abi | blog » The Evil File System

January 28th, 2010
by Abi Raja

The Evil File System

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From the iPad Programming Guide (pg 17):

Applications with the UIFileSharingEnabled key in their Info.plist file can share files with the user’s desktop computer. A connected iPad device shows up on the user’s desktop and contains subdirectories for all applications that share files. The user can transfer files in and out of this directory.

Of course, it is important to remember that although you can manipulate files in your iPad applications, files should never be a focal part of your application. There are no open and save panels in iPhone OS for a very good reason. The save panel in particular implies that is the user’s responsibility to save all data, but this is not the model that iPhone applications should ever use. Instead, applications should save data incrementally to prevent the loss of that data when the application quits or is interrupted by the system. To do this, your application must take responsibility for managing the creation and saving the user’s data at appropriate times.

Glad Apple is waging a war against file systems. They really need to go away. Humans don’t think in terms of files, filenames or folders.

This is the Footer

You are about to begin reading the footer on Abi's blog. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the other windows; music is probably playing on your iTunes. ⌘+tab to it and pause the song right away. Maybe, your iTunes just froze up and won't listen to you. Hit ctrl+alt+delete and bang it repeatedly until the music dies out. Or if you prefer, just stay in this window and hope the music and the Gmail Notifier and the yellow popups emanating from the lower right corner will just leave you alone.

Now, try to foresee everything else that might make you interrupt your reading. Cigarettes within reach, if you smoke, and the ashtray. Anything else? Do you have to pee? All right, you know best.

It's not that you expect anything in particular from this particular footer. You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from Presidents, from websites, from journeys, from marriages, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst. This is the conclusion you have reached, in your personal life and also in general matters, even international affairs. What about footers? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of footers, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn't serious.

So here you are now, ready to attack the first lines of this footer. You prepare to recognize the unmistakable tone of the author. No. You don't recognize it at all. But now that you think about it, who ever said this author had an unmistakable tone? On the contrary, he is known as an asshole who doesn't know how to write, and who instead, chooses to flagrantly plagiarize Italo Calvino's first chapter from If on a winter's night a traveller. Now that you know that this piece of writing is a fake, a copy, a work of a criminal even, you are bitterly disappointed. For a second there, you thought this author was actually creative! And just for a millisecond, you thought about following him on Twitter. But that's impossible now because you only follow the most brilliant people and the author here seems to be quite the opposite.

You even wonder why you are still reading the footer of such a talentless hack? And the answer to that is obvious — you are not a quitter. Once you start on something, you don't stop until you achieve complete success. When Ronald Reagan could not run in 1988 due to term limits, you petitioned to get rid of term limits altogether. And when the courts threw out that petition, you called your congressman. You called him everyday for the first twelve years and you've been calling her for the last nine. And on November 4 2008, you wrote in Ronald Reagan's name just like you've done every election since '88. When your math teacher give you a D in 7th grade, you didn't sleep until the next year after getting an A. You are one of the 40% of Twitter users who returned after the first month. You are Donald Trump. You are Greg Kinnear's character in Little Miss Sunshine (which you hate to find out, is one of the author's favorite movies). In short, you never quit, and for this deeply-seated reason, you will continue reading this footer regardless of how long, boring or fake it is or becomes.

Your mind wanders once again to this plagiarizing rat of an author. What can this guy do? He can't design (obviously, someone else designed this blog), he can't write, he most probably can't read. Can he code? Ah! Maybe, he can. Maybe, that's the only thing he can do! You almost click this link to his projects page. But you stop yourself midway, what if that page has another long boring essay and you, being the non-quitter that you are, would have to read every word of that too. So, you don't bother with even going near the link to his about page. Yes, it's best not to start.

Now, you are seething with anger. You have read 752 words of the author's writing (or rather, of Calvino's writing) and he's done all the talking. You'd like to talk back, scream at the author, because you are the kind of guy who calls up Jim Skinner when your local McDonald's refuses to serve you breakfast at 10:59am. So, you start composing an email but immediately after you write the words “To the bastard who ripped off everyone..”, all the energy seems to get sucked out of your body. You put down your pen, so to speak. You give up! Perhaps for the first time in your life. Fuck. You are really really really really really really pissed off. You wish you could reach into the computer and grab the neck of the author. But, with a heavy sigh, you give up, yet again. All is lost. You are doomed to read this footer for as long as it runs.

And as you wallow in your own misery, unbeknownst to you, your computer's security has been compromised. Your hard disk's contents have been copied and the disk subsequently erased. Your porn has been sent to your grandmother, the one that's still living. And at this very moment, your credit card is being used to purchase Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveller, which Amazon will deliver to the author within 24 hours, who will read it for the very first time. “Wait, how's that even....

Your world spins madly, everything is grey and blurred. Your jaw drops. You are shocked. Stunned, in fact. But, before you can regain your poise and try to comprehend what just happened, and before the author can tell you more about how he hacked your computer, you are already at the end of t h i s

~ Voices ~

January 28th, 2010
by Noah Kantrowitz

Eh, people do seem to like hierarchies an awful lot though; based on how often they show up you can probably make some assumptions that it is a hardwired way to look at the world. Not saying I disagree with an infinite undo model instead of storing files, but there is nothing wrong with the underlying organization.
January 28th, 2010
by Mugunth

I believe apps will be able to sync their desktop equivalent with the iPad. Like, AirSharing Pro can sync files from mac to iPad, and 1password pro can sync data between iPad and mac and so on. If I’m able to hook into iTunes sync ie., get a callback when the user syncs the iPad, it will be even great.
January 28th, 2010
by Abi Raja
The Author

Noah, the problem with hierarchies (the primary kind of organization in computers) is that they are hard to change. And any human’s organization is constantly evolving. I’ve had long discussions with people in particular about how email organization has changed over the years (Eudora’s folders vs. GMail’s labels) and I think labels/tags + user-defined rules serve as great substitutes for hierarchy while being completely “evolve-able”.

You would think that because naming things is such a common cognitive task for humans in the real-world, that would mean that filenames are a great abstraction. But in practice, we find that filenames are really nothing like naming in the real-world because people often remember what was in a file (or a summary of the file; hence, the great the suggestion in the iPad HIG to make files and file handling highly graphical) rather than what they explicitly named it.

Mugunth, Yep, that’s what UIFileSharingEnabled is for.
January 29th, 2010
by Robert Kaiser

Thanks for telling my that I’m not part of “people”, I already ass-u-me-d that.

And thanks for putting all people’s thinking into the same pocket. Good things we don’t have free minds and everyone follows where Apple heads.
January 29th, 2010
by Robert Kaiser

I meant thanks for telling me I’m not human, actually. Now I know why I felt they are too dumb for me.
January 29th, 2010
by Abi Raja
The Author

Robert, when I say “all humans”, I mean that babies don’t get born understanding the concept of files and filenames. Of course, you and I have learnt what files are and these abstractions are very useful for us. There’s some value in preserving systems that people have become accustomed to. But ultimately, if there’s a better alternative, we should gradually move to that.
January 29th, 2010
by Josephine Swiss

completely agree with the gradual deconstruction of hierarchies – however this is not what apple is doing; apple is clean washing one level as to give the impression of an organic organisation structure, to then fix this dimension while in fact reducing flexibility. how can a reduction in self-organisation possibilities be an advancement? i want to be able to organize my content/applications/etc. myself and not be dependent on a commercial central stored on demand knowledge body. the only area where a participatory option is granted is the programing of apps, but even these then are subject to commercial control by apple. as long as a system works with hidden hierarchies, which at the time being is uncircumventable, then covering these up reinforces the prevalent hierarchies instead of liberating creative knowledge. this is why jailbreaking iphones is so popular – it comes closer to a convergence of what the device is actually capable of. it is so great to imagine what could be done with an ipad if it weren’t bound to commercial restrictions!

abi writes here

The Evil File System

~ Voices ~

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This is the Footer