[extension]

So when I want to attach something to an email, I have to go to the app for whatever kind of data it is and find the "share" button, which will be in a different place for each app, if it's even there at all. Ditto if I want to copy it to a USB stick, add it to my Dropbox, upload it to a website, etc.

The fundamental ideas behind a filesystem, packaging all data in a generic container and allowing arbitrary grouping of the containers, are extremely straightforward and intuitive, not to mention incredibly useful.

What throws people for a loop is having to share their filesystem with magic invisible gremlins that leave inscrutable files all over the place. Most filesystems come pre-loaded with mountains of this junk, which the user is made keenly aware of when they are banished to some small niche directory. But the gremlins won't even stay out of the niche; they are constantly creating folders and dumping mysterious config files there, behind the user's back.

The solution to this problem is clear and simple. A filesystem, from the user's perspective, should be empty when it comes out of the box, or at most contain a few items that the user knows exactly what they are. From then and forever, nothing should ever appear in the filesystem except what the user explicitly put there. The user is free to create, move, copy, rename or delete any file without unexpected side-effects.

It seems obvious to me that filesystems should work this way and there would be no big usability issue if they did. The problem is, we have all this old baggage attached to the filesystem, both conceptually and practically, and we are throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

[ams6110]

I think you've hit on why so many users keep everything on the desktop. They can have files and folders there (which most people CAN understand, by the way) but they don't have to deal with or see the rest of the file system (which they will inevitably stumble into pretty quickly using Explorer (or whatever file navigator app).

[extension]

They either stumble out of the Desktop or get lost in the pollution. They download a photo and edit it in Power Goo. When they want to find it again, do they look in Desktop, Desktop\Downloads, Desktop\My Pictures, Desktop\My Documents, Desktop\My Documents\Power Goo, etc?

[ThomPete]

I think you are missing the fundamental point here.

The current file systems whether MS or OSX isn't made for the amount of files that the average person deals with today.

A better system would be to allow you to search on multiple axis. But more importantly a better system would follow what you are attempting to do and limit the option space quite significantly.

[megablast]

WHen you want to share something, it will ask you what type of file you want to share, you pick photo, then select from the list, which you can filter in a number of different ways.

You could filter by name, date, who is in it.

[extension]

So you need special case code to handle each and every data type, even when you're just going to flatten it into an opaque blob in every case? And there would be a PDF store, and a Powerpoint store, and a Ruby script store, and an NES emulator saved game store, each with it's own completely independent API?

No, this is ludicrous and backwards, for so many reasons. Obviously you want some sort of generic data interchange layer, and voila: filesystem.

I can imagine a filesystem far more sophisticated than what we have today, with metadata, indexing, content handlers, searching, filtering, and so on. But the essential foundation for all of this is a generic package for user data.

[ThomPete]

The web is fundamentally a bunch of files.

Would you rather browse around the net in hierarchies or use google to find the files.

File systems like those we have today are fine when you don't have a lot of content. But it simply fails as a design system as soon as we move into terabytes of data.

Why do you think that Spotlight and QuickSilver are so popular on the mac?

[extension]

We're not talking about the web, we're talking about the user's stuff. Entirely distinct, for the purposes of usability. Anyway, a good filesystem supports fast search and filter, in addition to folders.

Without files, you have no web and no general search. Instead you have photo-net, music-net, video-net, text-net, all orthogonal. Lame.