Wired News: Tiger Tweaks Could Kill Folders
User-interface experts at one of the world’s top design houses say Mac OS X Tiger is the beginning of the end for the Macintosh Finder — the era of organizing files in nested folders is over.
Experts at Silicon Valley’s frog design say new features like the systemwide Spotlight search are far more useful for locating information than the hierarchy of files and folders that underpins most computing interfaces, whether on Macs or Windows-based PCs.
That has got to be the stupidest thing I have ever heard… search has been a part of computing since the dir (or ls) command in MSDOS/Unix before GUI existed… but so has folders! When I first saw this headline I thought that maybe they were proposing a flat system like the tags on delicious or something of that nature… but this is just dumb… search cannot replace organisation, as evidenced by the continued popularity of places like the Google Directory… would any user of the Google Directory argue that Google search will make the directory obsolete? Of course not! Search came first with Google!
Tags: Software
4 Responses
Well, personally I really like the search interface, which is why I love google and especially gmail. I don’t know that it can totally replace folders…but I think it definately needs more focus. It’s especially handy if you can’t remember where you saved a file.
well as far as finding something new i’m all for search, and if you forget where you put something, yes, very handy, but as far as doing everything that way we have a few problems:
1) Programs finding files… if a program has to search every time it wants to access a file you are talking about taking forever
2) Finding files quickly… ok, morning, time to start work on chemistry… open up search and type ‘chem’, wait for search, look through result to find the files you need… OR… open folder marked ‘chem’, navigate to the folder for the week you’re on, open the files… which is faster?
haha, firefox should be saving your form data and doing the suggestion-popup thing, shouldn’t it?
yeah, I don’t agree with scrapping folders, they’re very handy. The thing with a google-type seach too though is that it takes practically no time. But yes, I agree with what you said there.
Ugg, this blog isn’t saving my info so I have to enter it ever time.