Yostivanich

Mere mor­tals don’t think of things on their com­put­ers as “files.” Peo­ple think about dig­i­tal rep­re­sen­ta­tions of things the same way they think about real phys­i­cal things: they think about pho­tos, videos, text doc­u­ments, arti­cles, and peo­ple. A “file” on a com­puter is just a uni­ver­sal con­tainer for one of those things.

via Dustin Cur­tis – The Death of Files. Let’s throw out files and just have apps that oper­ate on a data­base of files. Store the files behind the scenes and open an app to work on a file or series of files.

This is an inter­est­ing con­cept par­tic­u­larly for the more novice user and sim­ple series of files (movies, music, doc­u­ments) but does it scale to a pro­gram­mer being able to manip­u­late a series of dif­fer­ent types of files for a project, same thing for a movie edi­tor or a graphic designer, that’s a dif­fer­ent ques­tion. The basic design con­cept I would imple­ment would be an OS level data­base of files, file types and applications.

Any new appli­ca­tion would reg­is­ter with this data­base adding file types or reg­is­ter­ing as being able to manip­u­late a par­tic­u­lar file type. The OS could han­dle stor­age of all files with appli­ca­tions request­ing that cer­tain files be orga­nized together in a man­ner to be acces­si­ble say as a project. This would also allow the OS to take advan­tage of more effi­cient stor­age and back­ups of the under­ly­ing data. The OS could sep­a­rate out core OS level infor­ma­tion, from appli­ca­tions, from appli­ca­tion and user level stor­age. This allows for one click back­ups of all these dif­fer­ent lev­els of infor­ma­tion (backup the whole com­puter, backup the OS, backup appli­ca­tions, backup my pref­er­ences and files for my user account). The iPhone, iPad and even iPhoto and iTunes are great exam­ples of this occur­ring where the details of files are almost com­pletely hid­den from the end user.