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It got my smart folder confused with the desktop, then deleted everything there. I am not pleased at all. Will now go give a 2 star review.
 
This isn't like Piles at all. Piles are arbitrary collections that you build yourself. Piles are closer to Folders than Smart Folders.

Smart Folders was a Copland feature. Basically saved searches. Imagine iTunes Smart Playlists in the Finder. It may be coming to Mac OS X some day on the file system level, but at the moment it's only found in Xcode and iTunes.

Piles will probably never see the light of day. The claims that Piles were in early builds of Panther were simply false -- Piles were never in there. Someone just stumbled on an old patent and thought that it'd make a good Panther hoax.
 
it doesn't seem that usefull from reading about it... but i'll give it a try.

if you wanted a certain group of data in one folder then why wouldn't you move it to a folder? and what more could you want than your main folder in the Finder toolbar, or in the dock, and mininise in place installed - that's everything you'd want!
 
Originally posted by cb911
if you wanted a certain group of data in one folder then why wouldn't you move it to a folder?

Because when you've got a lot of those files all over your hard disk(s), consolidating them into one folder takes ages. Manual, redundant labor that the Finder could easily do for you.

Ask yourself, would you rather maintain an iTunes playlist with all of your 4-5 star songs manually or automatically? Good. Now, ask yourself, would you rather maintain a folder of your most recent downloaded files, or article texts awaiting proofreading, or images awaiting uploading manually or have the Finder do it for you?
 
This is one of those programs that you wish was built into the OS, but isn't.

Why does this program work? Because we ALL have thousands of files scattered over our hard drives from many years of work. This program quickly throws all common files (or whatever your criteria is) into a single folder for quick use.
 
Amazing, this utility crudely implements something BeOS has had in a more elegant form for years and years.

Color me unimpressed. I'll wait until Apple chooses to implement it and then claim they invented the idea. ~_^ Come on, you thought Microsoft was the only company who did that?

--Cless
 
I've never seen (or heard rather) Apple say "We invented this" but mostly "We now have this highly requested feature." Which usually was handled by third party software or a previous version of MacOS. Of course, they may have done that before I really started paying attention...
 
At the initial unveiling of MacOS X, a demo was shown to the crowd to demonstrate some of the powerful features of the new OS. One of these had Steve bring a slowly spinning cube up onto the screen and then drag picture files onto the faces of the cube, and watch as the built-in OpenGL mapped them on and continued to spin the cube. "Nowhere before has this kind of power been seen on the desktop of the user" he commented.

Note to Jobs, BeOS did something quite similar, only instead of pictures, they played six QuickTime movies mapped onto an OpenGL cube in realtime, on a dual PowerPC 133MHz system, not a fancy dual 1GHz G4. ~_^

--Matt
 
Speaking of Be

IIRC, BeOS uses a database-like file system, and there was talk of bringing something like this to OS X (is this included in the JFS?)

In that case, "Smart Folders" would likely be just as simple as displaying a regular folder: they'd both just be queries on the "database." This way, you wouldn't have all the overhead of searching the drive, or the clutter of a bunch of aliases. It'd just be a stored query against the filesystem.

Could be a nice little feature for Apple to "pioneer".

[edit:] Reviewing the thread, I see that Cless indicates that Be in fact does exactly this... The more I hear about Be, the more impressed I am. Shame it didn't catch on.
 
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