sandboxing.

The disappearing file system and the new UI metaphor

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