Open almost any Windows laptop, and you'll see users who basically think of the hard drive as a file dumping ground. You'll see files stored on the Desktop, or everything just goes into one big directory. How many conversations have you had where you ask "Where did you save the file?" and the reply is "I don't know, just the place that it says when I press save"?

Windows should have had a services infrastructure, where programs explicitly define an export (how to access files the program has generated) and import (which files the program can handle). Users don't really think of files by directory but by type, either Word documents or photos or whatever. The file system should just be a dialog box which is essentially a search. "Show me Word documents I edited in the last 5 days." "Show me all my photos that I took in Hawaii." That's how users think about data.

When I hit "Save" on a Mac, the file picker shows me a field where I can type a file name, and a drop down where I can choose between "Documents", "Pictures", "Movies", etc. or the last directory this particular program saved a file to. Most of the time the application will even pick a sensible default location. Only if I click the small arrow at the right of the drop down to I see the advanced file chooser.

On Windows, when I hit "Save", I get the advanced file picker by default. Unless the application is smart enough to set a sensible default location -- which most Windows applications are not -- the Windows file picker defaults to Desktop. This is the reason most people have all kinds of shit on their Windows desktops.

I can search for files on Windows now, so at least Windows has one thing right.

See: http://nascent.freeshell.org/programming/TagFS/ https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/WinFS

and many more.

This search functionality is available system wide (Spotlight search box), from any file open dialog or from the command line. For example things like this are possible:

Find me all pictures I tool this year and where I used flash, and aperture f4:

kind:image fnumber:4 date:"this year" flash:1

You type this in either spotlight or search box on open file dialog. You can do the same from the command line

mdfind -interpret "kind:image fnumber:4 date:"this year" flash:1"

The nice thing about the mdfind command is that you can restrict the search to a directory of your choice only.

Some people pay good money for photo organizers on Mac OS X, not knowing they already have this functionality built in. And finding what attributes are available is not that hard either:

mdimport -X

prints the entire metadata schema.

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/06/the-beos-fil...

First of all, they designate only one part of the visible filesystem as "safe", when it should be the opposite. Everything that's obviously accessible should be safe, and system-critical stuff should require going elsewhere.

Secondly, there is nothing personal about "My Documents". Every program routinely dumps files there that you can't do anything with directly. Game saves are the worst offenders here. They're cryptically named and you can't double click them like every other file.

And then people complain that normal users don't understand files.

But MS is a highly engineer dominated tribal culture. I don't see how they can overcome that. I guess the windows explorer will survive another decade.

On the iPad, I can use the official Photos app (or any of the other photo apps) to get my photos where they need to go, whether that's a phone, computer, website or printer.

I don't read my email by going into the "My Emails" folder on my C:\ drive, I access my email through a UI specifically made for accessing email.

I don't manage individual contact files, I access my contacts through an address book app.

I don't manage individual music files, I use iTunes.

Most operating systems already encourage separating files by type, I'm taking it a step further by suggesting that 90% of users would be better served by many type-specific file browsers than a single general purpose one.

And last week I managed to score 2 32gb touchpads at the $150 price -- with the thought that we'll play with one for a week or so and see if it fits in our family. If not, we'll give both away at Christmas.

The touchpad just made me love my iPad2 more. It's nice enough, and will be a great gift for my mom and her dad, but it doesn't hold-up to the iPad2.

All that being said -- I sorta think of my primary computer as an oven to my iPads toaster-oven. The iPad can do a lot of the same things, and several things it can do far better than my oven and far easier.

And apple doesn't even want me to replace my oven -- they're producing toaster ovens by design.

What that means to me is that there's a lot of design decisions that work on a toaster oven that just don't make sense on an oven.

:) Now please forgive a somewhat clunky analogy.

How do I tell iTunes (or any other music player) to import some of the music on my USB drive? iTunes doesn't even allow you to do that with iPods...

There are a lot of things I'm used to doing on a computer that I can't do on an iPad. Everyone has their examples of things that make X inferior to Y. Apple has shown that they can be successful by offering less of "business as usual" while slowly introducing new ways of doing things.

The only way to advance the state of the art is to let go of a lot of the notions of what we think a computer should be. Is rearranging toolbar buttons really going to bring delight to people around the world? How does this help the guy who is miserable at his job because he's forced to use a 10 year old PC running Windows XP? How does it help the person who lost all of their vacation photos because they downloaded a photo editing app that turned out to be a virus? How does it help a four year old that's learning to read?

I have a really nice app to read them called Media Player Classic -- I just don't have an app to manage them. Writing apps to manage every single file type I have is very inefficient compared to using a general purpose file manager. You abstract out often-used code rather than copy-pasting it all over the place, don't you?

The only way to advance the state of the art is to let go of a lot of the notions of what we think a computer should be.

The fundamental definition/theorem/axiom/whatever of computer science is the Church-Turing thesis. We haven't come up with a practical notion of computability more general than that, so it is by default the state of the art. Following from that, I think a computer should be a real-life manifestation of a universal Turing machine -- something that can run anything computable (taking into account resource bounds but also providing all the resources it can) without being beholden to another entity. Anything less is an appliance, a toy, and is not fit to be called a computer.

With a dedicated file manager, you open the one program and do it all in one step.

What is interesting is that Apple and MS have two totally opposed philosophies in handling the issue of the user not understanding the file system.

And judging by the popular success of the iPad I have to disagree with the suggestion that Apple is less inclusive.

Well, they might have fixed it then. All I know is that I balked at the 1GB OS X update waiting for me.

And judging by the popular success of the iPad I have to disagree with the suggestion that Apple is less inclusive.

The iPad is only popular in rich first world countries. You will find tons of PCs running Windows in not-so-rich countries, orders of magnitude more. That is exactly my point.

At very least in Bangkok, which is obviously not belongs to rich first world countries, I can see iPad (and Galaxy Tab) everywhere on a train or even in a not-so-expensive restaurant. My not-so-rich neighbor bought an iPad few weeks ago and ask if I could help him setup Wi-Fi, etc.

Maybe I have an Apple-fan Attraction Field turned on or something, but I've found iPad-availablity around me to be pretty amazing. It's hard to deny that Windows-running PCs are still orders of magnitude more but it's still amazing.

New technologies tend to be adapted by first world countries first. This was as true of the original IBM PC as it is today for the iPad.

I have a set of documents, a subset of which I'd like to copy onto my USB drive. I also have a set of pictures, a subset of which I'd like to copy onto my USB drive. My USB drive already has a set of documents and a set of pictures, and I'd like to get a subset of the documents and a subset of the pictures onto internal storage so that I can plug out my USB drive afterwards and still access them. Can you come up with a way of doing all that that doesn't involve a filesystem or a poor imitation of it?

Plug an SD card with photos on it into the iPad camera connection kit, and plug that into the iPad. The Photos app opens, you tap the photos you want to import, and you're done.

Your other cases are simple extensions of this example. The fact that an iPad can't do this right now with more file types or with a USB drive is not an inherent limitation of the approach.

-> Write code, -> Dump logs to app.log, app.err -> Is there an err browsing app you're aware of ?

If that ever happened to someone on HN, the consequences:

-> If apple implemented something so broken, some nutter would explain to me what extension to use. -> If MS implemented it, there would be a #1 post on HN with the title "MS file management is broken beyond repair and company is irrelevant"

I expect to be downvoted for this but it is impossible to have a fair discussion about Microsoft products.

Aha, therein lies the rub. These documents could be essentially arbitrary files, and there's no substitute to a general purpose file manager for them. Writing an app for every single file format that could be present on the USB drive is highly inefficient compared to the usual file manager.

My basic point is that filesystems are a well-established standard, and practically everything on your computer supports them. If you'd like to deviate from such a standard, you'd better have a very good reason for doing so.

If that doesn't work for you, then okay. You're not most people.

This is interesting. For example, my mom knows the document she wants to open is her 2009 tax return document. The fact that it is a PDF or she reads it with Adobe Reader -- I'm fairly certain she doesn't know. If I were to layout every application she has installed and told her to find the one to open to access her tax documents I honestly don't think she'd have a clue. She'd probably try Word. I suspect she's not alone on this.

Maybe you can provide a practical example of a case where you need to move files onto your system that can't be opened by any of the applications installed on your system. I can't think of a single time I've needed to do that. Files don't have inherent value. They're only useful if you have software that can make use of them.

I never said the files couldn't be opened by any of the applications on my system -- I just said the files couldn't be managed by any of them. Note the very important difference.

Regardless, here's an instance that came up just a few days ago: I have multiple computers and have software to deal with a certain file format installed only on some of them. I needed to back up the contents of a USB stick containing some such files on a computer that didn't have the software.