Death to Folders and Filenames!!!

As the title of this post suggests, I have a beef with the way file systems have forced us to manage our files since the dawn of personal computing. I would much rather have my computer manage my files for me than have to waste my mental faculties managing files manually. Obviously folders have their place but a file system built primarily around tags and metadata would be a dream. A file can have as many tags as it wants but you get only one folder per file, and that can be very limiting.

Regarding metadata, especially on the mac, I would like better options for developers. As of now I have not seen a straightforward way to examine and, in some cases, alter the metadata of a file in Cocoa. Furthermore, although developers can develop plugins to make their file's metadata available to the file system, they have little control over how that data is presented to the user in the "get info" panel. Additionally, it would be very useful to be able to tack on extra metadata to a file and to have that metadata remain intact even when the file is transferred to other platforms or opened in another application.

Also, something needs to be done about the pain that is file names. It's one thing to figure out a naming scheme and stick to it when you're talking about a school report, but it's quite another thing to figure out meaningful names for a batch of images and also keep their names from conflicting. After all, a file preview often conveys much more than "IMG_0023" ever does. In my "dream" file system, files would be automatically given names by the file system unless they already had meaningful or user-given names. These names would be hidden from the user by default, and they would be automatically changed to prevent conflicts. If user-defined names conflicted, the file system could maintain its own unique names internally but still present the user-defined names to the user.

Of course, for a system that doesn't rely on folders, it needs to have robust searching and metadata based organizational capabilities. Obviously, on a mac, smart folders would become way more important, and the Finder's design would need to change to accommodate a much larger number of them. However, unlike the current system, where a search is often cluttered with files a user rarely cares about, files could be marked as resources by both applications and the os and would be excluded from most searches.

A file system like this would largely do away with a frustratingly archaic system that requires too much effort on the part of the user just to keep their data organized. After all, with computers this powerful, they should be doing the work for us.

Update: In retrospect, it has become quite clear to me that Apple's solution to this problem is the iPhone os. An app-centric design largely bypasses the filesystem and its difficulties. However, this design does cause data to be "trapped" inside applications. If Apple can implement a really sweet solution for sharing data among applications, we will finally be able to relegate the filesystem to the domain of geeks and programmers.