Neat concept, although the organization of items in a temporal fashion is different from culture to culture. Dr Alice Gaby speaks a little about this in episode 41 of The BrainScience Podcast (http://docartemis.com/brainsciencepodcast/2008/07/bs41-alice...).
For instance, given a series of photos of a baby, a young boy, a man, and an elderly gentleman, Western cultures would normally place these items from left to right then top to bottom. Chinese cultures might place them from top to bottom first and Israelis might place them from right to left.
She also speaks of an aboriginal tribe that has no concept of left or right. Whereas you or I might say, "Would you please pass the salt to your left" they might say, "Would you please pass the salt north. She speaks of the above experiment being performed with people from this tribe. Not all, but a statistically significant number put the temporal or from East to West (sunrise to sunset).
So while interesting there are always surprising items to consider when writing your software. Know your user, for he is not thee. ~David Platt
That's kind of the point - people can't or don't want to organize their stuff in the way that suits their operating system best. There's definitely room for usability improvement in this area.
A hierarchical filesystem is an implementation detail, and it's unhelpful to expose it to the user. It doesn't really match the mental models.
It's interesting to see how the lack of filesystem is handled in the iPad. The video for iWork where the slides are flicked backwards and forwards (like pages in the iPhone Safari) doesn't look like it'll scale. Maybe you have to use a search interface when you get more docs than you can comfortably flick through?
Yeah, I think filesystems are (inevitably?) converging towards search or some sort of computer-aided file organization.
I've been meditating a lot on this recently. The way I organize files is in a current directory for the last N weeks, or for the duration of the last project or similar. I then batch process it every so often and delete the files that need deleting and squirrel away the ones that may need referencing later in an actual hierarchical file system. This way a small number of recent files are readily available, and I have some hope of finding historical files later (at the cost of some upfront work).
Anyway, it occurred to me that I really don't enjoy doing this, that my time is better spent doing other things and that computers are supposed to be good at boring work like this anyway. Ideally, the computer should be able to help me "get the files I want" either by placing the files somewhere where I can later find them myself or by searching and providing them for me when I ask nicely.
All this leads me to wonder: are there any tag-based filesystems out there?
Indicative of the entire philosophy of software development--the newest stuff is the most important, and things from years ago don't matter (now we can keep re-inventing the wheel).
For instance, given a series of photos of a baby, a young boy, a man, and an elderly gentleman, Western cultures would normally place these items from left to right then top to bottom. Chinese cultures might place them from top to bottom first and Israelis might place them from right to left.
She also speaks of an aboriginal tribe that has no concept of left or right. Whereas you or I might say, "Would you please pass the salt to your left" they might say, "Would you please pass the salt north. She speaks of the above experiment being performed with people from this tribe. Not all, but a statistically significant number put the temporal or from East to West (sunrise to sunset).
So while interesting there are always surprising items to consider when writing your software. Know your user, for he is not thee. ~David Platt