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.
Tiger Tweaks Could Kill Folders
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Yeah, spotlight seems to work great…locally…
Last night, I tried for hours to make Spotlight index my shared folder on a WindowsXP box. I did a mdutil -i on to the volume I was trying to index and spotlight began indexing it. 30 min later, I ran top in the terminal and mdutil showed idle.
When I checked spotlight again, it wouldn’t show any results from the network share.. am I missing something??!??!
did you miss the part where it said “Beginning” ?
that means that sooner or later it will be mature enough to replace the finder.
I never use the finder anyways on OS X. Keyboard command to get to folders and going to Go menue. Maybe I’m just to organized, because I generally know where I put everything and have my downloads in one place, etc.
Admittedly I haven’t used Spotlight yet but just why I need a search engine locally is beyond me. I have all my stuff properly organized in folders. Admittedly hundreds of folders but ordered logically so that anyone could find what they are looking for.
The only thing I use a keyword-based search engine for, is pictures and I can imagine others using a search engine for multimedia too. Simply because multimedia can be classified into different categories and you often need a picture that conforms to fuzzy selection criteria. But if I just want one particular file that I know where to find, I choose folders any day over a metadata search engine.
Oh, I’ve got it all organized but my Mac Mini can’t hold the massive storage I have on my windows network. I have over 2.2TB (almost perfectly organized to my liking) but some of the shares (ex. pictures) I’d like to spotlight for pics of a party from last year or something. Am i missing something on getting the index to work? I can see the index files on the mac but spotlight doesn’t show any results from it…
KDE’s Scott Wheeler has said this already more than a year ago. And then, at
http://conference2004.kde.org/
aKademy 2004 he gave a http://conference2004.kde.org/cfp-devconf/scott.wheeler-search.meta…
talk about his plans for KDE 4 for a new contextual linkage engine, now named Tenor.
Recently, Tenor was again
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/5816/1/
highlighted in an article because it seems to have made some more progress.
Think about not having to remember that whole directory structure or even what you named the files. With Spotlight you can search for a phrase that would be in the file you are looking for and chances are very high that the first result will be what you want. For example, after installing Tiger one of the first things I did was install a Spotlight plugin that would index my OpenOffice (NeoOffice/J) files. To test that it works I did a search for an acronym mentioned in my history notes. Since the acronym, SNCC, is only written once in only one file out of all the files on my system Spotlight shows me that file almost instantaneously. I just have to press CMD + Space to bring up the search field and type the term. I really don’t even have to use the mouse to choose the file, just press down once and then enter.
Spotlight is quite awesome. It does have some ways yet to go though. When my laptop has been on for a few days, and some applications *cough*Safari*cough* that hog memory are running, Spotlight can be a bit slow searching because it searches as you type. The only problem I have with it so far is the way it does grouping. You can configure Spotlight to order the results by type. I want Spotlight to show me applications first. Well, when I do a search for an application name, like Moneydance, it doesn’t pull the index items for applications first. When it finally does get around to pulling them it moves them up in the list but I think it would be much quicker if it did searches in the order you have the categories arranged.
david gelernter worked on “lifestreams” as he called it which basically goes conceptually further than spotlight&co…
that was in 1998 and back then he also used works of other human-interface-designers which stated the same.,,
I have over 5000 Word, Excel, PowerPoint, jpeg, mpeg and PDF documents that I’ve collected from undergrad and postgrad. Most have titles that aren’t very useful but all were kept in a very elaborately organized folder system. Two weeks after I got Tiger I realized that almost everything I did on my computer that wasn’t in the dock started with command-space bar. I hadn’t traversed my elaborate folder system once in those 2 weeks. As a matter of fact my folder system based on year, class, lecture sucked because within 2 minutes of using Spotlight I was finding relevant material I had long forgotten about.
Realizing that finding a place to put new documents in my elaborate folder system was a waste of time with Spotlight, I made an Automator action that looked through all my school folders, took all the files out of their individual folders and placed them into my Document folder.
Now everything simply goes into Documents. The fact that Spotlight goes through documents has been wonderful as I have 300+ page syllabi in single pdfs….in other words, syllabi with too many pages to remember such and such is on page 36 from second year of class X.
My Finder use is minimal now.
it’s all fine until you need to use the command prompt
unless Spotlight also works from the CLI, which would be ace.
Let’s not forget the labels feature in GMail, the tags feature in del.icio.us/Outfoxed/etc. I actually had a conversation with a friend a few months ago about how I’d much rather have folders to store my data, but upon using these new categorization schemes, I much prefer them to folders. Labels and tags allow users to never really have to worry about paths, and provide much more flexibility on how we view our files.
The iPod uses a pro-actively metadata driven relational as opposed to the hierarchical data model used by all previous players.
It’s nice to see the same benefits being reaped by OS X
I don’t see Spotlight or other content-based indexing mechanisms replace hierarchical directories, but complement them.
There will always be situations where you want to group files together which have no common indexed keyword(s).
It’s just as it was with the CLI vs GUI argument: the real power lies in using the strengths of both where appropriated, not in choosing one over the other.
the thing for me is that there needs to be more Metadata.
I like organizing my files in my own folder structure but their are a lot of times where I want the same file to be referenced by different projects and therefore be in different places at once without duplication.
What would help was if there was a way for me to ad contextuality information to both files and directories.
for example when I do a design project I always have the same folder structure within the projects folder, as well as the same template files.
kind of like a database driven site would. (office templates such as invoices and letterhead, but also project managment files, fonts, logos etc.
it would be very very cool if I could add metadata to the file to give it more attributes than just name and the automatic date stamp, and use the smart folder feature to always gather related files creating for me an automatically updated project folder.
I think John Siracusa at Ars talks about this extensively.
For me spotlight as it is, is really irrelevant because for example the photographs I shoot for a project have generic and irrelevent machine controled names.
(sure I could put more info using exif, but have you ever tried to use a cameras controls to type out information.
I think these guys are off the mark here, because the tool and the file system are too independent right now.
Spotlight by itself will not bring this change about until the file system is more powerful. (like BeFS was).
I strongly suspect that the article could have better been titled “Tiger Tweaks Could Kill Finder.” A directory (folder) based architecture is not only for human convenience; it also provides a mechanism for software to locate information without human intervention.
While technology such as Spotlight might reasonable become the preferred mechanism for human-oriented data location, tree or graph-based hierarchies will almost certainly remain as the underpinnings for the forseeable future. With that, a means for humans to directly access this structure will also be needed if for no other reason than troubleshooting.
I’m all for a better file system, and starting w/ Spotlight seems like a reasonable way to do it. I loved the notion of smart folders ever since Copland days, and someday I’ll get around to playing with them.
I don’t see a better way to handle projects (programming, web site, etc) that contain lots of assorted files. Organizing by directory is not only the best way now, it’s the only way that makes sense.
Will the old way still be available? Apple’s “our way or the highway” attitude has made me resist even good ideas. If their concept of the ultimate file system isn’t the same as mine, how screwed am I? I hated the OSX Finder (and still prefer the spatial OS9 one); I don’t especially hate the Dock myself, but an awful lot of people do, and there is no Apple-sanctioned alternative to either.
My big fear about MS’s version of this idea, if they ever release it, is that when (not if) it eats itself, what will be left? Hopefully not a multi-GB partition containing tens of thousands of files, all renamed w/ GUID’s to avoid conflicts? Or even worse, some sort of database with everything jammed in together? Presumably Apple wouldn’t do something like that?
As long as computer software and the OS internally uses folders, and as long people still think in a hierarchy kind of way, the computer will always uses folders.
Remember: it’s a desktop metaphor, in real life we put stuff in “folders” too!
Folders give me the idea being in control: I put stuff wherever I want to. I hate Itunes indexing my MP3’s, I hate Iphoto indexing my photos. It’s giving control to the computer, dictating structure.
Phuck indexing! Long live “real” folders!
folders forever. thas the way my brain thinks anyways…
on the occasion when i do loose sumthing there r find features in pretty much any os
i hate indexing though, its a waste of my cpu’s time.
A hierachy of files is a good way to organize things, whether we’re talking about a filing cabinet or a computer.
But that hierarchy is not very good for finding things. Why? Because you won’t easily find what you’re looking for unless you already know where it is.
That’s not a silly statement. If you know where something is supposed to be, and it is, in fact, in that location, then you’ll find it. If not, you may have to search every folder looking for it.
To reduce the need for those kind of “front to back” searches, we impose organization on our hierarchy. We align and fill folders alphabeticaly. We following an established file structure, as in Unix, that designates certain kinds of files belong in certain kind of folders.
All that imposed organization helps, but it is limiting in that the organization must exist, users must adhere to it, and users must remember what folders should contain the kind of file they’re looking for.
Of couse, if you’re searching for a segment of data that might be contained in multiple files in multiple folders, that organization won’t be a great help.
Another way impose organization is after-the-fact, which is what tools like Spotlight anf Beagle (someday) do. This is a Good Thing. It transfers the responsibility to maintain and adhere to the organization from the user to the computer. This is what computers are supposed to do.
In my house, I have an attic, a cellar, a kitchen etc. My skis and roller blades are in the cellar, the sugar is in the kitchen cupboard and my christmas decorations and empty computer boxes are in the attic.
I don’t just have a huge heap of possession in the back yard somewhere.
But how cool would it be if I had a slave to which I could say: “Bring me my skiis” , “Bring me the sugar”, all the while keeping my lazy butt on the sofa?
This is how I use spotlight. My stuff is organized in folders, but I use Spotlight to eliminate the tedious, time-consuming drudgery of navigating.
I’m amazed that in all of the nonsense that I’ve seen written about search tools, no one mentions them as a way to avoid navigation. Can’t anyone thing beyond using them to find stuff in a disorganized pile of crap?
Check out the mdfind command. I used it a couple weeks ago to find the email for a sepcific job by logging into my computer at work and running this on the command line.
with mdfind, you can also do significantly more complicated searches than you can with finder.
Could you imagine having source code to a large project without filing it in folders somehow? It may seem to not be a big deal with a relatively small project, or a bunch of individual small projects, but what if you have multiple projects that reuse some of the code (hopefully code is reused!) amongst the projects?
Now, as if that weren’t enough, what about working with a large body of source code being worked on by multiple people on multiple machines? What if you have several slightly different versions of code with the same filename, or several majorly different versions of a file with the same filename?
Now, what you could do is enforce a query to have nested levels of qualifiers, but wouldn’t that replicate in functionality what’s already being done with folders now?
Being a long time BeOS user I’ve discussed this with people a lot. Some have been saying that BeFS queries could eliminate folders in BeOS too, but I don’t agree.
Sure if I know exactly what I’m looking for, queries is a good thing, but if I don’t have anything specific to search for, how will I ever find what I want find?
You would have to rely on you brain to hold a lot of information.
Also, even though a lot of meta-data can be automatically extracted from a file, some (and often the most important) has to be entered manually. The computer can’t recognize a dog from a dinosaur in a picture for example, you’d have to enter that yourself. Most people just don’t want to spend time entering a lot of information about their files.
Queries can’t replace a well structured filesystem. But it can make it easier to find things if you know what you are looking for.
I use spotlight to launch all my apps these days, and load almost all my documents.
Why bother searching with a mouse when I can just hit command-space, type the first 3 letters of the app and its right there in less than a second.
This is insane.
Folders are not going away at all. They are reality based. They make sense, and match how we store stuff in the physical world.
I almost never use spotlight, I hate using search utilities.
I have everything organized and it takes me no time to find it since i just know where i put it. It takes me far longer to think what to use to search for a file i want. i don’t remember the names of things, i don’t remember how to spell things. I just know what i’m looking for visually. Sorta like spelling words, you don’t spell it out, you just think and your hand makes it, and afterwards your brain checks to see if it came up with the right thing. Using spotlight involves way to much thought, plus means going through the process of narrowing things down and seeing a ton of stuff your not looking for.
There is no way you can get rid of folders, some may find spot light useful, but I’m sure there is probably even more people who haven’t used it one bit aside from a search for when they really can’t find something (used it once or twice for that). Furthermore you have to put a file some place. Spot light finds things, but you will need a file structure when putting something away. Unless your are just going to make a vast abyss on the HD and toss every file in one folder. What a mess.
Computers have evolved to closely simulate the physical world, thus a desktop, a mouse that acts as a hand for manipulating things, a keyboard for writing. Files work like out file cabinets. Things just make sense. But when things become less physical it goes to heck, like the CLI, or hyperlinks between various files on your HD and such.
Things like spotlight are nice, but they will never take hold for everyone, and will get massive backlash if they became the only way. Just think if the only way to open a file was to drag its icon ontop a app. People would go insane. Not many people know you can do that right now or do it. If they got ride of being able to do “open/file” people would go insane. Dropping a file on a app to open it is about as intuitive as thinking you can throw a bank statement at your file cabinet and the cabinet just absorbs it and puts it in the right spot.
The comparision with google shows how bad this idea is, for one using google is not ideal, I wasn’t aware of directories for sites, but for the net they wouldn’t work anyways, since they would have to update constantly for everyones site (which won’t happen), and its not a structure created by the user, thus we use google. A person computer is not the same, we put everything where it is, so it all makes sense.
Also, itunes and iphoto are evil far as organizing files, I think the number one gripe with them is that they don’t let you work with things via a finder like means. Your working with a black hole and have no idea whats going on. People don’t want to wonder where their files went. We don’t walk into our neighbors house and toss all out personal records in some heap in a room there and leave with the idea that person will keep control of them for us.
Why would this do away with the directory structure? You have to have some sort of data structure to organize the files. Ever tried to set up ACLs when all files aren’t organized somehow using a directory like structure? It’s a bitch.
Besides, a file system keeps things ordered logically. When you are looking for a specific type of file, you can usually narrow down pretty quickly where the file can be found based on the directory structure. (Unless you’re using a Mac where the Unix and Apple directory structures are dumped together and each pretends the other doesn’t exist) Furthermore, what’s so great about spotlight anyway? “locate foo | grep bar” always quickly found whatever I’ve been looking for anyway.
Spotlight and Smart Folder’s current implementation is a good start but here are some features that are needed:
1. For Smart Folders(Saved Queries) to actually be folders that are recognized as such by software such as GIMP.
2. When you go to open a file in a smart folder using an open dialog you can’t use the search field in the open dialog to narrow down the results further(it becomes disabled), that is extremely annoying.
3. Right now spotlight can use keywords manually added to each file to help find them. I’ve manually tagged some pictures with keywords such as People, Friends, etc and made a smart folder that shows all the pictures of people. This is all well and good but i would like a GUI system where there is a list of keywords that have been used so I can just drag a file into the keyword and it will automatically have that keyword added to it. Also I would like to be able to drag an untagged image/file into a smart folder and it do something so that it will add the keywords so it will become part of the smart folder. Right now I’m adding my “keywords” to the spotlight comments area.. This really would be hard to implement using such comments but maybe a seperate spotlight keyword list would be useful to do what I am suggesting. Not sure if there is anything like this with spotlight so far.
NOTE: I’m not suggesting that any of the suggestions I made right there are original ones because they aren’t, just wanted to make that clear.
Folders and human-exposure to the folder hierarchy are going to be around for a long time. Most people prefer to have some idea of “where” a file is located, other than just “on the computer”. How would you like to have a “save file” dialog box that doesn’t let you specify a location, because it is no longer relevant?
I think most people like to be able to casually browse their files (without having to enter keywords). Most of us probably have enough files that browsing all of them – even limited by filetype – without a hierarchy would be too overwhelming. Also, without any folders it would be too easy to end up with tons of “forgotten” files.
Folders exist because they serve a purpose, they’re convenient, and they just work.
We’ve been able to do this very thing in BeOS for years… I mean ages. Not surprising spotlight can do it now given an ex-BeOS engineer worked on it.
Think about not having to remember that whole directory structure or even what you named the files. With Spotlight you can search for a phrase that would be in the file you are looking for and chances are very high that the first result will be what you want. For example, after installing Tiger one of the first things I did was install a Spotlight plugin that would index my OpenOffice (NeoOffice/J) files. To test that it works I did a search for an acronym mentioned in my history notes. Since the acronym, SNCC, is only written once in only one file out of all the files on my system Spotlight shows me that file almost instantaneously. I just have to press CMD + Space to bring up the search field and type the term. I really don’t even have to use the mouse to choose the file, just press down once and then enter.
Ahh, so you don’t have to remember file metadata, but you do have to remember file contents. And how exactly is this an improvement? My experiences with file indexing suggest that this is not a typical case. A more likely case involves sifting through more than a dozen false positives. How do you distinguish the false positives from the real thing?
Folders and human-exposure to the folder hierarchy are going to be around for a long time. Most people prefer to have some idea of “where” a file is located, other than just “on the computer”. How would you like to have a “save file” dialog box that doesn’t let you specify a location, because it is no longer relevant?
Well, there are some other reasons for folders as well. (And I really should be writing my editorial on this soon.) From the point of view of a user, a “folder” is simply a group of files described by a conceptual name, that can be copied, moved, compressed, or deleted as a group. Using folders it is easy for me to say I want to synchronize this group of files with my web server but leave that group group the same, or that I want to send this group to a publisher but exclude that group. This collection gets archived every day, but that collection gets archived once a month.
File folders are some major powerful metadata mojo. They encode both concept and relationship. I know that README describes a group of files in that directory, src contains the source code, and index.html is the entry-point to a selected group of documentation. I know that all the files in a directory named “santa_monica” were taken in California, all the documents in “job_hunt” are cover letters, and most of the pdf files in “library” were downloaded from the web.
Think about not having to remember that whole directory structure or even what you named the files.
Well, I don’t have to do that now, really. Using Directory Opus (best file manager in the world), I have aliases to most of my important folders, such as /Desktop for my desktop and /Porn for my stash of adult videos
So, if I want to access all of my porn, I do the following:
1. Press Winkey + O to bring up a folder Window
2. Hit tab
3. Type /porn (or really ‘/po’ and then it autocompletes)
4. Press Enter
This takes all but about 4-5 seconds, and that’s if I mistype something. I can’t imagine any search utility being faster than that. I suppose a util like Spotlight might be helpful if I was looking for a certain porno – say, if I wanted to watch that Peter North facial. But then again, I doubt that Spotlight could search videos, but hey … it might work wonders for PDF files anyway
for a small amount of results but what to do with metadata search that gives you a thousands or even more results?
I have been reading about metadata search for years and I have never got the real answer on that question. Just look at Google example: search for something and you get thousands of pages. Tell me where is the real answer? On the first page or on the 786th page?
Here is the paradox: huge amount of metadata results requires folder hierarchy !!!
When things get complex you have the same problem: complex folder hierarchy and complex metadata hierarchy.
Further, to get exact results with metadata search you have to spend a lot of time organizing your metadata, typing categories etc. And you have to remember all these categories and combinations of categories to get real results.
If i know where my file is..why the hell would i like to search? It is like daily printing the directions from your office to home…no sorry i know where my home is.
“I hated the OSX Finder (and still prefer the spatial OS9 one); I don’t especially hate the Dock myself, but an awful lot of people do, and there is no Apple-sanctioned alternative to either. “
To make finder just the way OS9 was:
1.) Open finder
2.) Click the button on the top right of the titlebar
3.) These is no three
The era of organising files into nested folders is of course not over. Alternatives are becoming much more usable, but this does not make hierarchical folders any less useful. They’ll be around for a while
People use folders as in real life.
As long we use folders in this real life, the concept will be of use in computers.
Computers should adapt to humans way of working. Of course, they can introduce powerful capabilities like searching as the Apple tool but.. I want the machine to help me and follow me in the way I work, not the other way around.
Folders let you put in one place several files of different kind so when you mail or compress it before mailing, you know everything is inside of it.
That’s what I like in Apple computers when I bought my first one, a LC III with 7.1 MacOS. It was human and adapted to me while the Windows 95/98 at that time was just a pain in the ass
Today I only use NetBSD and text interfaces so I am no longer using a mouse and the desktop concept. The interesting stuff is I don’t use folders but a Database. I have a big Postgres database on my disk where I store everything : old emails, source code and so on and I also have a CVS for some projects developped in C.
The database should be the next best step to store information I think.
Welcome to hype. Spotlight technology is great, its UI implementation totally sucks. With 10000+ docs, pdfs, images and all, an “Enter term to search in every absolute metadata field and content any file has” field is totally cumbersome and ineffective.
Looking for a file named “baseball” in my harddisk returns an eternal list of seemingly unrelated files, and only when I make a custom search that takes about 20 clicks I am able to find it.
Surely, why would anybody use filenames to organize their data?
I’m surprised there’s only been one mention here of Gmail-style labels. They seem to me to be an excellent approach to addressing a major problem with a hierarchically organised folder system: what to do with files that logically could/should be in more than one location in the hierarchy. Unix systems work around this problem by (hard) links, but that can be extremely confusing (to me anyway… having the same file in several places never fails to do my head in).
Furthermore, labels seem to me in no way incompatible with content-based indexing (if that’s what you want) and should integrate well with an access permissions system. Peronally, I’d love to see a (preferably Unix-like) OS organised around a flat, label-based file structure. Anyone know if this has ever been seriously worked on?
Since when are folders “bad” anyway? Searching for files is not more efficient than if you simply created a folder and made a link to this folder with a suitably descriptive name.
Maybe Apple doesn’t realize that in Windows you can even add comments to links if you’re THAT disorganized that you can’t even remember what the folder is by its name alone.
And that’s just with Windows Explorer by default, with 3rd party file managers you have even more options.
Spotlight is a case of trying to fix something that isn’t broken.
I like folders too and i’m sure we’ll keep them. But i like what Gilbert Fernandes is saying. Just create one big database on a disk where you store everything into like the winfs idea.
This way you can do fast and complicated searches but you can also emulate a folder structure. Best of both worlds.
I have a mess of almost 1’000’000 different files and (hmm… too many) folders (docs, zipped sources, software, other stuff) on my harddrives and actually it is simpler to download a file again than to find it locally. So I would like to use a database-like filesystem with context search instead the classic one.
So I would like to use a database-like filesystem with context search instead the classic one.
Pet peeve here. All file systems are databases. What people are really asking for is a better index.
“Why bother searching with a mouse when I can just hit command-space, type the first 3 letters of the app and its right there in less than a second.”
That’s hardly revolutionary. Every desktop I know of has a ‘run program’ dialog you can pull up from the desktop with a couple of clicks or a single key combination (alt-F2, often). Then you type the app name. No whizbang indexing service needed for that, is there? GNOME’s (and I suppose others, I just haven’t tried lately) does autocomplete as well, so alt-f2-‘evol’-enter is enough to run evolution…
Just like in hackers the movie. Instead of typing cd /tmp they had to fly around a virtual reality file system for 10 minutes to get to /tmp. Real time saving device