waffle

As part of a long-term ongoing discussion, Michael Tsai linked to another article on the lack of an iOS documents filing system.

I’ve long mulled over Apple’s specific behavior in this field.

First, Steve Jobs didn’t like file systems. Reading the biography (which was the first book I read about Apple or Steve Jobs ever if you exclude the Folklore stories that became Revolution in the Valley) has been illuminating on many levels, not the least that Steve was more critical than I knew about customer control over the things they owned. He was relentless against distractions and if something could be tied to tradition, it would have to make its case twice as hard to make the cut. He didn’t see Mac Spotlight and iOS as potential improvements or as new tools in the toolbox, but as replacements. I am told that Scott Forstall hold most of Steve’s ideas dear, so I think this may still be a factor.

I am more out of my depth here, but just applying the output to what we know of the process, I think the iOS group sees files as something you are under pressure to manage. In particular, it sees files for everything as a generic solution, and by applying Apple philosophy, it thinks that most of the problems that can be solved using files and applications are instead better solved in a task-specific way for each task. They want for there to be an app for that instead.

The problem is that the theory doesn’t hold perfectly. Even if it works partially, it can’t possibly scale up to every scenario. But in particular, it doesn’t hold for the things that people really miss having a file system-like documents and folders system for.

• Having a file system as its own cross-environmental entity let you mix a bunch of related materials for the same subject, but that are completely different type of media. You can’t have one app for all of that; “app-thought” forbids it and even if it didn’t, it’s horribly impractical. There’s no good solution for this right now except Dropbox integration. iCloud doesn’t change anything in this regard; it just eliminates having to copy things around in some apps.

• Having real folders means being able to nest them. Deep hierarchies that you are forced to use are complex, but hierarchies that you maintain yourself can be a secret to efficiency and productivity, and may make being really productive with many documents possible in the first place. Look at the opening screens of the iWork apps, or of GarageBand or iMovie. There’s no list view and you are discouraged from keeping many things around. When you cross a certain number of items, it’s harder to scan for something there than in a folder you control on a traditional file system, from a traditional file manager (like the Finder). You are still under pressure to manage these files in some ways to avoid drowning in them (and with everything of that kind in one place, even more so), you just aren’t given adequate tools for doing so efficiently.

  Or for that matter, look at your home screens. I have condensed mine down to three screens by tossing everything into folders, but I am limited to so few items and they won’t nest that it’s not surprising that I use Spotlight to find some of the seldom-used apps anyway. Search is a good complement to deliberate arrangement, but when it’s a cop-out for the rest of the experience, you’re doing something wrong. Springboard is the new Program Manager.

• The current system of having everyone implement the fundamentals isn’t holding up very well. Everyone has to solve the same set of problems and not everyone are equipped to do that or will make odd workarounds. Even the good workarounds will need to be learned on an app-by-app basis and the assumed inherited complexity of file systems has been replaced by other complexity, both for the developers and the users of the app.

• Having folders might not be the end-all solution for everything, but it is a sound foundation. Add tags to reduce the reliance on nesting as the sole organizational method, add colored labels as in Mac OS X and HFS+, fix the problems with filename restrictions (as long as they don’t have to escape from iOS), require participating document formats to generate previews and provide the right kind of metadata and you’re miles better than before, even if you don’t even count being shielded from the files and folders that constitute the system’s inner workings as a feature.

I am less and less so as time passes, but I remain hopeful that Apple will finally receive enough feedback that they change their minds and turn one of their biggest liabilities into one of their biggest strengths. If iOS 3 was Copy and Paste, maybe iOS 6 is New Folder.

Disgusting:

When I make something myself, no matter what software I use to make it, then — assuming it doesn’t infringe any copyrights — it’s my right to distribute it however I want, in whatever format I choose, for free or not. I don’t lose the right to publish my novel if Microsoft determines that I wrote it using a pirated copy of Word. Would I lose that right if I tried to sell my iBook outside of the iBookstore and Apple got wind of it? I don’t know; we’re in uncharted waters here. Or how about this: for a moment I’ll stipulate that Apple’s EULA is valid and I’ve agreed to it implicitly by using the software. Now suppose I create an iBook and give it to someone else who has never downloaded iBooks Author and is not party to the EULA, and that person sells it on their own website. What happens now?

The point of an idea is to spread and hopefully to merge with other ideas.

Take, for example, the idea of me worrying about how we’ll manage to not slash each others’ throats in a few decades when 3D printing is sufficiently advanced to be cheap and good enough to have a serious impact on dozens of major industries when we can’t even figure out that out of the commercial media industry and society, society’s the one that shouldn’t have to step back. It could meet the idea that all matter — the matter used in those 3D printers to displace the matter otherwise used in a distant country at scale to assemble the same machine, the matter in a polycarbonate and aluminium disc that used to mean so much and now means so little, the matter in any of a number of fiber cables going across the Atlantic, the Pacific or the Indian oceans that’s making all this happen, or the matter inside a flower’s petal — was once forged in stars and has travelled many light years for billions of years to get to where it is right now.

Or why not take the idea of God’s Debris, which I swore I mentioned before but seemingly haven’t, and which you should absolutely read now because I think I may be about to spoil it, really, do read it in the short interim before you even finish this sentence, it’s quite a lovely book, available for free as a PDF online and it’s written by Scott Adams, the author of Dilbert, which I hated before I read this book and then I started thinking that this guy really knew something and now I actually think he’s kind of smart and kind of like Dilbert as well which just goes to show that you’d better have plasticity in your opinions or you’ll really miss out on some things, like how the point of God’s Debris, or rather the central premise, which I hope you have read by now, that is not just God’s Debris but also its central premise which shows up rather late, and this is quite enough stalling and if you haven’t left by now to download and read it you’re deserving to read what you’re going to read, which again is the central premise, being how the sole point of a God, the only thing it could ever do to amuse itself, assuming that it’d know and be able to do anything, paradoxes be damned, would be to blow itself up, to end its own life as it were, and the real shocker in the entire novel is the assumption by the old man that mankind’s ascent from language and crude tools are to gain the level of knowledge and advanced facilities of a God in that we will be able to master the physics, not to mold them to our liking, but to take advantage of everything within their limits, which the old man would see as God rebuilding itself, but which is in any case rather interesting and if not directly applicable then at least worth the comparison since given the past few thousand years we seem to be getting a handle on at least the technology stuff, even if some people would have you believe that the Universe didn’t take thirteen-something billion years to get a handle on everything else first and would just rather God have been around for just those thousands of years, but enough of that since we don’t need those people and those particular concepts to make this premise interesting, and this sentence has turned out to be rather long already.

So if this place — waffle, that is — is really going to go foom within about a month, I think I’m at least going to drop some interesting Claim Chowder on my way out. If manipulating most aspects of materia and life is really within humanity’s grasp at all, it’ll happen within the next thousand years or it won’t happen at all. I know that this is a cop-out in terms of scale since it’s hard to verify, but I also suspect it boxes in how I feel about human progress and the Universe, which isn’t a bad conciliatory prize.

But my second prediction is simply that technological progress will be tremendous and the driver of the most change — good and bad — in the world on micro and macro scale in the immediate future. Like I said, if people lose their shit because CDs can now be downloaded and it takes ten years of uneasy upheaval to sail that industry to a point where both it and its customers are pleased with the arrangement and the rest of the media types and art forms have largely yet to make this work, imagine what will happen to the industries of production, distribution; the silent cornerstones of trade without which much of anything else would lay unproduced or unarrived?

Ideas are ideas. Patents and “Intellectual Property” started out as ways to encapsulate them for the good of competition, but regardless of your opinion on whether they continue doing so — and if it wasn’t absolutely clear by now, I am convinced that they are now poisonous due to the ease of access that the surrounding post describes — they’re not going to get less controversial in the next thirty years. If we are going to collectively lose our shit over this, please let it be now. Please let us work out that on the whole, ideas are what matters, the betterment of society and life is what’s important, and it’s for the good of humanity if we use any such innovations to make our life better, rather than block them because they upset what we have now. Death and destruction, such that they may appear, will not follow in the wake of using the sum of knowledge humankind has accumulated, but by the hands of those that are comfortable now and will be trying to prevent it.

I hope you get the idea.

I have turned off comment moderation. You people are grownups.

(Grownups are occasionally also assholes; I will treat those people as assholes as the need may arise.)