Bregalad wrote:
I wish someone invented a computer OS without requiring a folder tree structure, because it's not adapted to many applications.
I think there is an Apple/Macintosh focus on letting users search for things rather than having to interact with files and folders. Though I think there are a lot of drawbacks to a search-only workflow too, and the prioritization has led to the Mac "finder" UI being underdeveloped and less usable for getting around the actual file structure than linux/windows equivalents.
On the far end of the spectrum, a lot of android apps will scan the file system for only files it can use, and try to just present these to you in various ways, rather than allowing a user to hunt through folders. This is often frustrating as the thing you are interested in gets buried in the flood of other files you have, or if the scanning system fails or is out of date and slow/mysterious to refresh. As a result of the file system being generally hidden from the user, most android devices tend to have really horrifying directory trees if you actually go and look.
I'm reminded of the discussion earlier about sub-forums where disorganization by putting everything in a large group is weighed against obscurity from putting things into too many small groups. The ideal solution that occurred to me there was tagging.
I'm trying to imagine a file system now where instead of folders you just have tags, and every file can have multiple tags. Tags could have a hierarchy like folders do, but files wouldn't be contained by a tag. I wonder how well that would work... I'm imagining a UI with a folder-like hierarchy of tags on the left, but you multi-select from them, and the relevant files appear on the right... you could also negatively-select a tag to exclude its results!
Probably there are some weird consequences of using such a file system that I can't think of at the moment. Like wanting to have two files with the same name-- if they have different tag sets it's probably okay, but if the user's current view includes both there's some UI work that needs to disambiguate them (show the differing tags next to the filename?). I'm thinking about stuff like group move operations, trying to remove or add tags to many files at once... could be a really confusing trying to merge two groups and some of them have identical-filename conflicts that you gotta resolve... but maybe you'd just get used to being careful about that.
I guess music files already have a system like this on some OSes, with genre tags, etc. but I've never tried using them because I know my music collection and I don't listen by genre, I just pick the specific music I want, so a simple folder structure is already perfect for me.