Reminds me of this Verge article reporting that kids growing up with iPhones don’t know what files or directories are: https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...
Yeah this is true, friends that are professors say they now have to have a basic class early in the semester that explains folders, files, and other basics to students.
Very much an intentional goal of the OS when it came out, the hope being that the concepts of files and folders might never be needed. A bold move to get rid of a mental overhead for using a computer that was never natural or intuitive to non-tech users. They eventually had to back off a bit, but it’s an amazing accomplishment that most users can still use these devices as if files weren’t a thing.
Re:macOS Ventura is now available
by phist_mcgee on Tuesday October 25, 2022 @08:20AM
(#33329517)
How long do you think that IT professionals will need to care about hierarchical file systems?
Funny, I'm in the first group but I'd much rather have it search everything by default: because I organize my files, if I'm searching for one that means that I don't know where it is, so I need to look everywhere.
Re:macOS Ventura is now available
by rubyist5eva on Monday October 24, 2022 @05:45PM
(#33323063)
Funny enough, I'm in the first group but prefer Finder's default behavior for the second group.
To me this is definitely it. Using non-technical people's computers is eye-opening. Thousands of files scattered around on the Desktop, Documents, or wherever they just happened to go. Finding something in a specific directory would be a completely foreign concept.
Well, count me in the third group: I make use of hierarchical storage, consistent naming conventions, and other organizational tricks to give me a rough idea of where any file might be. I also fail miserably at it (apart from dev/programming stuff, which all is in `~/dev/<project name>`) and rely heavily on search to find anything again.
As search is fast enough nowadays with indexing, I'd rather have it search the whole disk every time than the directory I'm in just to realize I've put it someplace else.
This is just speculation, but based on a conversation with my partner, there are two types of computer users. The first group makes use of hierarchical storage, consistent naming conventions, and other organizational tricks to give them a rough idea of where any file might be. The second group has never heard the term "file systems" and just stores everything with an arbitrary name in whatever location the originating application uses by default.
The first group would prefer to search the given directory, because the supplied context (of which folder to start the search in) drastically improves/speeds search results. The second group prefers to search the entire disk, because supplying that additional context is impossible - any file might appear anywhere.
The set intersection between the first group and "people who change their default settings" is much higher than it is with the second group. Consequently, the whole disk search is enabled by default.
Additionally, given the addition of an "All My Files" view in Finder (a feature which the first group would probably find baffling), Apple may also believe that the latter group outnumbers the former.