How do you represent that path with tree hierarchy?
You represent that by using a spatial Finder [1] (with aliases), instead of a browser. Files and folders can be organized spatially on the desktop and within each window. Since a given window is a permanent view into its folder (there was no way to open multiple windows of the same folder nor could a window ever show a different folder) it was extremely easy to remember what you were looking at, visually.
The classic Mac OS also had tags which you could use to flag files and folders by colour and of course you could change folders into small icon or list view in order to handle many files at a time. These view settings permanently applied to a given folder, so every time you opened it you would see the same window, in the same place, right where you left off.
To someone who may never have used this system, it's hard to describe how incredibly productive it was. Humans have extremely powerful spatial memory and the classic Mac OS Finder leveraged that perfectly. Just like the example of someone walking through their house to retrieve a book from their library or a letter from their desk, you could navigate your folder structure visually, without even reading the file names; it was incredibly powerful!
Same way you draw a UI for different screen sizes: you scale it. If you were doing this from scratch today, you'd use a resolution-independent UI drawing library, such as one based on vector graphics.
As for wildly different aspect ratios (portrait vs landscape) you're just going to have to compromise. As long as you have a mechanism to make sure windows can't get lost outside the bounds of the screen, you should be fine.
It the problem should only happen once, though. After your files have been synced between the devices for the first time, thereafter each device should maintain its own window positioning.
If you scale down a large display to a phone-sized one, either usability is horrible on the phone because touch targets, text etc. are too small or you cannot use the space of the large display effectively.
> After your files have been synced between the devices for the first time, thereafter each device should maintain its own window positioning.
No they shouldn't. That breaks the entire metaphor because now items don't have a single spatial position anymore.
Boo, the finder is the worst thing to happen to UI because it is like pulling all the leaves off a tree and then ranking them in interesting ways. I mean, it's useful and great but at the expense of stalling development on tree/graph representations for the last ~30 years.
I mean look at this article - great writing, lots of good ideas, but not a single picture until page 9 of 10 and then you just get two lists and a card catalog metaphor. Whoo, dynamic lists. The problem with a spatial finder is that it's all about ordering things, which is a hideously constrictive thing even as a dynamic process because it reduces everything to one dimension and encourages quantitative rather than semantic thinking (let me be clear that I'm blaming Apple for this unhappy state of affairs rather than the author).
We can see another instance of this in the mentioned bookmarks; it's 2019 and the only options I have for exploring my bookmarks in any of the popular browsers are as a 90s style menu tree. Why doesn't my browser pro-actively tag my bookmarks and allow me to apply any of many categorical schemas that people share. Likewise, why can't I configure my browser to be more selective about CSS? It blows my mind that websites and apps offer 'dark themes' as a feature when theming has been a basic part of desktop UI for >20 years. I should be able to view any website through a dark theme whose darkness and basic palette I've chosen for my browser, in the same way that I can put on sunglasses rather than having to wait for artificial things in my physical environment to be painted in less vibrant colors.
I'm well aware that there are any number of CSS modifiers and plugins, I have used many over the years. But they all require either restyling individual website elements via a GUI or writing replacement CSS code. This is like saying that if you have an uncomfortable chair the solution is to take up woodworking rather than throw a cushion on it. I am never going to write code to increase my comfort (as opposed to developing new tools) because the discomfort of having to acquire competence with yet another syntax vastly outweighs the likely aesthetic improvement. It would make perfect sense if I was a working designer but I'm not and don't want to be. Invitations to code something oneself are implicit failures to understand the problem, confusing the cup with its content.
I submit that part of the problem is that designers and developers are hopelessly constricted by their own axiomatic metaphors. Take bookmarks; I still use physical bookmarks occasionally, and they're essentially nodes for a particular marker in a one-dimensional linked list (the sequence of paper pages in the book). The browser allowed us to take a collection of such one-dimensional markers and structure them in a binary tree form. That's nice, but by now we should be up to using quaternions to explore 4-dimensional slices in n-dimensional semantic space.
Frankly, if I were dictator of the internet my first rule would be that you can provide content or rendering but not both at the same time unless you want to be in an art museum. UI paradigms are like vessels into which content is poured; the web is the equivalent of having to buy drinks only in single-serving cans or bottles and then telling people to be happy with the huge variety of packaging options, with no regard to the time and cognitive overhead of trying to find what you want behind 500 layers of branding. Economists refer to this as the paradox of choice: little, no, or even negative value is being delivered to the consumer, while vast resources are being spent on trying to slightly expand market share through product differentiation. In some cases, far more economic resources than required for the manufacture and delivery of the underlying product and with significantly higher negative externalities in terms of energy and anxiety.
The problem with a spatial finder is that it's all about ordering things, which is a hideously constrictive thing even as a dynamic process because it reduces everything to one dimension and encourages quantitative rather than semantic thinking (let me be clear that I'm blaming Apple for this unhappy state of affairs rather than the author).
Can you elaborate on this a little more? I'm not quite sure what you mean here.
To me, the spatial metaphor Finder was all about semantic thinking. I'd open up my project folder and all of the documents would be spread out visually, within the 2D plane of the window, and their spatial orientations and groupings carried meaning for me. Additionally, I'd tag things with various colours, such as marking a file red (for TODO) or another one green (for Done). This was just about as far from one-dimensional as I could envision a workable UI (3D UIs have been tried in games and they're pretty clunky).
As for bookmarks? I agree with you. Bookmarks suck!
Well, you make a fine point about the colors, which were something I'd forgotten to consider. I did (and do) use this approach, but with the passage of time my enthusiasm for the maintenance required has really diminished.
What I am looking for is something in the same ballpark as dynamic graph generation as seen here, but with shareable tagging: https://www.mcnutt.in/forum-explorer/
When you say their spatial orientations and groupings carried meaning for me I wholly agree; What I'm trying to say (poorly uwu) is that managing the finder or other WIMP desktop elements is like laying out a beautiful graph in Visio or some other flowcharting software, vs the sort of dynamic graphs that the computer can render for you on the fly.
Taking the example above and imagining it extended to disks and documents as opposed to topics and comments, suppose you could have nesting nodes, whose size might be a treemap-like function of their content and whose layout might be manged with Apollonian gaskets; and imagine further that I could click on the name of individual contributors (isomorphic to file properties or curated tags) and quickly see a cross-section of their contexts - not the text of the individual comments, but the immediate neighborhood of the graphs in which they appear; and imagine further that as I applied selection criteria of various kinds to refine my graphs, their unique combination would itself form a metagraph which I could save at any time, like the key to a particular collection.
That last sounds a bit handwavey, but I'm imagining a fairly small graph that would map about the same amount of information as a regex string or polynomial expression. You wouldn't read the content of these graphs (unless you really wanted to) any more than you measure the ridges and notches of your most commonly used physical keys. They'll just become shapes you recognize and name to unlock your favorite perspectives, fulfilling much the same function as the extension buttons on your browser toolbar.
Taking the example above and imagining it extended to disks and documents as opposed to topics and comments
I like to think of it in terms of the real world objects the metaphor is meant to mimic. So I think of documents the way I would pieces of paper on my desk and control panels like light switches in my house (to borrow John Siracusa's example).
On the other hand, something like an address book or a filing cabinet full of tax records is not what I'm interested in organizing spatially. Instead, I'd use a purpose-built tool such as an address book application or document-oriented database. Likewise for photos or music, which lend themselves to custom database applications of their own.
I'm not sure what your treemap-like graph database would be optimized for, other than disk space cleanup tools (which I have used).
You represent that by using a spatial Finder [1] (with aliases), instead of a browser. Files and folders can be organized spatially on the desktop and within each window. Since a given window is a permanent view into its folder (there was no way to open multiple windows of the same folder nor could a window ever show a different folder) it was extremely easy to remember what you were looking at, visually.
The classic Mac OS also had tags which you could use to flag files and folders by colour and of course you could change folders into small icon or list view in order to handle many files at a time. These view settings permanently applied to a given folder, so every time you opened it you would see the same window, in the same place, right where you left off.
To someone who may never have used this system, it's hard to describe how incredibly productive it was. Humans have extremely powerful spatial memory and the classic Mac OS Finder leveraged that perfectly. Just like the example of someone walking through their house to retrieve a book from their library or a letter from their desk, you could navigate your folder structure visually, without even reading the file names; it was incredibly powerful!
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/2/