[joe_the_user]

Once you are dealing with more than, say, two hundred pieces of information, you kind of start needing to classify that information and have definite ways to find it.

If tags are a way that you can definitely find and specify a given file, then tags will form part of a new, distributed file system. If tags wind-up just being half-assed, uncertain hints to where files might be, then they will form part of a new, disfunctional distributed file system. And the later case seems to be where things are going. This "hints but no certainty" approach to file location indeed works great most of the time and fails frustratingly significant percent of the time.

But even here, this is a file system even when it is often dysfunctional.

[grecy]

I think you missed my point.

I have thousands of photos "in" iPhoto, and I have no idea of any of the file names or their location on the file system.

I don't care what they are called or where they are, I just want to have my photos.

Sure, there might be a filesystem under there, but I have no interest in interacting with it directly.

[vacri]

So... what about my scripts? Should I have to load some specific manager - iScript - in order to access my creations? Just because 'the filesystem is dying'? What about my store of .iso files? Do I need iIso?

[xp84]

Quit trying to get everyone off your lawn and accept that you are a (presumably) some kind of developer. Computers are not made just for your needs. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one. In this case, you'll eventually have to be running some kind of developer tool to have this kind of access. This is probably appropriate. The average computer user (of any mainstream OS) has as much use for the ability to manage "scripts" and "ISOs" outside of a purpose-built application for using them, as he does for a C compiler.

[UnFleshedOne]

File manager as a developer tool... The very idea makes me want to chase somebody off my lawn, but it does sound plausible. Every time I work with an application that insists on managing things on its own, I can't help but ask "but where _are_ the files??". I guess there is this notion that files are what's "real" in an otherwise ephemeral system. They are what you run, they are what you store your pictures in, they are what you recover from a busted harddrive.

Normal users seem to be very comfortable with the idea of unspecified magic though.

[vacri]

Quit telling me what to do. Quit sucking down the Apple "There is only one way" philosophy. That there is constant complaints at Apple's UI decisions shows that even in UI, there is not 'only one way'. I much prefer the Linux way - "choose how you want to be" - give a reasonable default, which can be tailored.

To try and paint computer users as being in two camps 'normal' and 'developer' does everyone a disservice - there's much more variety in users than that. Here's an example - there's a lot of gamers that like side-editing save games, yet they're not developers. Where to they fit into your dichotomous view?

[scott_s]

I think people who need to manage files outside of a particular application will become the exception, not the rule. As long as you can access the underlying file system when you need to, I see no problem with most people not having to care about it.

[vacri]

How do you move photos from Alice's computer to Bob's computer? "Check out these"? With the concept of files, you can move photos/music/whatever in a number of ways - thumb drive, network shares, cloud. If you only work through 'photo manager' applications, how do you do it? What if the creators of the photo manager didn't want to support thumb drives? What if the way the photo managers on the different devices use different ways of referring to the photos?

I think 'regular' users have plenty of use for understanding the filesystem. I also think that it's okay to have some degree of expectation for the user - dumbing it down for the lowest common denominator is harmful (look at politics!). What do you really gain by alienating the power users?

[scott_s]

You're still thinking of exceptional cases. Photo managing applications have, and will improve, native ways of sharing the photos, even if it's as simple as sending an email.

I see no reason why making the common case simple (not "dumb") means you have to eliminate, or even alienate, the power users. Frankly, since I started using a Mac, iTunes and an iPhone, I stopped managing music files. And I think that's great. Files are an implementation detail. What I want is music or radio programs, not files.

[vacri]

It's an error to simply transfer "it works for music" to "it works for everything". That it works for music is largely because sharing media files is verboten in our Brave New World - sharing is not a problem that needs to be solved there. But sharing non-media files between users is not an exceptional case, not even remotely - it's common as muck in business.

The idea that the 'normal' user is only a home-based casual web-browser/photo-taker/music listener is misleading from the outset.

[joe_the_user]

"No you don't understand, these amplifiers go up to eleven..."

Even a flickin' unix whiz doesn't care about, say, which disk sector a file is located on. In fact, if they are using a distributed file system, they also can mostly ignore the physical location of the data.

Your spiffy net of tags is a way-to-find data. A officially "file system" is a way to find data. Each has some flexibility, some lack-of-ambiguity and some persistence over time. You may not care about the uniqueness, ambiguity and decay over time of your tag based way-to-find data. But that just means you've got a convenient but half-assed file system. Moreover,