Cool! Here's what I would really, really like to see as part of a file manager re-imagining: a unified, programmable activity stream for my actions across both my local machine and the Internet, stored locally but accessible via API.
Imagine this:
I save a photo, with Photoshop, to my Pictures/2012 folder. It's immediately added to my local timeline. It's private to me.
I copy the photo to my Pictures/Web folder. Again, this is added to my timeline. I've programmed the timeline to also send the photo to Flickr when I do this.
I copy it to my Pictures/Clients/John Smith folder. It's in my timeline, but here I've programmed it to send it privately to John Smith via a web service.
I'm on a company network. I copy a file to a shared drive. It shows up in the timelines of all the other people who have access to that drive (although some of them may have chosen to filter these actions out). A couple of them have actions programmed in; they automatically copy the file to their own private folders, or to their mobile devices, etc etc. One of them decides to leave a comment on the shared timeline.
I can search my timeline by type, person, action type, etc etc. And do the same even when I'm disconnected from my computer and network, although not all of the files are necessarily available.
About 3 years ago I've developed a small tool, very limited but can automate certain tasks based on the directory called Psycho Folder - http://code.google.com/p/psychofolder/
It's much more limited than this but still did the trick with the combination of CLI tools.
It watches directories and takes actions according to the created / modified file types in that directory.
Initially I used it for auto video conversion:
- Torrent downloads a mkv video
- Psycho folder detects the file unzips if necessary
- Launches video conversion tool (convert it to an encoding that my TV can stream)
- Launches subtitle encoding tool if there is a subtitle file
- Copies it to NAS so the TV can stream it from
In one point it was also part of my CI system, when a new release is there it would upload it to dropbox.
There are so many other possibilities, imagine creating thumbnails automatically when you drag & drop a picture to a directory, or maybe upload them to instagram etc.
It doesn't provide the timeline you were looking for, and I don't think it can do Internet-y stuff, but it could take care of the "if something lands in _____ folder, do ____" bit if you had it run a custom script for each action.
Perhaps you could hack together your own activity stream with some elbow grease?
I'm squinting at the pictures and wondering. How on earth is this thing going to handle real projects? You know, where you have like twenty different kinds of files all related to the same project, which should be grouped together because they're about the same thing, even though they're in different apps.
I mean, here's what I find in the directory for my current comics project:
a bunch of Illustrator files (this is what I draw it in)
a few CBZs of the content
some PDFs of the same content
a bunch of web-res gifs of the pages
some Indesign files (related to publishing the book)
a couple .csv files used in an Indesign data merge
various other gifs/jpgs/tiffs
a Word doc
a link to an external directory full of print-res TIFFs
Plus a subdirectory structure to chunk all of this into stuff related to book production, model sheets, fan art, and whatnot.
This is the use case where every "We're going to replace and simplify the file browser!" effort seems to fall down. Recognizing that real people's projects sprawl across many file formats.
It really bothers me when I click a download button only to be greeted by "Hey, you can't actually download our app, but why not sign up for our newsletter?"
Just build a new Norton Commander for OSX and we are happy.
Anyway, don't get why YC/PG invests in such ideas. Though nice this idea is no venture case (easy to copy when successful).
Dropbox is easy to copy, right? Virtually no lock-in. There's SugarSync, Google Drive, and SkyDrive. Funny thing is that I've tried them all out and I still like Dropbox, even though it offers less free storage. Dropbox is the fastest out of all of them and has LAN syncing. Google Drive threw up during syncing several times (where it couldn't sync a file).
Since half of YC's portfolio is in a company that was considered "a feature" by Steve Jobs, I don't think he needs to justify these investments to anyone.
I have this argument at my job all the time: should we be worried, when consulting with clients attempting to build startups, about the giants in their industry stealing their ideas? My answer is always no: worst case scenario they'll try to buy you in order to copy you. Next worst they'll try to copy you once you're already becoming successful. Neither of those are bad scenarios.
Big companies don't try to copy unsuccessful ideas, it never happens.
This kind of company (if things work out reasonably well) could easily sell for $10,000,000. After an investment of $15-20k for 5+% of the company, that is a return of $500k or more. Twenty-five or more times your money is a pretty good return.
I was a boy when I first saw that icon of a hard disk on a Macintosh System 6 desktop. The moment I saw it, I knew, instantly, EXACTLY what it implied and felt a deep sense of satisfaction that the person who came up with that (ostensibly a PARC person, not an Apple person, of course) was indeed a poet, probably someone who could gaze at a Magritte painting for an hour, just enjoying it.
The file-system-as-a-tree was and remains a powerful and useful abstraction ... that very few people are aware of. Not morons: my wife is brilliant, but when she saves that complex XCell doc with all its pivot tables, formulas and summations, she still appears to have no clue what happened to it.
And since the rest of the engineering community has also decided that the file system tree is "too hard" for people to understand, they are doing away with it on tablets now too: ever save or download something on your ipad (or apad for that matter) and struggle to find it?
So if mere mortals cannot understand where a file went on the file system tree, I sincerely feel like these poor guys writing Collections are handing a machine gun to a cave man by which they will be clubbed to death with.
I think you're hanging out in a reality distortion field where people actually do try and use Dropbox, Drive, iCloud, etc. I get it - all my friends use them and talk about them and stuff. But my friends are tech nerds. Normal people grow their file system organically. They don't use dropbox - they email stuff to themselves. They are disorganized, and if they ever tried to get organized, they'd just end up forgetting where stuff is.
This thing looks like it's going to add a whole bunch of work to my life while I try to figure out where the hell stuff is.
They could just cut a deal with Google for search, the the way Firefox did. You could potentially eek out a couple of dollars per user per year if you can get people to "live" more in this new "file system"
This product (might someday) solve a real problem I have: one significant impediment to picking up a new web app is the need to learn yet another way of interfacing with the content I "own" on it.
If Collections can provide a compelling consistent interface on top of existing web apps, and an API for new web apps to target, then they might get to own some valuable conceptual real estate in user's minds: "I'm willing to try this new service because I already know how I'll be able to manage my content on it".
This also makes the world a better place by making it easier on the newcomers--it's unfair to them that established players occupy the "I know how to use this already" space in users' heads, that their service has to not just be better, but be that much better than the established players, to reach people.
Then they could use that conceptual real estate to promote those new web apps, and that promotion could yield revenue. Another option would be to wrap their own reference implementations of the services they're abstracting over in a premium layer. Another would be to work with web apps to provide value-added interfaces to the web apps' premium services and take a cut of whatever the web apps charge. Another would be to offer a premium corporate version that plugs into internal corporate datastores (in a way that, presumably, doesn't suck, distinguishing them from other products).
Collection's play for native integration (e.g. extending that consistent interface over all your local content) distinguishes them from Dropbox, which prefers to own that content.
A similar problem to this, that Collections isn't targeting (yet), is to provide an abstraction not over data but over operations. It's already far too complicated to juggle email, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Gmail, G+, SMS, tumblr, etc. That means that I have to really think hard about letting a new web app into my routine.
An intermediary that presents a consistent interface to all those services, and opens itself up for use with new services, could try to win over valuable conceptual space with users and make the world a better place in exactly the same way.
It would be cool if your slogan "Finder for the cloud" was replaced with "Explorer for the cloud" (or whatever windows users call it) if they are on windows.
You could detect this pretty easily and it would prevent alienating a large percentage of visitors.
I have absolutely no problem with the finder and would not like a file manager that links to my social websites. I would mind a separate app that would aggregate that info, but wouldnt want use it to manage my local files
I was literally thinking about how much I needed this five minutes ago, but I want it for Flickr! Any chance you'll be adding support for other services in the future, or adding a plugin model so I could do it for myself?
This looks amazing, but it sounds too good to be true.
This is the quint-essential problem of our current time, for techies and non-techies alike. Media overload.
No easy way to organize everything and find it.
Whenever I take pics with my iPod and put them on my PC, I don't take the time to rename them from DSC_001.JPG to something useful. Just drop them in a folder that is named appropriately and am off.
It is suboptimal. So if you guys can figure out how to fix that, there is much potential with that.
But....iono...I am a bit skeptical, would love to be proven wrong though :)
Just my 2cents: have you read About Face ( http://www.amazon.fr/About-Face-Essentials-Interaction-Desig... )
In this book they explain a whole vision about computer things (memory, files, interfaces) that Apple is slowly implementing in tablets and Mac OS X (extending it with iCloud).
I'm always pestering people at work with: "have you checked in the green book before doing this?"
Maybe I'm not representative, but I live in zsh on mac and linux/freebsd.
What I'd really like is a way to specify files within zsh, then open a new finder window with just those files in it, without moving them. Right now, I can do "open ." and get a Finder window with the current working directory, but what I want is something like "openw [1-5]*/" and get a new finder window containing just things matching that. They could easily be in multiple directories too.
Should be easy to do; create a temporary directory, hardlink the files there, run the file manager on that directory, then delete the directory and links when it closes.
Something like:
mkdir "$HOME/.virtualdirs" 2> /dev/null
tempdir=$(mktemp -d -p "$HOME/.virtualdirs")
for file in $*; do
ln "$file" "$tempdir/$(basename $file)"
done
thunar "$tempdir" #replace thunar with your file manager
rm -r "$tempdir"
Ok, now that it works, you just need the other 999.75 hours to make it into a real application ;)
I wonder if that might be possible without this app. what if we were able to translate shell expansion operators into Smart Folder views, or some other similar thing? That would be a good start.
Yay that's exactly what we need to make file management more coherent - another baroque piece of crap that only adds features instead of refactoring existing ones.
The problem is that we have opted too much for the visual metaphor for a desktop/folder etc...
Back in the day (~1987?) there was a file manager called "PathMinder" -- this was a GUI file manager for DOS -- it was AMAZING!
You had a full keyboard navigable system for your file system... now, this was a directory centric model (the idea of collections/groups/tags/etc had not evolved yet) -- but hte fluidity of navigating the structure was AMAZING.
I had fully memorized many many paths (just like memorizing the path to various dungeons in Bard Tale) via the keyboard.
It would be great to have the ability to have a meta-tree of navigation.
E.G.: assume you navigated to \Downloads - you could then highlight a file, say, a .PDF -- then in one more stroke, show me ALL .PDFs -- or what if I had tags on my files - even AUTO-TAGS (like Received Via [work/personal] email) - show me all PDFs I have received via my work email. or Show me all attachments received from my mom.
Collections of content is a weak premise... I would rather auto-tag content based on how I receive/procure it...
It is more about threading the communication channels than it is putting shit in the same bucket...
[+] [-] benwerd|13 years ago|reply
Imagine this:
I save a photo, with Photoshop, to my Pictures/2012 folder. It's immediately added to my local timeline. It's private to me.
I copy the photo to my Pictures/Web folder. Again, this is added to my timeline. I've programmed the timeline to also send the photo to Flickr when I do this.
I copy it to my Pictures/Clients/John Smith folder. It's in my timeline, but here I've programmed it to send it privately to John Smith via a web service.
I'm on a company network. I copy a file to a shared drive. It shows up in the timelines of all the other people who have access to that drive (although some of them may have chosen to filter these actions out). A couple of them have actions programmed in; they automatically copy the file to their own private folders, or to their mobile devices, etc etc. One of them decides to leave a comment on the shared timeline.
I can search my timeline by type, person, action type, etc etc. And do the same even when I'm disconnected from my computer and network, although not all of the files are necessarily available.
[+] [-] jredwards|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fmavituna|13 years ago|reply
It's much more limited than this but still did the trick with the combination of CLI tools.
It watches directories and takes actions according to the created / modified file types in that directory.
Initially I used it for auto video conversion: - Torrent downloads a mkv video - Psycho folder detects the file unzips if necessary - Launches video conversion tool (convert it to an encoding that my TV can stream) - Launches subtitle encoding tool if there is a subtitle file - Copies it to NAS so the TV can stream it from
In one point it was also part of my CI system, when a new release is there it would upload it to dropbox.
There are so many other possibilities, imagine creating thumbnails automatically when you drag & drop a picture to a directory, or maybe upload them to instagram etc.
[+] [-] htp|13 years ago|reply
It doesn't provide the timeline you were looking for, and I don't think it can do Internet-y stuff, but it could take care of the "if something lands in _____ folder, do ____" bit if you had it run a custom script for each action.
Perhaps you could hack together your own activity stream with some elbow grease?
[+] [-] wslh|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] egypturnash|13 years ago|reply
I mean, here's what I find in the directory for my current comics project:
Plus a subdirectory structure to chunk all of this into stuff related to book production, model sheets, fan art, and whatnot.This is the use case where every "We're going to replace and simplify the file browser!" effort seems to fall down. Recognizing that real people's projects sprawl across many file formats.
[+] [-] pooriaazimi|13 years ago|reply
If you want to be a "power" user, use Finder (or Path Finder) - you're not the intended audience for this "app" (nor am I).
[+] [-] armansu|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] radley|13 years ago|reply
http://www.adobe.com/products/bridge.html
[+] [-] nicksergeant|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RaphiePS|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jordanlee|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tferris|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brianchu|13 years ago|reply
Not so easy to copy after all...
[+] [-] tomasien|13 years ago|reply
I have this argument at my job all the time: should we be worried, when consulting with clients attempting to build startups, about the giants in their industry stealing their ideas? My answer is always no: worst case scenario they'll try to buy you in order to copy you. Next worst they'll try to copy you once you're already becoming successful. Neither of those are bad scenarios.
Big companies don't try to copy unsuccessful ideas, it never happens.
[+] [-] SoftwareMaven|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] argumentum|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicolaus|13 years ago|reply
The file-system-as-a-tree was and remains a powerful and useful abstraction ... that very few people are aware of. Not morons: my wife is brilliant, but when she saves that complex XCell doc with all its pivot tables, formulas and summations, she still appears to have no clue what happened to it.
And since the rest of the engineering community has also decided that the file system tree is "too hard" for people to understand, they are doing away with it on tablets now too: ever save or download something on your ipad (or apad for that matter) and struggle to find it?
So if mere mortals cannot understand where a file went on the file system tree, I sincerely feel like these poor guys writing Collections are handing a machine gun to a cave man by which they will be clubbed to death with.
[+] [-] jawsh|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newman314|13 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eazel
[+] [-] Kluny|13 years ago|reply
This thing looks like it's going to add a whole bunch of work to my life while I try to figure out where the hell stuff is.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chacham15|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erikpukinskis|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anakanemison|13 years ago|reply
If Collections can provide a compelling consistent interface on top of existing web apps, and an API for new web apps to target, then they might get to own some valuable conceptual real estate in user's minds: "I'm willing to try this new service because I already know how I'll be able to manage my content on it".
This also makes the world a better place by making it easier on the newcomers--it's unfair to them that established players occupy the "I know how to use this already" space in users' heads, that their service has to not just be better, but be that much better than the established players, to reach people.
Then they could use that conceptual real estate to promote those new web apps, and that promotion could yield revenue. Another option would be to wrap their own reference implementations of the services they're abstracting over in a premium layer. Another would be to work with web apps to provide value-added interfaces to the web apps' premium services and take a cut of whatever the web apps charge. Another would be to offer a premium corporate version that plugs into internal corporate datastores (in a way that, presumably, doesn't suck, distinguishing them from other products).
Collection's play for native integration (e.g. extending that consistent interface over all your local content) distinguishes them from Dropbox, which prefers to own that content.
A similar problem to this, that Collections isn't targeting (yet), is to provide an abstraction not over data but over operations. It's already far too complicated to juggle email, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Gmail, G+, SMS, tumblr, etc. That means that I have to really think hard about letting a new web app into my routine.
An intermediary that presents a consistent interface to all those services, and opens itself up for use with new services, could try to win over valuable conceptual space with users and make the world a better place in exactly the same way.
[+] [-] redguava|13 years ago|reply
You could detect this pretty easily and it would prevent alienating a large percentage of visitors.
[+] [-] icebraining|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emehrkay|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaronbrethorst|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Terretta|13 years ago|reply
Here is one of many implementations:
https://github.com/patrickjennings/FlickrMS#readme
[+] [-] jordanlee|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcamillion|13 years ago|reply
This is the quint-essential problem of our current time, for techies and non-techies alike. Media overload.
No easy way to organize everything and find it.
Whenever I take pics with my iPod and put them on my PC, I don't take the time to rename them from DSC_001.JPG to something useful. Just drop them in a folder that is named appropriately and am off.
It is suboptimal. So if you guys can figure out how to fix that, there is much potential with that.
But....iono...I am a bit skeptical, would love to be proven wrong though :)
[+] [-] nraynaud|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdl|13 years ago|reply
What I'd really like is a way to specify files within zsh, then open a new finder window with just those files in it, without moving them. Right now, I can do "open ." and get a Finder window with the current working directory, but what I want is something like "openw [1-5]*/" and get a new finder window containing just things matching that. They could easily be in multiple directories too.
[+] [-] icebraining|13 years ago|reply
Something like:
Ok, now that it works, you just need the other 999.75 hours to make it into a real application ;)[+] [-] sonicvoxel|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] melloclello|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samstave|13 years ago|reply
The problem is that we have opted too much for the visual metaphor for a desktop/folder etc...
Back in the day (~1987?) there was a file manager called "PathMinder" -- this was a GUI file manager for DOS -- it was AMAZING!
You had a full keyboard navigable system for your file system... now, this was a directory centric model (the idea of collections/groups/tags/etc had not evolved yet) -- but hte fluidity of navigating the structure was AMAZING.
I had fully memorized many many paths (just like memorizing the path to various dungeons in Bard Tale) via the keyboard.
It would be great to have the ability to have a meta-tree of navigation.
E.G.: assume you navigated to \Downloads - you could then highlight a file, say, a .PDF -- then in one more stroke, show me ALL .PDFs -- or what if I had tags on my files - even AUTO-TAGS (like Received Via [work/personal] email) - show me all PDFs I have received via my work email. or Show me all attachments received from my mom.
Collections of content is a weak premise... I would rather auto-tag content based on how I receive/procure it...
It is more about threading the communication channels than it is putting shit in the same bucket...