Files are useful if you want to share data between applications. I thought about it just today - maybe they could just be seen as the most general interface (a blob of bytes, basically). I suppose Apple & Co want to replace that by handlers and plugins - want to send a photo by email? Either you need an email plugin for iPhoto, or an iPhoto plugin for your email program (and how does it work if you use a web based email program?).

I don't think this approach will scale well in the long run (there are a lot of file types...). The iPhone is a bad example - I suspect in the long run apps just don't interact enough, which is why they will be superseded by web apps again. They are just good for isolated use cases.

Android's implementation of Intents and its sharing menu are probably a better example. I take a photo with the camera app, then hit share. Android automagically knows that Gmail, Messaging, Picasa Uploader, PicSay Pro or any number of image manipulation apps can do something with that image. Reading a cool story in the NPR app? I hit share and can, again, select Gmail or Twitter or whatever else the system recognizes as being able to handle that data type.

I don't think it's a replacement for filesystems, but it is a very powerful way of handling data on a platform as limited as mobile.

I like the intents concept, too. Unless there are > 100 apps that claim they can do something with your intent.

The thing is, there aren't actually that many file types which you'd want to open in multiple programs. Maybe fifteen or so which you'd expect to do data interchange with - a handful of picture formats, ditto movies, ditto audio, ditto text/DTP, and Excel and Powerpoint.

Everything else is special-purpose, so as long as you can mail the document, you're fine.

iTunes and iPhoto already handle the majority of those. Add a personal office-document-management tool and you're already pretty much there.

Isolated use cases is just what the average user needs. He doesn't want to be distracted by "byte blobs" and "program interaction".

Do one thing and do that well, I say.

The thing is, I am often very confused when I want to do things on a Mac. Maybe it is just because I am used to the old fashioned way of just attaching a file to my email. Like with the right click, files always work the same way. Unless every app comes from Apple (which is probably their goal), not all apps will adhere to my expectations in the same way. And even Apple will probably have a hard time to pull it off.

Some tasks simply are complicated by nature. I don't think all use cases are isolated. For example mailing an image is not an isolated use case (or rather, would it really be less confusing to have different apps for mailing images and mailing text?).

Since when can't you mail images or other files with OSX? Just drag and drop a file into your mail and you're good to go. There's also the "attach" button when writing a new mail.

How do you drag a photo there if it is in iPhoto? Where does iPhoto store it's photos? Is it even legal to just copy fotos out of the iPhoto folder?

I also tend to have problems on OS X because the finder sucks and dragging files to the task bar -> window opens -> drop on window often does not work for me (I suppose it should work?). If you open the finder, it hides the email window...

Just drag the photo from iPhoto to your new mail. Be strong, there's a lot of good magic involved(;

Also, iPhoto stores the pictures pretty conveniently as you might expect: ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library. And of course you can copy the files out of there.

And finally, you might want to get a screen that can fit a new mail and a finder window next to each other. A 13" monitor should do that just fine, btw(;