Recently, the founder of Posterous wrote up an article positing that the finder is dead. He believes that files, folders and documents will cease to exist on a computer. Needless to say, it was an interesting read. That said, I disagree with the concept.
Sure, we are moving further away from actually using the “Finder” or taking full advantage of file systems. Our phones work almost completely off of apps, but can we really live with out them? When it comes to an actual computer, I like to have my files where I need them. Sure,there are tools that help me organize my files like iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie and more. There is even iDocuments which I did a screencast on in a recent macgasm video cast, but the files still need to exist. We can’t trust every thing in the cloud, and most people aren’t going to want their files archived and to be only accessible through certain apps.
If we want to dig deeper, we have to look at the apps that we would use as well. First, all file formats would have to be able to work across all applications. Can you imagine the pain of writing a paper in one app, then finding a new app that is better and having to actually make a whole new copy of that? Lets take photos for example if that doesn’t click. Lets say you use iPhoto to import your photos from your camera, but you want to use the Photoshop app that doesn’t allow you to import directly from the camera to do some hardcore editing. What if it wont read the format of the pictures you just imported and the only way to get them to read is by exporting those photos to the other app and taking up even more space on your hard drive? It just doesn’t make sense to me at all.
Sure, there would be some app that we could use to make things make more sense, but do we really need to live in an app ran world outside of our iPhones, iPod touch, and other cell phones? I think not.
More Information: Is finder dead?
Photo Credit: Ambient Damage
