iPad The Future of the iPad Does Not Include A Traditional Filesystem

why include icloud drive, but not a true file system?

 

i'm happy without. if i think how a Windows or OSX traditional filing system would aide my ipad life, i cant to be honest. for me, apps and dropbox do ALL i need. This being said there's no chance in hell i'd survive my desktop pc's without one.

 

I agree. I think the iPad Pro and the ecosystem is built for the cloud. I don't think there was ever a plan to include a file system in iOS. More often than not, I find myself picking up an iPad and going to the app I need to use.

What I would like however, is to be able to access different file formats in certain apps at the same time.

For instance in mail I should be able to attach files directly from mail. I hate having to go to different apps to send different file formats or sending multiple emails when I could just send one.

 

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If Dropbox would allow me to download entire folders of files for use offline I would be happy. Until then I still wish for a proper file system like a regular computer.

 

Use Documents 5 to sync whole Dropbox folders. I have more than 60 Gb synced this way.

 

I'm sure you'll know this, but some people might not, but in Mail if you hold down and from the pop up scroll to the right, you can choose Add Attachment.

From there you can add any Apple supported file format (txt/pdf/MP3/MP4/pages/numbers/whatever) from iCloud Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, maybe more I don't use any others.

 

I thought I would miss it a hell of a lot more than I actually do. I had all these scenarios in my head that made me angry to think about doing on the iPad. "But when I group files into folders and want to make projects and do this and that, I can't do that!" Then I actually tried it and was like...wow. I can actually do all that, it's just a different way of going about it. I can easily find crap by just spotlight searching it or open the app I wanna use the file in. I can make project files and folders within the app and then transfer to other apps for different specific functions and back. It actually feels more cohesive to me than doing it on my Mac.

And I tend to find the iPad more useful in general just because it has so many useful apps that do things that I never would have even dreamed doing. I think back to my time on Mac (which I still have) and think about the few apps I have, but that the most used app was actually safari. Safari was like the Swiss Army knife general purpose "go to this site and do this thing" thing. It's not like that on the iPad. If I have a need, there's almost always an app that does it for me. I've actually expanded my skill set from the great selection on the App Store. Hell...I haven't even used my expensive scanner in awhile because it's been so much easier to just use "scanner pro 7" to scan all my documents.

I think we're getting there. The want to do things is always there before the capability to actually do them. I want to edit code in Xcode on iPad. I want to have Final Cut Pro on my iPad that works perfectly with my iCloud library. I want pro level apps on my iPad. That alone would make it a completely different level of device far beyond just a Netflix watching/e reading type of dealio. Add in the ability at some point to connect it to a monitor and have it be the proper aspect ratio and resolution and you have a real work station on your hands in a few years

 

In the default mail app you can click on the paper clip and access anything in iCloud Drive, plus if you click on locations I also have Box, Dropbox, Transmit and BitTorrent sync as possible locations.

 

I'm not going to argue for or against the merits of a file management system, but are we seriously going to act like a dead man's musings on technology from 1997 are relevant 20 years later? Jobs may have been a visionary but come on!

 

Just create a Sandboxed Finder. It has access to the network and apps but no way to access the system directories. Apps like File Explorer for iOS already do some of this.

 

Until the iPad gets a usable/accessible FS and maybe even a SDcard or USB card i wont ever be able to consider moving away from either the Mac or a PC.

 

I'm don't mean to suggest that any of the technology he spoke of is fantasy, but the way people use technology changes all the time, and companies that fall even a year behind can have great difficulty catching up (see Blackberry). So ideas about whether a file system seemed important on a tablet 20 years ago are not relevant today. Personal electronics have changed a lot in the last 20 years, and no one can predict for certain how they will further change in the next 20 years.

 

Cloud works great for them because then they can charge you for storage and access. Unfortunately, high bandwidth cloud access is not available everywhere and it can be very expensive. Works well when I'm within urban areas but go outside of that and you can have access problems (as I have found on recent trips and expect to run into in upcoming travel).

 

I bought Office 365 Home not just for the apps but for the 1TB of cloud storage that is included for each user.

 

It would take about ten minutes to design a simple file system that fixes that. For example: you have one user accessible documents folder. Apps keep their own storage as they do now. If an app wants to save/read from user storage it has to ask permission. No system files are ever accessible. No security issues. And now you can actually use external storage because it just becomes another permission for the app.

And the "want the excel file, open excel" is fine if all you ever use is excel. But what if you want to switch to numbers? Now you have to keep excel installed, or manually move every single file to numbers, by hand. Versus keeping your spreadsheets in a spreadsheets folder in user storage. Or organizing them into a "tax documents" folder. And what if you have work spreadsheets and home ones? Now they are intertwined. That is certainly "Pro" status.

 

Yep. I'm all about getting rid of tasks that we no longer have to do, and (unless you're a developer) the concept of "organizing files" is about as archaic as it comes.

Nope. Simplicity is actually incredibly hard to design.

It requires a mind shift. It's similar to switching from PC to Mac. When I want to get rid of an app on the PC, I have to go through an "uninstall". On a Mac, I drag the application to the trash. At first, it's problematic that you don't have to do as much as you used to, then you get used to the idea that it's simpler. Same thing here. You organize files on a PC or Mac because you HAD to. Now, you don't have to and there's a worry about loosing control. There are people that still prefer to actually defrag their drive.

The shift in UI and UX design is to, over time, make interacting with computers less about me conforming to the device and the device conforming to me. What's next? Instead of reverting to File Systems, let's move forward - how about turning on an iPad and choosing a task - I want to work on taxes - and the device opens Excel (or your preferred application) and shows your tax docs at the highest level.