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.
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.