Comments on: What folder did I put that in?

By: NateDSaint

NateDSaint — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 13:34:03 +0000

Maybe I’m using some bizarro-whacked-out version of Windows 7 (home premium), but to install fonts, I just right click the font file and then click “install,” and sure enough it pops into the folder.

All that aside, I think you make some excellent points about limitations of visual representations of the hierarchy of your sorted hard drive.

At the same time, I think there’s a good bit of abstraction built into modern file systems that let you access just the things you need, specifically the idea of “libraries” in Windows 7, in which you create a view that contains specific elements you’ve either found or have manually placed there. And Mac folks may complain that Vista/7 ripped off the “finder” feature of quick-searching, but I’m very thankful they did, as most businesses I work with are switching to 7 and I no longer have to install grep for windows to find where they accidentally moved their system files.

Good post!

By: Colin

Colin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:21:15 +0000

@whir I didn’t say get rid of the file system completely—just hide it away when I don’t need it. When working on a web site, I only need to see the file hierarchy for the web project I’m working on. It’s really nothing different than how I currently work: load Coda (or other IDE), select project, instantly see all local and remote files for the projects, work on project, commit changes using git—yes this is using terminal but even here for most tasks there is little reason I need command line access for anything outside the local and remote folders for the project I’m working on.

By: whir

whir — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:55:04 +0000

Point taken, but good luck dealing with that web server if it doesn’t have a file system either. And you need to know at least the relative file system layout of the various files you’ve got up in your IDE, right?

I’m a Windows user, so believe me that I’m sympathetic to the idea of never having to open up C:\Program Files\ again for the rest of my life. But I feel like when this idea is taken to its logical conclusion you wind up with something like the iPod, where it’s basically just a little bitty hard drive but you need to go through proprietary software to load and unload it. Maybe I’m just paranoid, but I don’t trust application makers enough to relinquish that control.

(Signed, some random internet guy – see you at Balsa Man)