The Finder is dead.

This article is full of flaws.<p>Finder was just rewritten from the ground up, from scratch. Heavy investment.<p>Spaces is about windows management, which has nothing to do with Finder. Same with Expose.<p>iPhone and iPad deal with files, one way or the other.

Do not want.<p>Limiting the amount of interaction the end user has with a hierarchical filesystem may well be a Good Thing. Increasing the degree to which each application is a black box containing all associated data is a Bad Thing. Making each application responsible for the mechanism by which data can be transferred, archived and synchronized is also a Bad Thing.

Yeah. The command line is dead too. That's what purists believed in 1986. The Mac killed it. Except, it just keeps coming back because it's so danged useful.

One of the reasons I love the unix world and despise Windows is precisely <i>because</i> things are not in black boxes. I can read and parse log files. Config is in text files that can be grepped. Automated processes are run from scripts that I can open and examine. Very little is done in a walled garden closed binary format. Even Apple's applications are folders inside of which I can find yet more scripts, text files, resources, etc. When something goes wrong I can usually figure out why. When something fails for some god-knows-why reason in Windows, I get an error box, and nothing else.<p>Please don't try to hide the guts of a system from me. It is the thing I value most about my Mac.

While 90% of the time I agree with the ease of sandboxed and cloud-synced file management, there's still that 10% of the time that I'm annoyed by it.<p>If I want to copy, rename, share, or email a specific file I find it easiest to do it in the file. I find it almost as easy to do it in an app that facilitate it easily like iPhoto (with it's built in share and email buttons). I find it much more difficult to do it in an app that doesn't make it quite as easily facilitated through the UI, like iTunes.<p>I would love for the finder to go away, but I'd hate for it to go away at the expense of every app developer having to rebuild mechanisms into each app to expose general file manipulations that the finder handles quite well right now.

In June or so (according to macrumors: <a href="http://www.macrumors.com/2010/01/23/mac-os-x-10-7-appearing-in-web-logs-dev-release-at-wwdc/" rel="nofollow">http://www.macrumors.com/2010/01/23/mac-os-x-10-7-appearing-...</a>) 10.7 will be pushed out to developers at WWDC and we'll see for sure. Personally, I can't stand this speculation that, just because Apple designed an iPhone and iPad, that they're going to cripple the Mac. I think if they think people will be better off with a limited device, they'll just try and sell them an iPad instead of a Mac.<p>Hierarchical file systems aren't terribly usable--how many people do <i>you</i> know who just splay all their files across their desktop--but I can't imagine Apple replacing it with just an app model. (Personally, I like Gmail's archive/label/search system for a filesystem UI, but it's hard to see what wrinkles we'd run into translating it into a general FS.)

Yay! Lockin!<p>The future is one big black box that it difficult to manage or migrate.

I hope I'm not alone in really disliking the current over-use of the word 'App'. An 'App' is merely a shortening of 'Application', they are not different things. Even on the iPhone an App is still just an Application.<p>Postulating that the current model of user's interacting with files mostly because Applications are now called Apps is faintly ludicrous.<p>On the other hand I think that hiding the intricacies of the filesystem in a user-friendly way would be welcomed by most people that use a computer for non-technical purposes. It certainly reduces the likelihood of problems caused by accidental deletion of config/application data.

This is exactly why I hate iTunes and the Apple ideology. I was using it for a while before I decided that the UI sucked for my massive collection of music. But getting those files out of proprietary codecs is a pain. No I do not want your monolithic Apple apps.

It may not be dead, but its been in perpetual suck-mode for multi-monitors since its inception.

It seems unlikely that the file system would disappear/become inaccessible altogether. Sure, when you want to edit photos you should have to dig around in folders. But existing apps already insulate you from these details - just by layering suitable abstractions over the file system.<p>Having the more general layer underneath gives you more power when you need it. It also gives all apps a simple, standard place to store their data. The raw file system has been slowly losing its prominence over time, but I really don't see a benefit in scrapping it altogether.

Macs will be touchscreens. The OS will look like iPhone OS. This is not hard to see.<p>Web Designers: Wake Up And Smell The Touchscreen Coffee! <a href="http://ebooktest.wordpress.com/2010/01/31/web-designers-wake-up-and-smell-the-touchscreen-coffee/" rel="nofollow">http://ebooktest.wordpress.com/2010/01/31/web-designers-wake...</a><p>Edited to add: This does not necessarily mean access to the CLI will be taken away. I think Devs would revolt over that.

I think you can go one step further and assume the browser is going to be the only app most people use. It's happening on the desktop, and there's no reason the same phenomenon won't happen on devices.<p>If this seems far fetched, look at it this way: most desktop apps are becoming more like browsers given how they use the network. Spotify is a perfect example (for those who've used it).

This is bad. Sure, you can make the user forget about files most of the times, but not <i>kill</i> it completely, because:<p>1) It'll be a hell of work to parse everything. Should my music clips go into the music folder or video folder? Sure, you can associate file extensions, but what if the software isn't installed yet? If two programs have to share files? The relations can fail in too many ways.<p>2) All software to ever run in this machine would have to fully implement it's own "file explorer". The picture manager will have to be able to rename, organize move files, as will the document editor, the video player, the text editor...<p>3) Less freedom of movement. What if I want to send a set of videos, documents and audio files to someone else? Would I have to open each app and politely ask it to send an email (which they will have to implement, too)? What if I want to backup an entire hard drive, with hundreds of different file types?<p>3) It'll be a complete hell if things go wrong, and you will have to resort to file management anyway. File lost extension somehow? Major file extension conflict? Unknown file type? You are screwed without manipulating the files themselves.<p>And don't even get me started on the reliability of your "in the cloud" future.

In this delightful future, how do I change the app I use to edit my photos? Or change the app I use to listen to my music?

Has this guy seen the video for the iPad announcement? It makes it pretty clear that Apple intends on keeping Macs as the high-end/advanced machines, the iPhone as a somewhat limited portable device, and the iPad situated comfortably in between.

I don't see why the Finder and file concept have to die just because personal computing's storage model is evolving.<p>In fact Finder capabilities should only grow as many people choose to de-centralize and sychronize their storage.

And so, the gap between those who can make and those who are limited to consuming widens. A computer ceases to be a bicycle for the mind and becomes just another environment for consumption.<p>Is this really what we want?

I, for one, hope not - not specifically Finder, but the file/folder model in general.<p>I cringe every time I HAVE to drop to shell just to manipulate a specific file the way I would like to.

Try attaching a photo from iPhoto to an Email.

A 10% market share company is going to change the face of computing... in a way that everyone has been predicting for the last 15, 20 years? I somehow doubt it.