Nested Folders Like Sooo Yesterday

There is an article on Wired entitled Tiger Tweaks Could Kill Folders, the main gist being that with Spotlight the 20 year old practice of organizing files into hierarchical folders (which incidentally is another one of those metaphors that doesn’t extend to the real world) could be on the way out. It’s an interesting read and while I don’t for one minute think we’ll see the end of the Finder or nested folders I do wholeheartedly agree that people want to see their files in different ways and find them quickly. In that sense, Spotlight goes a long way to alleviating the pain of organising all your stuff. Steve Jobs mentioned also this point in his WWDC 2005 Keynote.

This was the whole idea I had behind KIT and yet the most popular feature request was that it include hierarchical folders – I had so many I decided to write something much too long, complicated and now somewhat outdated about why it was a bad idea, back in my pre-blogging days.

KIT was modelled as an iTunes for your files; something different where you could find things almost instantly and organize them in ways liberated from the file system. Like Gmail, its motto is to search not sort. Thankfully quite a lot of people got KIT but since many of its selling points were made much less persuasive by Spotlight and Smart Folders in Tiger, I will be addressing this wholeheartedly in the next few months.

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