[Chris Breen]

ingus, on 11 January 2013 - 06:52 PM, said:

Well said. So then what really matters, is the pro's and con's of each approach be weighed, and then user's decide for themselves. Constructive dialogue like this serves that purpose. That there was defensiveness (on all sides) I believe came from the titled "Disruption".

I'm still willing to stand by the word "disruption" as I firmly believe that Apple is making a concerted effort to change the way we interact with our devices and data. It's something that's happening slowly, but I don't think there's any denying that it's happening. I expect that five years from now we'll look back on the way we've dealt with data in the past and see a marked change.

[Chris Breen]

This video from Corning might help illustrate the point. No mouse. No keyboard. All touch.

[bastion]

ingus, on 11 January 2013 - 06:52 PM, said:

Chris Breen, on 11 January 2013 - 01:50 PM, said:

ingus, on 11 January 2013 - 01:06 PM, said:

There's certainly nothing wrong with supporting both. Why exactly must one go away?

I don't think anyone has suggested that one must go away (though Circus Ponies seems to have interpreted it that way). Rather, Apple is deemphasizing the folder hierarchy and providing alternate ways to access your stuff.

Well said. So then what really matters, is the pro's and con's of each approach be weighed, and then user's decide for themselves. Constructive dialogue like this serves that purpose. That there was defensiveness (on all sides) I believe came from the titled "Disruption".

The problem is the assumption that disruption is inherently negative. In the short term it pretty much has to be, but that "short" can can be very short indeed. Disruptive change has been the heart of Apple's business model for the company's entire existence - or at least the parts of it where you could identify it as a successful business - and such change has generally been to the benefit of the subset of users willing and able to accept it on its own terms instead of just retreating into a corner chanting "change is bad."

[ingus]

bastion, on 14 January 2013 - 06:13 AM, said:

ingus, on 11 January 2013 - 06:52 PM, said:

Chris Breen, on 11 January 2013 - 01:50 PM, said:

ingus, on 11 January 2013 - 01:06 PM, said:

There's certainly nothing wrong with supporting both. Why exactly must one go away?

I don't think anyone has suggested that one must go away (though Circus Ponies seems to have interpreted it that way). Rather, Apple is deemphasizing the folder hierarchy and providing alternate ways to access your stuff.

Well said. So then what really matters, is the pro's and con's of each approach be weighed, and then user's decide for themselves. Constructive dialogue like this serves that purpose. That there was defensiveness (on all sides) I believe came from the titled "Disruption".

The problem is the assumption that disruption is inherently negative. In the short term it pretty much has to be, but that "short" can can be very short indeed. Disruptive change has been the heart of Apple's business model for the company's entire existence - or at least the parts of it where you could identify it as a successful business - and such change has generally been to the benefit of the subset of users willing and able to accept it on its own terms instead of just retreating into a corner chanting "change is bad."

Not all change is bad, even initially. There are a few times it's actually self evident, and one switches and doesn't look back. In this particular case, as more often than not, the change helps in some situations/styles and inhibits in other's. That's why being able to support both is great. Part of the great appeal of computers is their versatility. So a change can be "disruptive" to the market, as in, an implementation so good it get's broadly and willingly adopted, or it can be "disruptive" to the user in that it get's forced down their throats. With computer's there's not too much reason for the latter, and when it does happen, it foster's defensiveness. My personal tastes are with the broadest, least limiting, solution. When I'm swapping out a hard drive in a multi-drive system, it's sure nice to know exactly which files are on it...

[bastion]

ingus, on 14 January 2013 - 07:41 AM, said:

bastion, on 14 January 2013 - 06:13 AM, said:

ingus, on 11 January 2013 - 06:52 PM, said:

Chris Breen, on 11 January 2013 - 01:50 PM, said:

ingus, on 11 January 2013 - 01:06 PM, said:

There's certainly nothing wrong with supporting both. Why exactly must one go away?

I don't think anyone has suggested that one must go away (though Circus Ponies seems to have interpreted it that way). Rather, Apple is deemphasizing the folder hierarchy and providing alternate ways to access your stuff.

Well said. So then what really matters, is the pro's and con's of each approach be weighed, and then user's decide for themselves. Constructive dialogue like this serves that purpose. That there was defensiveness (on all sides) I believe came from the titled "Disruption".

The problem is the assumption that disruption is inherently negative. In the short term it pretty much has to be, but that "short" can can be very short indeed. Disruptive change has been the heart of Apple's business model for the company's entire existence - or at least the parts of it where you could identify it as a successful business - and such change has generally been to the benefit of the subset of users willing and able to accept it on its own terms instead of just retreating into a corner chanting "change is bad."

Not all change is bad, even initially. There are a few times it's actually self evident, and one switches and doesn't look back. In this particular case, as more often than not, the change helps in some situations/styles and inhibits in other's. That's why being able to support both is great. Part of the great appeal of computers is their versatility. So a change can be "disruptive" to the market, as in, an implementation so good it get's broadly and willingly adopted, or it can be "disruptive" to the user in that it get's forced down their throats. With computer's there's not too much reason for the latter, and when it does happen, it foster's defensiveness. My personal tastes are with the broadest, least limiting, solution. When I'm swapping out a hard drive in a multi-drive system, it's sure nice to know exactly which files are on it...

All change is bad initially from the standpoint that no matter how self-evidently better the new technique may be there's going to be a drop in user efficiency and effectiveness as they make the transition.

As (I believe) Chris was saying, I don't think Apple's making any move toward generally eliminating the users' ability to micromanage their files, but eliminating the requirement that they do so by offering more powerful tools to achieve the "typical" tasks one is going to perform on documents. From the standpoint of the create/categorize/retrieve tasks that embody most document interaction, Finder and its peers are no more advanced than a file cabinet. Simple. Sort of obvious in the simple cases. But also quite limited.

You've also, I think, made the same mistake I called out from the Circus Ponies blog post: You say you want to know what files are on a given drive. All well and good, but file is not a synonym for document. Do you really care about what files are there, or do you care to be able to replicate the contents of that device to a new device such that your retrieval mechanisms continue to work? Certainly it's the latter, yes? (And that's leaving out questions of RAID and similar technologies which alleviate even that requirement of you.)

[ingus]

bastion, on 14 January 2013 - 08:52 AM, said:

ingus, on 14 January 2013 - 07:41 AM, said:

bastion, on 14 January 2013 - 06:13 AM, said:

The problem is the assumption that disruption is inherently negative. In the short term it pretty much has to be, but that "short" can can be very short indeed. Disruptive change has been the heart of Apple's business model for the company's entire existence - or at least the parts of it where you could identify it as a successful business - and such change has generally been to the benefit of the subset of users willing and able to accept it on its own terms instead of just retreating into a corner chanting "change is bad."

Not all change is bad, even initially. There are a few times it's actually self evident, and one switches and doesn't look back. In this particular case, as more often than not, the change helps in some situations/styles and inhibits in other's. That's why being able to support both is great. Part of the great appeal of computers is their versatility. So a change can be "disruptive" to the market, as in, an implementation so good it get's broadly and willingly adopted, or it can be "disruptive" to the user in that it get's forced down their throats. With computer's there's not too much reason for the latter, and when it does happen, it foster's defensiveness. My personal tastes are with the broadest, least limiting, solution. When I'm swapping out a hard drive in a multi-drive system, it's sure nice to know exactly which files are on it...

All change is bad initially from the standpoint that no matter how self-evidently better the new technique may be there's going to be a drop in user efficiency and effectiveness as they make the transition.

As (I believe) Chris was saying, I don't think Apple's making any move toward generally eliminating the users' ability to micromanage their files, but eliminating the requirement that they do so by offering more powerful tools to achieve the "typical" tasks one is going to perform on documents. From the standpoint of the create/categorize/retrieve tasks that embody most document interaction, Finder and its peers are no more advanced than a file cabinet. Simple. Sort of obvious in the simple cases. But also quite limited.

You've also, I think, made the same mistake I called out from the Circus Ponies blog post: You say you want to know what files are on a given drive. All well and good, but file is not a synonym for document. Do you really care about what files are there, or do you care to be able to replicate the contents of that device to a new device such that your retrieval mechanisms continue to work? Certainly it's the latter, yes? (And that's leaving out questions of RAID and similar technologies which alleviate even that requirement of you.)

Not to get caught up in semantics, but all documents are files (especially on *nix, where everything is a file). I know you know this. So, yes, I want to know and have access to all files, not just documents. In the case of RAID, I know what's on the RAID, even if I don't know exactly which disk it's on (or platter for that matter). There's a real good reason for this. I keep OS and programs on a dual SSD RAID 0, for speed and capacity. I most definitely don't want my documents and media (especially video) consuming space on the RAID. I keep those on secondary spinning disks. Secondly, knowing where a file is stored, it can be securely deleted, or even the drive could be destroyed, or simply moved to another machine. Granted, not everyone cares about this, nor should they, but it's good to have the option, and it's good that the ability to keep files in specific locations will remain. Notice that I'm not even getting into silly matter's like thumb drives, burning CD's, etc.

I have a real good example of how change isn't always bad from the beginning. The first iPhone and the iPod Touch. It was industry disruptive, but quite enabling (immediately) over the other phones/mp3 players of it's day.

[bastion]

ingus, on 15 January 2013 - 03:40 PM, said:

Not to get caught up in semantics, but all documents are files (especially on *nix, where everything is a file). I know you know this.

I very much *don't* know that. I meant exactly what I said: Document and file are not synonyms. A file may contain multiple documents. A document may be composed of more than one file. A collection of N files may contain the contents of M documents. This notion isn't contrived. It isn't even rare. Most users, most of the time, care about documents. Files are an implementation detail.

Quote

I have a real good example of how change isn't always bad from the beginning. The first iPhone and the iPod Touch. It was industry disruptive, but quite enabling (immediately) over the other phones/mp3 players of it's day.

Once users got past the learning curve. So, in fact, it was still initially negative.

[ingus]

bastion, on 15 January 2013 - 04:13 PM, said:

ingus, on 15 January 2013 - 03:40 PM, said:

Not to get caught up in semantics, but all documents are files (especially on *nix, where everything is a file). I know you know this.

I very much *don't* know that. I meant exactly what I said: Document and file are not synonyms. A file may contain multiple documents. A document may be composed of more than one file. A collection of N files may contain the contents of M documents. This notion isn't contrived. It isn't even rare. Most users, most of the time, care about documents. Files are an implementation detail.

Quote

I have a real good example of how change isn't always bad from the beginning. The first iPhone and the iPod Touch. It was industry disruptive, but quite enabling (immediately) over the other phones/mp3 players of it's day.

Once users got past the learning curve. So, in fact, it was still initially negative.

Do you see why I would like to know where a "stream of bytes" reside?

[bastion]

ingus, on 16 January 2013 - 12:16 AM, said:

bastion, on 15 January 2013 - 04:13 PM, said:

ingus, on 15 January 2013 - 03:40 PM, said:

Not to get caught up in semantics, but all documents are files (especially on *nix, where everything is a file). I know you know this.

I very much *don't* know that. I meant exactly what I said: Document and file are not synonyms. A file may contain multiple documents. A document may be composed of more than one file. A collection of N files may contain the contents of M documents. This notion isn't contrived. It isn't even rare. Most users, most of the time, care about documents. Files are an implementation detail.

Quote

I have a real good example of how change isn't always bad from the beginning. The first iPhone and the iPod Touch. It was industry disruptive, but quite enabling (immediately) over the other phones/mp3 players of it's day.

Once users got past the learning curve. So, in fact, it was still initially negative.

Do you see why I would like to know where a "stream of bytes" reside?

Why you would like to? No, not really. But I'm not telling you you're wrong to like that and I don't think Apple's going to stop you from satisfying that urge. Do you see why someone would prefer that they not be required to know "where" (the quotes are much more appopriate there than where you put them) a stream of bytes resides? Funnily enough, people have been telling me for years that I'm wrong to not want to be required to micromanage my storage.

I see why the need occasionally exists, but I also know that the need is not typical today and that even some times when the need does exist it doesn't really need to, if you take my meaning. Often it's an artifact of an implementation detail which itself is no longer necessary and was never more than a compromise in the first place. My stance on this is opposition to those who seem to be of the opinion that that compromise is "the" right way to do it, rather than a legacy of the much weaker systems that are older than a fair percentage of today's users. The people who are adamant that there's no better way to manage electronic information than a 30-year-old emulation of a 110-year-old physical mechanism.

That's where the disconnect is: To me, the fact that I have at any time been required to know "where" a file is represents a failing of the system. When it was unavoidable because the system wasn't sophisticated enough to do it on its own it was tolerable - a necessary evil. I have never viewed the *requirement* (as distinct from the option) to manage files as a virtue. Not on the NCR mainframe I used to work on (where you actually did need to know where - without quotes - your data were). Not on the Apple II I had 30 years ago. Certainly not on the Mac or Windows box I have today. For all the shortcomings of the system and the company, Be had data management 15 years ago that, in some respects, was better than Apple and Microsoft have now.