| A funny article! Just to answer to a few misjudgements: "Gone are the days we had three or four major applications. Now we have 50 plus." You can have even more if you choose to stick to UNIX philosophy of having "programs that do one thing and do it well", and you also can have only a few, if you choose software suites (and counting one such suite as "one" program), that do a broad range of things, so it's a mater of personal choice in the spectrum of software solutions. "One part of the potential solution may lie in an ‘app-centric’ operating system (OS), instead of the current ‘file-centric’(OS). In an app-centric OS, the file/folder management is a background (system/app level) process, similar to what you find on current smart phones and tablets." Again, it's a personal choice. In the desktop you may interact in an "app-centric" way. You open your application and then do things inside it. Opening automatically an associated application when you're opening a file is only there for your convenience, desktop or phone/tablet BTW. It's a no-brainer! "To access the last ‘run’ I completed, I don’t have to wade through the files on my iPhone to find it. I simply open the app, and the relevant files are accessed and presented to me in a meaningful way within the app interface." Some sort of history and in-app access to recent files (read "works") was there long before the iPhone! And that's beside the examples of Spotify-like desktop apps "partially doing it". Files in current computing systems are like cells in the living organisms, like atoms in physical mater. Of course, there is file-less information transfer inside the system, just like there is chemical transfer among living cells, just like there is sub-atomic interaction among chemical molecules, but some sort of structure inside a given individual information system is needed, just like was needed in the nature itself. The entire article seem like a rant against the nature of things only because "I can never remember where I ‘file’ the bloody things." |