Steven Hodson wrote a good post about GMail not working out for him as a primary email client. One of his complaints was the use of labels and how they weren’t a satisfying replacement for folders to organize email.

Although I use a GMail account as my primary email address, and really enjoy the convenience the web client provides in terms of access anywhere, I still download all my emails at the end of each day into a desktop client (Apple Mail). When I’m at home I don’t use the GMail web interface at all.

The reason why I do this is for organizational purposes. I have an extensive set up of folders and sub folders in Mail for archiving. This hierarchy is all in the sidebar and it’s very satisfying to open and close nested folders and drag and drop emails from one to another.

Yet based on some of the comments on Steven’s blog, I think some hope folders will eventually be replaced by another organizational method, say tags / labels or search. I know Steven was talking about email, but I wonder if there are any ramifications for the desktop.

For some reason, moving tags and search to the desktop scares the heck out of me. I don’t want to have the OS be nothing but a search box with a tag cloud – or even an “iTunes” like interface.

Now, I’m not a total tag-o-phoble. I see the power of tags in iTunes or iPhoto. 24,000 MP3 files are a nightmare to sift through and it’s infinitely easier to type in a keyword and see your list update automatically to what you were looking for.

I occasionally use the search feature in the Finder, which updates as you type and is surprisingly fast.

In iTunes and the iPod, “category” tags form a hierarchy that one can browse through, drilling down through music, artists, albums, and eventually to individual songs. That’s cool, and this “column view” is efficient way of browsing through the equivalent of nested folders on the small screen that is the iPod.

But an early iteration of OS X had the Finder only with this “column view”. People complained, and the old icon view was reinstated. Column view is still in the OS X Finder. But it couldn’t replace the old, visual way of browsing through folders and files then, and I don’t think it will now.

Something like column view (itself based on tags) seems best for information of all the same type where the same properties can be applied, and also for navigating and opening files. Add copy, paste, and duplicate and that view quickly gets unwieldy. It is great in certain situations but can’t totally replace the visual desktop metaphor that dates from the inception of the Mac.

But this is how I see it: navigate to information however the heck you like – visually, with search, with tags. Do this on the iPod or the iPhone or in GMail where all the files are generally of the same type (music, email, photos). But please don’t ever replace folders with tags on the desktop. I still break out into hives when I open up someone’s “Documents” folder and see 49,993 files with no organization in the traditional manner.

So that might be where “old school” comes in. I like icons. I like dragging and dropping files into folders, and arranging and labeling them so I can see where they are in the larger file structure at a glance. I like Cover Flow and Quick Look. I love the good old fashioned feeling of identifying a photograph by its thumbnail image and dragging it out of a folder into to the trash.

The day when I give up folders, files, and icons for organization is when something like AI comes around, where I can say “Earl Grey, hot – from that project I can’t remember the name of last week sometime” and be able to trust the computer to give me the correct result, instead of me wasting time with false positives or figuring out how to carefully craft the query.

That’s my take. So is the desktop metaphor of files and folders antiquated? Will search and tags ever be a decent replacement? Or something else?

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Categories: Apple, General, Technology :: ::

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