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by bonoboTP 83 days ago
Files and folders are already a helpful metaphor taken from paper based office work. You have container folders and you can put different files (pieces of paper) into different folders. The thing thats a bit conceptually hard for regular people is the nesting, that folders can contain folders can contain folders. The real world has some nesting too, like putting folders in drawers but it's more limited in number of levels. This tends to be the thing that supposedly "more user friendly" apps remove and only allow two levels or so. Basically collections or lists, eg playlists. Or tags. But once you understand nesting, files and folders are quite intuitive.

Without the helpful abstraction of files and folders, all we'd have are bytes stored at various addresses or sectors of the hardware.
2 comments
harvey9 82 days ago
I was particularly referring to Office applications which have a first stage save dialogue with some folders shown but if you want to navigate to another location you need to browse which opens another window. In the physical office metaphor this would be having to change your shoes to look in a different file cabinet
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bonoboTP 82 days ago
Oh I see, I hate the new UI of Office. I somewhat accept the ribbon, but this new full screen file menu replacement where they try to make you save stuff to the cloud makes me want to go back to the good old File > Save as... > Dialog popup of Office 2003.
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falcor84 83 days ago
> Without the helpful abstraction of files and folders, all we'd have are bytes stored at various addresses or sectors of the hardware.

I agree with most everything else you said, but would slightly push back on that. I actually quite like the idea of non-hierarchical blob storage searchable via arbitrary indexed metadata, as well as the idea of content-addressable storage (e.g. with magnet links). While folders are an elegant abstraction, I really feel that we shouldn't be beholden to it.

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fwip 82 days ago
Either way - the OS is, if anything, the thing that provides the file/metadata abstraction. It doesn't exist to hide it from you.

Without an OS, you've got a CPU and memory-mapped hardware devices. You certainly don't have files.

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