Steve Jobs on the File System

http://oleb.net/blog/2012/06/steve-jobs-on-the-file-system/

by dwynings • 14 years ago

58 66 14 years ago

0x0• 14 years ago

This is all fun and games until you need to work with multiple hard drives, removable media, and network volumes. And backups of and onto such devices.

Maybe only "professionals" need that. But I'd imagine even amateur photographers will soon run out of space if they store all their holiday photos on the macbook SSD.

jiggy20113• 14 years ago

I guess the answer is to somehow handle this transparently, for example putting most commonly used files on the SSD.

Think about the Unix way vs Windows. In Windows you have a C drive , D drive etc, all of these are seperate partitions and if you want to locate a file you need to know which partition it is on.

In Unix you want your personal files , so you go to /home/username or programs are in /usr/bin etc. This is because the filesystem is providing a layer of abstraction over the physical disk.

Of course this has a snag that if one of your disks fails you won't be quite sure what you lost because you don't know what was on that specific disk, but I guess anything important will be persisted to the cloud anyway.

The filesystem is really a very limited way of organizing things. You have to choose one criteria to categorize on which means you end up in subfolder hell.

The big problem is, how do you store your data in a way that means it can be accessed by multiple programs. For example you catagorise your music in iTunes but you want to move it into a different media player?

The Apple answer to this seems to be to simply say no, you have one program for each type of data and that is it.

johnchristopher2• 14 years ago

> Think about the Unix way vs Windows. In Windows you have a C drive , D drive etc, all of these are seperate partitions and if you want to locate a file you need to know which partition it is on.

> In Unix you want your personal files , so you go to /home/username or programs are in /usr/bin etc. This is because the filesystem is providing a layer of abstraction over the physical disk.

Hm. I have the opposite feeling. To me unix is using one less layer of abstraction than windows. I know hdd are really devices located in /dev/sd* or /dev/scsi or sthg and these acronyms relate more to the hardware wiring than the piece of metal that is a hdd. blkid, fstab would tell me which devices are mounted or their properties and I can "mount (or switch them on)" them to a "kind of virtual folder". In windows, two partitions located on the same hard drive appears as two distinct hard drives both in explorer and in a prompt and that is an additionnal layer. Specifically, with 2hdd with 4 partitions scattered on each drive you can't tell which partition is on which drive at first glance.

> The Apple answer to this seems to be to simply say no, you have one program for each type of data and that is it.

This boils down to "what is a computer to me? : a machine to run programs that manage data ? data that are supposed to be looked at and data that are supposed to be executed to look at another type of data ? Do I use word to write text or do I write text to a file via word ?"

Personnaly, I believe the "everything is a file" moto to cover a lot of ground and to be a very good description of how computer/mobile works when I have to explain "computer" to beginners. It also frees you from paradigms imposed by the use of one and only one explanation ("yes, you can write text without MSWord and people will be able to read it!")

endlessvoid942• 14 years ago

Apple does this pretty well with Aperture. If you just want to use aperture simply, you don't have to know about filesystems. But if you know you want to have separate libraries, you can open and close other libraries on the filesystem.

I guess I'm saying I agree, but it's still possible to keep the filesystem as free from the UI as possible.

crazygringo• 14 years ago

That's when the amateur photographs turn into professional Mac users.

delsarto4• 14 years ago

No way would I trust all my photos to iPhoto, or Flickr, or Picasa! What happens in 18 years when I want to make a slide-show of my daughters baby photos for her birthday party. Good luck with that...

I feel the only reasonable approach is to have the original jpegs layed out in a simple date-encoded directory tree, title/comment them with IPTC, add EXIF geotags and archive that. Backs up to S3 (even though if I got hit by a bus I doubt my family could figure out how to restore them).

Actually, SD cards are so cheap these days I don't even reuse them. So I have that backup, minus comments and geotags as well

endlessvoid942• 14 years ago

You're not their target market.

delsarto4• 14 years ago

This is true ... but what I want to do -- have my photos for years to come, is pretty much what everyone wants to do (otherwise, why did you take them). But how many people can even move their iphoto/itunes library across when they buy a new apple computer? Let alone all the important meta-data...

esbwhat• 14 years ago

Hope you're accomodating for bit rot with your SD cards

alexchamberlain3• 14 years ago

DVDs safer?

delsarto4• 14 years ago

Yes, by backing up to my local RAID array and then syncing with S3. I just figure it's not worth re-using the SD cards and they're an extra backup.

I actually figured out every photo I take has

  - one copy on the SD card
  - two mirrored copies on my raid
  - 3 copies on S3
  - 3 copies on flickr (I believe)

for a total of 9!

advocate1• 14 years ago

This is the smart approach. Keep everything as "format agnostic" as possible.

The only reason someone would not use this approach and opt for one of the services mentioned is marketing. There is no marketing for storing files in a "non-proprietary" format. It's simply a matter of not knowing how to do it.

What's funny is the proprietary approaches ultimately can make things more difficult for novices. At least it's more they have to learn: different rules for each service. How often I have heard novices wanting to know how to convert/export/transfer files to/from these services.

Compare this with learning the jpeg format, IPTC and EXIF. You only need to learn one set of rules. And every service uses jpeg. That's unlikely to change anytime soon.

It's a battle against the "lowest common denominator" in the interest of creating a strategic advantage via incompatibility and proprietary formats. But it seems always some compromise is necessary. All those services work with lowest common denominator formats like jpeg. They don't each have their own proprietary image formats, though they could. Compromise is made.

The entire web is built on "lowest common denominators": e.g., IP, UDP, TCP. To allow things to flourish you have to have some lowest common denominators that everyone can develop on top of. But let the battle continue. We the users all suffer inconvenience as a result.

Gring2• 14 years ago

For iPhoto: go to ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library/Originals - there are all your unaltered Photos.

delsarto4• 14 years ago

Yes, but without all the interesting meta-data, presumably?

tosseraccount• 14 years ago

An application managing it's own data is not Steve Jobs idea. Marketing genius/visionary types have been trying to save us from "the file system" for about a half a century. The file system is still here and there are still magic proprietary bins for putting your data into (saving you from having to think too hard ... about the file system).

grumblepeet• 14 years ago

This is the great thing about SharePoint. It adds a layer of abstraction that allows you to present different views of the files and you can slice and dice as much as you want. I can see a time in the next few years where the traditional file share on Windows Server will be completely replaced by a SharePoint interface.

tensor3• 14 years ago

It does sound like iOS, except for the fact that iOS has no fallbacks for pros to access the file system, modify the OS, or otherwise manage it like the portable computer it is.

Before someone mentions jailbreaking, I'd just like to say that jailbreaking is not a suitable solution. There should be an official supported way to obtain advanced access to your device.

j_baker2• 14 years ago

There should be an official supported way to obtain advanced access to your device.

This seems like an awfully arbitrary statement. Why should there be an official way to get access to the filesystem?

tensor3• 14 years ago

For all the same reasons that you can do so on OS X. I'm also lumping in the ability to side load apps here, among other features pros might need or want.

I'm aware of all the arguments for their completely closed eco-system. But OSX itself is also a perfect example to counter them. Fundamentally, portable touch screen devices are still computers and are not actually so different that such a closed environment is needed.

andrewflnr2• 14 years ago

Because we're consumers, and we want one. Do you really need another reason?

tedunangst• 14 years ago

To play devil's advocate, if you allow the pros to do cool things, then the peons will see them doing that, and want to do it too. Why is your iPhone doing this cool thing that mine isn't? Then they try to manage their portable computer, and either dick it up or fail, but end up frustrated. Platform unity is a big deal, not just in the sense that there's only a few models of iPhone, but also in the sense that everybody's iPhone is equally awesome (or not).

cluda01• 14 years ago

What's interesting about this is the overall trend of flexibility in technology. In the few short years I have been alive (~27) the trend during the 90s and early 200s was a preference for infinite customization, and all the confusion that that engenders. In today's world we are now seeing the pendulum swing back in favor of less flexibility with the primary justification being that it makes for a more usable and intuitive interface. I wonder if the trend will reverse course and head back towards customization.

jwhitlark• 14 years ago

"...if your society has no variation in productivity, it's probably not because everyone is Thomas Edison. It's probably because you have no Thomas Edisons."

-- http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html

The feeling that the top end was being crippled for the benefit of the unwashed masses was always my complaint about apple in the last few years. (Tongue in cheek).

Sunlis• 14 years ago

It's been a while since I've used an iPhone, but I seem to remember there were apps on the App Store that gave you (non-root) access to your files. Jailbreaking could, of course, get you root access.

msh• 14 years ago

Well thats more or less what xcode + a developer certificate gives you.

mcantelon• 14 years ago

>And that was the breakthrough, as an example, in iTunes. You don’t keep your music in the file system, that would be crazy

Actually I do and it works great. I hate iTunes.

alexchamberlain3• 14 years ago

Devil's Advocate: Why do you hate iTunes?

randallsquared2• 14 years ago

I'm not the OP, but in 2003 iTunes was the single biggest drawback to switching to the Mac, for me. I had a fairly large collection of MP3s at the time -- maybe a coupla thousand -- and a bunch of versions of the same song in some cases (an album version, a radio version, live at here, live at there), and it was all neatly categorized in the filesystem, band/album/name, when I switched from Gentoo to OS X. I freely admit I should have had a backup.

When I "tried" iTunes, there was an option for it to rename all your files (I don't remember whether it was the default or if I stumbled on it), but what I did NOT expect was that all my carefully named folders and files would be lumped into "Unknown Artist"/"Unknown Album"/"Unknown Track NNN".mp3, while my old files were all carefully removed.

My MP3 collection literally never recovered. I could choose to play the few hundred tracks that had happened to have good ID3 information, but all the tracks I'd ripped myself were essentially randomized. I also never found an ID3 creator that could successfully differentiate the various versions of songs I had, though I stopped trying around 2006 or 2007, and now I don't bother buying music any more -- I just listen to Pandora.

sp332• 14 years ago

iTunes is slow and buggy, especially on Windows. I used to be able to press Esc to shrink from a movie from full-screen to windowed, but after an update, it stops the video. Then if I restart it, it runs in full screen mode again which is quite surprising. If iTunes ever crashes or is quit, it won't remember your place in any of your files. Syncing iPods is a pain, especially when you try to find which podcasts you're syncing. And there's no way to get songs from your iPod onto your computer.

jlarocco• 14 years ago

Poor platform support. No Linux version at all, and their Windows version is lame.

Poor format support. I don't care either way about Ogg, but no FLAC support is a deal killer. There's a FLAC plugin, but it requires using 32-bit iTunes, and even then it's not supported very well.

It insists on "managing" my music collection itself. It's constantly renaming, moving, editing ID3 tags, and what not. I think most of those features can be turned off, but it takes forever to figure out what all the options are, and by the time you realize they need to be turned off, it's generally too late and you have to pull the altered songs from backups.

It also doesn't handle poorly tagged music very well. For example, a while back I had a two CD collection of trance music, something like "The Best Goa Trance of 2010". The MP3s were tagged with the artist and song names, but no album name, presumably because they were originally on different albums. In iTunes there's no way (that I know of) to group the songs in my library, except going through and manually adding the album tags. This is made even worse by the default settings where it moves around and renames the files without telling you.

I'm sure I could train myself to immediately fix all of my music's ID3 tags, and to conform to Apple's arbitrary way of managing music, but it's easier to just use a different player.

gouranga2• 14 years ago

Similar. I keep my music in the filesystem in one directory and Zune just abstracts it behind a series of views (very differently to how iTunes does it).

You get the best of both worlds then.

nfg• 14 years ago

Actually with an uncheck of the "Keep iTunes Media Folder Organised" and "Copy files to iTunes Media Folder when adding to the library" options in Preferences this is precisely how iTunes does it.

51Cards• 14 years ago

Interesting since just the other day I read an article on how lack of access to the file system in iOS was one of its significant drawbacks. Specifically the lack of ability to browse and attach multiple files to an email, etc.

I agree it's confusing for a lot of users, but I still think there is a happy medium in there.

ajross• 14 years ago

Or not. A large class of people have simply never used the filesystem at all. Everything on their PC went onto the desktop or default directory. They used the "Find..." dialog to locate everything they used, etc... These folks are well served by the "modern" app-centric abstractions, and frankly will be harmed by an attempt to show them the filesystem.

But the rest of us are harmed by hiding it (badly, sometimes). I'm not sure there is a happy medium; I suspect to some extent we filesystem-conscious few will simply have to learn and use two UX environments.

skibrah• 14 years ago

I agree that there are definitely cases, attaching multiple files being one, where the lack of file system access makes the process more difficult or impossible. However, I think that there isn't really a "happy medium" in terms of whether direct access to the file system is provided or not, there is either access or there isn't. Rather, one possible solution is to put the onus on the app developer and allow apps to present files that can be "public" within the phone and accessible to other applications. Obviously this opens a worms in terms of security, which I think is one of the main reasons that Apple has not done this.

agumonkey• 14 years ago

We're still toying around data categorization. Files are dull, hierarchies are almost meaningless since they require arbitrary ordering. DB-oriented FS aren't there yet (although BeOS found a sweet spot it seems, their c++ API has some ORM feel). '''Semantic''' still in progress.

The solution is barycentric: A network a loosely coupled types as a basis for ontology/semantic network in with `atomic` artefacts can be seen/search through. Could even be used to feed dataflow-like graphs for user to manipulate their data. Just like unix pipes but typed, and with an interactive side effect `free` GUI.

fratis• 14 years ago

I did a video on something like this that got some traction on reddit, where some really nice, knowledgable folks told me about BeOS and the original vision for Longhorn.

What I think both of them are missing is a really simple GUI that makes it so that the average user doesn't need to worry about the metadata layer, which seemed a little too present in those efforts.

I'd posted it on HN at the time, but it never really picked up any steam. Here it is again, if you're interested: https://vimeo.com/39284250

albertzeyer• 14 years ago

Hm, for mails, I usually use IMAP or an web interface, so it doesn't really matter (for me) how/where there is a local cache in my file system.

For music, pictures and other stuff, I care and I want to be able to use different tools and switch between them on the same set of media. This is why I disabled all the automatic management, e.g. in iTunes or iPhoto and just move the files around manually. It's because only this way, I have a sane and common way to find my media, no matter what application I am using.

The same is for projects (source code, other stuff; I also sometimes switch between different IDEs/editors) and documents.

And then there are contacts and dates. I haven't really found a good way yet to manage them as powerful as I want. Currently I use CalDAV and the like, all what GMail is offering me, so it is serverside just as mail. I guess to get all the possibilities I want, I also would need to have it just in my file system in some way.

peterkelly• 14 years ago

So what happens if you're working on several different projects, each of which involves working with multiple files of different types (e.g. word processing documents, photos, videos, and spreadsheets)? On a desktop OS you would have a folder for each project, and store all the stuff related to a particular project in the respective folder. I've been doing this for longer than I can remember.

With the current iOS model, content is organised by the app that created it, not by the project it's related to. So if you're doing work for multiple clients, or collaborating on different internal projects, all of your content is spread out between different apps, and there's no easy way to gather it all together for the purposes of sharing, archiving, or backup.

I agree that the way in which the filesystem is exposed to users on desktop OSs can be confusing, but I really think they need to find a way to allow people to organise their files better. Dropbox has essentially become the filesystem for iOS - it's a way around the limitations, and a lot of apps use it.

hoprocker• 14 years ago

> And eventually, the file system management is just gonna be an app for pros and consumers aren’t gonna need to use it.

I.e., Terminal.

10098• 14 years ago

That is a poor approach that only introduces more unnecessary complexity.

On a side note, this probably explains why Finder is the most retarded file manager ever :-)

jfernandez• 14 years ago

One of the biggest pros for having a file system is data portability. To a local degree that means being able to use files across multiple contexts, usually "apps". Another related effect is that you can transfer your files across devices/platforms without the need for systems to build ad-hoc/proprietary techniques to communicate with each other (i.e any iOS app that does app-to-app cooperation or how iTunes can show you files related to your apps).

A lot of people feel iOS 6 will include better system-supported architecture for this so in that sense he is right we don't need a 'file system app', but iOS hasn't given us this kind of abstraction yet that works to scale.

nadam• 14 years ago

The file system is basically a simple abstraction: store data in a tree structure.

The broader topic is how the tree structure can be 'disrupted' by less structured data organization and what are the territories where the tree structure (or at least a very strong (hierarchical?) structure) seems to be the right abstraction for most people.

For example let's take written communication: A Word document, a non-fiction book, is a tree structure. A wiki, or the web of tweets is not. The web itself is not a tree (web directories did not work out) while some parts of it (some websites, some webpages) are tree structured.

drcube• 14 years ago

This is probably the reason I will never buy an idevice. The very first app I downloaded on my Android phone was a file explorer.

I can't imagine any other way to interact with data than as individual files in some kind of hierarchy. What is iTunes but a specialized file browser that happens to have a built in music player?

The need for a single, general purpose program for performing actions that are generic for all files just makes sense to me. Say I have a bunch of pictures, a few albums, a movie and an ebook I'd like to share with my mom. Do you really think it would be easier to open four different applications, which probably have four different sets of "sharing" features and four distinct user interfaces? Or to just copy and paste from my hard drive into her thumb drive?

Speaking of which, is this actually a problem? I don't know anybody who has difficulty with the file/folder metaphor. And it isn't like I just hang around technical folks. I know lots of people who could use a "computers for dummies" book.

Which makes me think the real "problem" with file system behavior is that it facilitates file sharing. If people forget they have a disk drive filled with files, and think instead of their "iTunes multimedia blob", then the FBIAA can just lean on MS and Apple to "program out the piracy". Brilliantly evil.

WildUtah• 14 years ago

I don't know anybody who has difficulty with the file/folder metaphor.

Half the world has an IQ below 100. Computers need to help and serve them, too.

The threshold for comfortably managing hierarchical file systems is around 100 IQ. For doing it well is several points higher.

And eliminating access to the file system makes app developers get creative about inventing new ways to make things easier for users. A lot of data is relational and not compatible with the file metaphor. Some data is a net of objects (not as much as OO language designers seem to think). New ways to interact with those are valuable.

Of course, the flexibility of the file system has a lot of advantages. It invites a powerful and uniform set of tools that can make it even more flexible. That's why it continues to be useful. Nevertheless, other ideas, like relational data as a universal system service, are setting in to give it competition.

kapilkaisare• 14 years ago

> The threshold for comfortably managing hierarchical file systems is around 100 IQ. For doing it well is several points higher.

Do you have any citations for that?

pooriaazimi• 14 years ago

> I don't know anybody who has difficulty with the file/folder metaphor.

Then you should step out of your cave. You and I like file system, but 99.3% of the world's population (who don't have time to fiddle around with computers and just want to get their things done), hate file systems, and usually have disgusting desktop, documents, downloads and music folders.

amatheus• 14 years ago

Maybe you know different people than I, but most of the non-technical computer users I know, when asked about where is a document, will answer "Oh I saved my curriculum in Word" instead of a folder.

Steve Jobs on the File System

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