But it's not one big .EXE, it's a directory masquerading as a file :)
True. Still it looks nice.
Yep, I'm less happy with this idea, mostly because I think I'm used to the ideas of files, and I'm not happy when I can't organise things in a heirarchy. I played around with a palm pilot for a while that allowed up to 15 categories. While I never used all 15 categories, it felt constraining. I guess I'm just used to having heaps of tiny files in lots of small directories.
It will certainly be harder to adapt to this sort of arrangement as an old skool file system geek. But from my experience most Joe Sixpack users just let everything accumlate in one giant "Documents" folder and it makes it very difficult to find stuff.
I quite agree, although I think apps need to learn to startup faster. Theres nothing more disconcerting than the "is it going to load or not? Oh, here it is" that large applications seem to have these days.
Something I noticed on the Mac is the lack of "Splash Screens". Apps start pretty fast. Even MS Office apps on modern PCs start so fast there is little need for the splash screens they have.
Gnome Storage seems to be one approach which seems rather nifty, basically it's a database that stores all your files which you can access via a natural language search system, eg:
movies before 2000 that have Mel Gibson in them.
A move in the right direction.
which seems to be a much better way to organise files. The thing with databases is that I've not seen a good way to group files together. Perhaps it's my thinking that needs to change, but at least when programming you have large numbers of files that go together to form a "project". You have media (images? sounds?) meta information about the project (Makefiles, Doxyfile etc), and intermediate files (.o) and source files. Perhaps we need to move to something closer to smalltalks "image" idea :)
Programming is always going to be a special case. When you're making new software you have to understand how the computer and OS work "under the covers". A general purpose user does not. And even as a programmer when I use general purpose apps I don't want to deal with files. Take iTunes as an example. I don't care how iTunes organized my music. I'm only interested in the meta information. I want to listen to Pearl Jam so I just type Pearl into the search or browse to Pearl Jam in the Arists list. Or I want to get a play list of all the songs I played in iTunes (or my iPod) in the last two weeks.... etc. I can just creat "Smart" playlists that track this meta data. Much more useful than browsing a heirachy of directories and files in XMMS. If I do care about the file/dir structure I can tell iTunes to keep my files "Organized and track changes to Artist, Album and Tack names etc. Winamp 5 on Windows also has a nice media browser. And no doubt Rythum box is trying to copy a lot of this sort of behaviour. Though I must admit I've not used Rythum box much. The version I have can't parse filenames correctly and alot of my old audio on my linux box has filenames with [] chars in them. RB seems to balk on this. Probably fixed in a newer version. Regards