Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Death to folders! (27 Sep 2005) Ironically, the search-based metaphor also allows folders to be reincarnated in a new and more useful form. Spotlight has a “Smart Folder” feature that looks like a folder, but is in fact the result of a search. So you could, for example, create a Smart Folder that contains all files, e-mails and other documents mentioning “sausages” that were modified in the last month: the search software then populates the folder with anything that matches these search criteria, and keeps the contents constantly updated. (The name implies that if these are Smart Folders, then existing folders must be stupid ones.) The idea of establishing relationships between pieces of information, to allow connections to be made and results to be retrieved, is not new. Vannevar Bush, in his famously prognostic and influential essay in the Atlantic Monthly in July 1945, described how adding structured code words to associated microfilm pages in his imaginary “Memex” information-retrieval system would help researchers. “It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book. It is more than this, for any item can be joined into numerous trails,” Bush wrote. Article URL: http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4368267 Read 80 more articles from Economist sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Games meets Interaction Design: War, Indifference or Love?          Books about Usability | Information Architecture | Information Visualisation | Technology History This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy