This could be great. I have endlessly thought of how obsolete the current UI is on the system trees are. Really wish the best for you guys, of course signed up!
I used TotalFinder for over a year, but gave up on it a few months ago. It was nice and everything, but the number of times it crashed when I was moving large files (via USB or LAN) and basically ruining everything was alarmingly frequent. After a while I would (subconsciously) 'killall TotalFinder' before moving/copying any large file...
Been using XtraFinder for the past month and it doesn't have any problems.
It really bothers me when I click a download button only to be greeted by "Hey, you can't actually download our app, but why not sign up for our newsletter?"
It also seemed to break my back button after I went to the sign up page. I had to type the HN url to get back here after I finished. That was annoying.
Yeah impressive. I'm on a windows machine and find the windows explorer, and especially "search" to basically be broken. I have so little confidence in the search that I avoid it at nearly any cost. I find that it was much better on Windows XP (and I'm not saying it was anywhere near good on WinXP).
I'm not sure to what extent this is a replacement (on the site it sounds ambitious), but I'm very curious.
I've a machine with Windows Vista and accidentally found "\Windows\System32\where.exe". It's pretty dang useful, similar to gnu locate. Doesn't address the larger issues of Vista or file explorers in general, but helps get stuff done.
I was literally thinking about how much I needed this five minutes ago, but I want it for Flickr! Any chance you'll be adding support for other services in the future, or adding a plugin model so I could do it for myself?
> Is cloud-based file selection something that should be offered by a web developer, or by the OS?
You're hinting that it should be handled by the OS, and I certainly welcome that sort of change. That's the kind of thing that I think could set ChromeOS apart, so perhaps Google will make the first move.
That said, one of the reasons why the Web kicked Windows and MacOS's collective asses in the developer platform wards is that this sort of thing is often left to the developer on the web. There's only so much a centralized team at Microsoft of Apple can do. Tens of thousands of web developers constantly trying to one-up each other just have a MUCH larger creative output, and there's a strong natural selection programme at work. And so it's the Web where you've seen interface graphic design flourish, where you've seen leaps forward in the interfaces for sharing content, etc.
So part of me wants to say yes: let the developers play with this stuff. Build out the low level APIs in the browser (cameras, native data structures, etc) and let the best ideas duke it out in the marketplace. Good developers copy good ideas and standards emerge.
Jordan and team are good friends of ours (Filepicker.io team). We are trying to solve similar problems but approaching it from different directions. Its going to be an interesting future. :-)
Interestingly enough, one of the first YC companies from Summer '05, Memamp, tried to solve the Desktop search problem with replacing Finder.
I remember watching their demonstration during demo day and and being very impressed. Now the problem space is even harder, with cloud and hosted solutions in addition to all the desktop files.
They could just cut a deal with Google for search, the the way Firefox did. You could potentially eek out a couple of dollars per user per year if you can get people to "live" more in this new "file system"
Yay that's exactly what we need to make file management more coherent - another baroque piece of crap that only adds features instead of refactoring existing ones.
Just build a new Norton Commander for OSX and we are happy.
Anyway, don't get why YC/PG invests in such ideas. Though nice this idea is no venture case (easy to copy when successful).
This kind of company (if things work out reasonably well) could easily sell for $10,000,000. After an investment of $15-20k for 5+% of the company, that is a return of $500k or more. Twenty-five or more times your money is a pretty good return.
Dropbox is easy to copy, right? Virtually no lock-in. There's SugarSync, Google Drive, and SkyDrive. Funny thing is that I've tried them all out and I still like Dropbox, even though it offers less free storage. Dropbox is the fastest out of all of them and has LAN syncing. Google Drive threw up during syncing several times (where it couldn't sync a file).
Since half of YC's portfolio is in a company that was considered "a feature" by Steve Jobs, I don't think he needs to justify these investments to anyone.
I have this argument at my job all the time: should we be worried, when consulting with clients attempting to build startups, about the giants in their industry stealing their ideas? My answer is always no: worst case scenario they'll try to buy you in order to copy you. Next worst they'll try to copy you once you're already becoming successful. Neither of those are bad scenarios.
Big companies don't try to copy unsuccessful ideas, it never happens.
"Big companies don't try to copy unsuccessful ideas, it never happens."
Have you ever worked at a big company? Big companies are so dysfunctional. It's not that the individuals are stupid but the broken dynamics of people working together can generate some pretty dumb decisions.
Big companies copy bad ideas all the time. This is one reason why startups can disrupt them.
"worst case scenario they'll try to buy you in order to copy you. Next worst they'll try to copy you once you're already becoming successful. Neither of those are bad scenarios."
This makes no sense. If they buy you, that's NOT the worst case scenario. The founders walk away wealthier. If they try to copy and succeed, the founders walk away with nothing. That is worse than them trying to buy the company.
I don't understand why "Neither of those are bad scenarios." The first one is possibly good, depending on what they're offering for the company.
You're missunderstanding my point: big companies have tons of bad ideas internally, but the ideas they try to copy are ones that are rapidly gaining traction.
Cool! Here's what I would really, really like to see as part of a file manager re-imagining: a unified, programmable activity stream for my actions across both my local machine and the Internet, stored locally but accessible via API.
Imagine this:
I save a photo, with Photoshop, to my Pictures/2012 folder. It's immediately added to my local timeline. It's private to me.
I copy the photo to my Pictures/Web folder. Again, this is added to my timeline. I've programmed the timeline to also send the photo to Flickr when I do this.
I copy it to my Pictures/Clients/John Smith folder. It's in my timeline, but here I've programmed it to send it privately to John Smith via a web service.
I'm on a company network. I copy a file to a shared drive. It shows up in the timelines of all the other people who have access to that drive (although some of them may have chosen to filter these actions out). A couple of them have actions programmed in; they automatically copy the file to their own private folders, or to their mobile devices, etc etc. One of them decides to leave a comment on the shared timeline.
I can search my timeline by type, person, action type, etc etc. And do the same even when I'm disconnected from my computer and network, although not all of the files are necessarily available.
It doesn't provide the timeline you were looking for, and I don't think it can do Internet-y stuff, but it could take care of the "if something lands in _____ folder, do ____" bit if you had it run a custom script for each action.
Perhaps you could hack together your own activity stream with some elbow grease?
About 3 years ago I've developed a small tool, very limited but can automate certain tasks based on the directory called Psycho Folder - http://code.google.com/p/psychofolder/
It's much more limited than this but still did the trick with the combination of CLI tools.
It watches directories and takes actions according to the created / modified file types in that directory.
Initially I used it for auto video conversion:
- Torrent downloads a mkv video
- Psycho folder detects the file unzips if necessary
- Launches video conversion tool (convert it to an encoding that my TV can stream)
- Launches subtitle encoding tool if there is a subtitle file
- Copies it to NAS so the TV can stream it from
In one point it was also part of my CI system, when a new release is there it would upload it to dropbox.
There are so many other possibilities, imagine creating thumbnails automatically when you drag & drop a picture to a directory, or maybe upload them to instagram etc.
Good software idea as you're going after a market that existing cloud vendors cannot (in terms of interoperability) in fear that it might cannibalize their own market share. In the end though, I can't see this being much of a consumer app, but rather a power user app. In the consumer world, I see whatever file manager and eventual cloud system that's baked into the OS ruling.
The problem is that we have opted too much for the visual metaphor for a desktop/folder etc...
Back in the day (~1987?) there was a file manager called "PathMinder" -- this was a GUI file manager for DOS -- it was AMAZING!
You had a full keyboard navigable system for your file system... now, this was a directory centric model (the idea of collections/groups/tags/etc had not evolved yet) -- but hte fluidity of navigating the structure was AMAZING.
I had fully memorized many many paths (just like memorizing the path to various dungeons in Bard Tale) via the keyboard.
It would be great to have the ability to have a meta-tree of navigation.
E.G.: assume you navigated to \Downloads - you could then highlight a file, say, a .PDF -- then in one more stroke, show me ALL .PDFs -- or what if I had tags on my files - even AUTO-TAGS (like Received Via [work/personal] email) - show me all PDFs I have received via my work email. or Show me all attachments received from my mom.
Collections of content is a weak premise... I would rather auto-tag content based on how I receive/procure it...
It is more about threading the communication channels than it is putting shit in the same bucket...
I have absolutely no problem with the finder and would not like a file manager that links to my social websites. I would mind a separate app that would aggregate that info, but wouldnt want use it to manage my local files
86 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] threadhttp://www.trankynam.com/xtrafinder/
Been using XtraFinder for the past month and it doesn't have any problems.
Looking forward to a good product - don't dissapoint! ;)
I'm not sure to what extent this is a replacement (on the site it sounds ambitious), but I'm very curious.
Here is one of many implementations:
https://github.com/patrickjennings/FlickrMS#readme
The big friendly button labeled "Get the App"... doesn't.
Is cloud-based file selection something that should be offered by a web developer, or by the OS?
You're hinting that it should be handled by the OS, and I certainly welcome that sort of change. That's the kind of thing that I think could set ChromeOS apart, so perhaps Google will make the first move.
That said, one of the reasons why the Web kicked Windows and MacOS's collective asses in the developer platform wards is that this sort of thing is often left to the developer on the web. There's only so much a centralized team at Microsoft of Apple can do. Tens of thousands of web developers constantly trying to one-up each other just have a MUCH larger creative output, and there's a strong natural selection programme at work. And so it's the Web where you've seen interface graphic design flourish, where you've seen leaps forward in the interfaces for sharing content, etc.
So part of me wants to say yes: let the developers play with this stuff. Build out the low level APIs in the browser (cameras, native data structures, etc) and let the best ideas duke it out in the marketplace. Good developers copy good ideas and standards emerge.
http://www.adobe.com/products/bridge.html
I remember watching their demonstration during demo day and and being very impressed. Now the problem space is even harder, with cloud and hosted solutions in addition to all the desktop files.
Not so easy to copy after all...
I have this argument at my job all the time: should we be worried, when consulting with clients attempting to build startups, about the giants in their industry stealing their ideas? My answer is always no: worst case scenario they'll try to buy you in order to copy you. Next worst they'll try to copy you once you're already becoming successful. Neither of those are bad scenarios.
Big companies don't try to copy unsuccessful ideas, it never happens.
Have you ever worked at a big company? Big companies are so dysfunctional. It's not that the individuals are stupid but the broken dynamics of people working together can generate some pretty dumb decisions.
Big companies copy bad ideas all the time. This is one reason why startups can disrupt them.
"worst case scenario they'll try to buy you in order to copy you. Next worst they'll try to copy you once you're already becoming successful. Neither of those are bad scenarios."
This makes no sense. If they buy you, that's NOT the worst case scenario. The founders walk away wealthier. If they try to copy and succeed, the founders walk away with nothing. That is worse than them trying to buy the company.
I don't understand why "Neither of those are bad scenarios." The first one is possibly good, depending on what they're offering for the company.
YC Company
Imagine this:
I save a photo, with Photoshop, to my Pictures/2012 folder. It's immediately added to my local timeline. It's private to me.
I copy the photo to my Pictures/Web folder. Again, this is added to my timeline. I've programmed the timeline to also send the photo to Flickr when I do this.
I copy it to my Pictures/Clients/John Smith folder. It's in my timeline, but here I've programmed it to send it privately to John Smith via a web service.
I'm on a company network. I copy a file to a shared drive. It shows up in the timelines of all the other people who have access to that drive (although some of them may have chosen to filter these actions out). A couple of them have actions programmed in; they automatically copy the file to their own private folders, or to their mobile devices, etc etc. One of them decides to leave a comment on the shared timeline.
I can search my timeline by type, person, action type, etc etc. And do the same even when I'm disconnected from my computer and network, although not all of the files are necessarily available.
It doesn't provide the timeline you were looking for, and I don't think it can do Internet-y stuff, but it could take care of the "if something lands in _____ folder, do ____" bit if you had it run a custom script for each action.
Perhaps you could hack together your own activity stream with some elbow grease?
It's much more limited than this but still did the trick with the combination of CLI tools.
It watches directories and takes actions according to the created / modified file types in that directory.
Initially I used it for auto video conversion: - Torrent downloads a mkv video - Psycho folder detects the file unzips if necessary - Launches video conversion tool (convert it to an encoding that my TV can stream) - Launches subtitle encoding tool if there is a subtitle file - Copies it to NAS so the TV can stream it from
In one point it was also part of my CI system, when a new release is there it would upload it to dropbox.
There are so many other possibilities, imagine creating thumbnails automatically when you drag & drop a picture to a directory, or maybe upload them to instagram etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eazel
The problem is that we have opted too much for the visual metaphor for a desktop/folder etc...
Back in the day (~1987?) there was a file manager called "PathMinder" -- this was a GUI file manager for DOS -- it was AMAZING!
You had a full keyboard navigable system for your file system... now, this was a directory centric model (the idea of collections/groups/tags/etc had not evolved yet) -- but hte fluidity of navigating the structure was AMAZING.
I had fully memorized many many paths (just like memorizing the path to various dungeons in Bard Tale) via the keyboard.
It would be great to have the ability to have a meta-tree of navigation.
E.G.: assume you navigated to \Downloads - you could then highlight a file, say, a .PDF -- then in one more stroke, show me ALL .PDFs -- or what if I had tags on my files - even AUTO-TAGS (like Received Via [work/personal] email) - show me all PDFs I have received via my work email. or Show me all attachments received from my mom.
Collections of content is a weak premise... I would rather auto-tag content based on how I receive/procure it...
It is more about threading the communication channels than it is putting shit in the same bucket...