I don’t buy it. I haven’t touched any of my 4,822 audio files in the filesystem in years. They are in my music library and I couldn’t care less about where on my drive they are or how they are organized there. The same is true of all my photos. The abstraction works perfectly for me in those two cases, I’m missing nothing.
(My parents would be delighted if Word or Excel had a similar library of documents.)
The media library presents you the files pretty much as an OLAP cube. That's possible only due to metadata diligently assigned to music and photos (location, geotags and date and time). It makes much sense to filter by one or two attributes to pick the music for to-day. Try testing your media library with all the metadata removed...
Since the Word and Excel documents often have no such metadata, and the possible attributes are numberous, it's no wonder no `document library' got popular as of yet. The best you get -- the state of the art of desktop search -- is full-text-search with some semantic analysis, right?
My parents (the only, well, “casual” users I know really well) have all their documents in one folder with no hierarchy whatsoever, any sort of library would improve their experience. There is enough metadata to make it useful, I think. There is the time of creation, the time a document was last edited, its name – that’s more or less just as much metadata as I use for browsing my photos. (I don’t spend much time organizing my photos and my photo library is not very powerful – I cannot, for example, only display all photos taken with a certain shutter speed. Despite that I would really never want to go back to organizing my photos in the filesystem.)
A sort of document library could be just as good or better than the filesystem for managing documents, I don’t think that you have to end up with a leaky abstraction. (Browsing documents on Google Docs, for example, doesn’t feel wrong but you are not using a filesystem to access your documents, you are using a sort of library view.)
I think it’s kind of astonishing that no one has really tried to do just that. There are half-hearted attempts but one of the things about abstractions is that they have to be good to be successful. It’s certainly not easy but I think it’s possible.
Comments
I don’t buy it. I haven’t touched any of my 4,822 audio files in the filesystem in years. They are in my music library and I couldn’t care less about where on my drive they are or how they are organized there. The same is true of all my photos. The abstraction works perfectly for me in those two cases, I’m missing nothing.
(My parents would be delighted if Word or Excel had a similar library of documents.)
The media library presents you the files pretty much as an OLAP cube. That's possible only due to metadata diligently assigned to music and photos (location, geotags and date and time). It makes much sense to filter by one or two attributes to pick the music for to-day. Try testing your media library with all the metadata removed...
Since the Word and Excel documents often have no such metadata, and the possible attributes are numberous, it's no wonder no `document library' got popular as of yet. The best you get -- the state of the art of desktop search -- is full-text-search with some semantic analysis, right?
My parents (the only, well, “casual” users I know really well) have all their documents in one folder with no hierarchy whatsoever, any sort of library would improve their experience. There is enough metadata to make it useful, I think. There is the time of creation, the time a document was last edited, its name – that’s more or less just as much metadata as I use for browsing my photos. (I don’t spend much time organizing my photos and my photo library is not very powerful – I cannot, for example, only display all photos taken with a certain shutter speed. Despite that I would really never want to go back to organizing my photos in the filesystem.)
A sort of document library could be just as good or better than the filesystem for managing documents, I don’t think that you have to end up with a leaky abstraction. (Browsing documents on Google Docs, for example, doesn’t feel wrong but you are not using a filesystem to access your documents, you are using a sort of library view.)
I think it’s kind of astonishing that no one has really tried to do just that. There are half-hearted attempts but one of the things about abstractions is that they have to be good to be successful. It’s certainly not easy but I think it’s possible.