Absolutely. The knee-jerk reaction of the author is painful. Mindless copying of what went before is how we end up with bad ideas being repeated over and over. When we try new things the good will survive, and the bad will be improved or removed. When we merely copy, we maintain the status quo. I'm glad to see Apple innovating, and I'd love a system which mostly gets rid of folders to be a success. Let's watch this space.
It took about 10 years for my mother, a daily Windows user, to understand folders. I lost count of how many times I explained it. The previous generation seem to particularly struggle with digitally-native concepts.
Folders are of course a broken metaphor. In the real world folders are not placed inside other folders - it makes no sense! The entire file concept is anachronistic, why do I care how the document is stored? Why do I even have to save? Why can't I undo after closing and re-opening a program? Why a I forced to give a document a name on disk when it already has a title? Etc...
Over the years I've moved from a fairly hierarchical arrangement of my files to one closer to maybe two levels (source code excluded), the congnitive burden is so much less - it's the advent of indexed search which has made this possible.
> I'm glad to see Apple innovating, and I'd love a system which mostly gets rid of folders to be a success.
Okay, let's not get carried away here. They aren't doing anything new. This is old hat, and they are just now working it into OSX. This isn't some Apple invented paradigm, this has been played with many times over.
> It took about 10 years for my mother, a daily Windows user, to understand folders.
Are you really sure about that? I have a hunch the difficulty wasn't with the folders themselves, but rather the badly-designed navigation interface of the Open dialog, and where it's starting from.
I've found that understanding the folder concept is one of the easiest things for new computer users to grasp.
The Open dialog certainly caused a lot of trouble. Perhaps I should have said learned to use effectively rather than understand. The concept of hierarchical folders is not particularly challenging, but the practice of using them is usually a real pain for little upside. One of the main use of folders I see is people grouping their work by year, month, etc - what's the point when the file has that metadata anyway?
It took about 10 years for my mother, a daily Windows user, to understand folders. I lost count of how many times I explained it. The previous generation seem to particularly struggle with digitally-native concepts.
Folders are of course a broken metaphor. In the real world folders are not placed inside other folders - it makes no sense! The entire file concept is anachronistic, why do I care how the document is stored? Why do I even have to save? Why can't I undo after closing and re-opening a program? Why a I forced to give a document a name on disk when it already has a title? Etc...
Over the years I've moved from a fairly hierarchical arrangement of my files to one closer to maybe two levels (source code excluded), the congnitive burden is so much less - it's the advent of indexed search which has made this possible.