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conspyesterday at 9:32 AM2 repliesview on HN

> and barely any hierarchy of (folders etc).

One of my great hate pet peeves with all smartphone and cloud apps is the "abstraction" and reliance on search. For me folders is quicker and less error prone, and as a bonus it saves on unneeded bandwidth (to load previews) and computing costs.

Also stop telling me I must use your one off "feature set" of sorting and ordering which either nobody uses or copies differently. The amount of square wheels (for me I must add, ymmv) reinvented is astonishing.


Replies

const_castyesterday at 7:27 PM

The worst is photos, because the search abstraction really breaks there. On modern iPhones, it's still a pain in the ass to organize photos in such a way where you can come back later and find them. I'm still in the "scroll through the timeline until you spot it" phase.

Machine Learning is making this better, but ideally albums or folders wouldn't be such a pain in the ass to actually use in day-to-day life.

miki123211yesterday at 10:19 AM

Folders as an abstraction don't really make sense beyond documents, though.

If your music is stored in a folder hierarchy, and can, in principle, be located anywhere, how do you index it to provide a library view? How do you distinguish it from random audio files that just happen to be ID3 tagged, but which you don't want as part of your permanent music collection? How do you efficiently react to deletion events? What happens if you delete an entire artist's worth of music from your music app? Should it delete the files, or only the library entries? If it deletes files, what if (some of) that music was in a folder that didn't contain any other files? Should that folder be gone too, or should you be left with an empty folder or hierarchy? What if the folder also contained a .nfo, is it good UX if it deletes the music and just leaves the .nfo?

If the only tool you have is a computer, everything is a file. If you're a music lover and not a computer enthusiast, you tend to think about albums, artists and playlists, and that's how you want to view your music collection.

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