Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!hc!lanl!cmcl2!esquire!sbb
From: sbb@esquire.UUCP (Stephen B. Baumgarten)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: 'Virtual' Folders - good idea!!  (This reply 100 lines)
Keywords: What a stupid idea!
Message-ID: <443@esquire.UUCP>
Date: 27 Jun 88 19:46:53 GMT
References: <46100167@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> <1437@spar.SPAR.SLB.COM> <5282@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> <2044@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Reply-To: sbb@esquire.UUCP (Stephen B. Baumgarten)
Distribution: na
Organization: DP&W, New York, NY
Lines: 33

In article <2044@pt.cs.cmu.edu> dtw@f.gp.cs.cmu.edu (Duane Williams) writes:
>I certainly hope that Apple has the good sense to ignore all this nonsense
>about reincarnating "virtual folders" or creating "clipped together"
>documents and that they will instead enhance the "poor man's search path."
>
>> (Surely a computer interface for the rest of us should preserve the
>> paradigms whereby we create and manipulate messes.)
>
>This is exactly what computer interfaces should avoid.  "Clipped together"
>documents are a pretty dumb idea.  If there were a good search path
>mechanism built into the file system, then the real folders we already have
>would do everything that "clipped together" documents would do, but in a
>visibly organized way.
>-- 
>uucp: ...!seismo!cmucspt!me.ri.cmu.edu!dtw
>arpa: dtw@cs.cmu.edu

This is all true, although I don't really know why everyone has problems
with the current "solution" (i.e., just throw everything in the System
Folder in a big jumble).  I agree it makes things hard to organize, but
what exactly are you organizing, anyway?  I mean, there are no runnable
programs in the System Folder, and really there are no double-clickable
documents either.  I only rarely ever look in there -- mostly it just stays
closed and buried off in the corner.  The only time I ever mess with it
is to add new INITs, and this doesn't happen very often, so it's not a
big problem to find them (especially if you use DiskTop to find all files
of type INIT or cdev).  A