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Noah is almost fantastic, but what is it?

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nontroppo:
When Operating systems get better metadata support, the needs for these kinds of apps will diminish. These apps are really just glue to overcome the ugly, weak folder hierarchies and lack of comprehensive search in traditional file systems. But while tagging and metadata is a wild hit on the web, OSes keep dragging their heels.

CWuestefeld:
Although this noah seems to enforce a timeline and topic oriented approach to organizing information, i think the future will look more like a dynamic filtering/tagging system
-mouser (December 03, 2007, 06:03 PM)
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I'll see that and raise you one. Even tagging requires too much from the user in terms of anticipating the contexts from which he'll be interested in an item years down the road. I've given up on any kind of proactive organizing or structuring. It must work on the inherent content and metadata itself. This app appears to start down that road:
In Noah you never have to spend hours searching for this stuff again, it's all in one place arranged by date and time. If you can roughly remember when something happened, you can find it with a few clicks, and you will find everything else that was happening during the same day, hour, or minute.-Noah
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But the timeline is only one small aspect of the goal.

I've been working smoothly for some time now using desktop search (Microsoft at work, Copernic at home). Recently my employer "enhanced" the Exchange servers, using a Symantec product called Vault that archives old messages offline while providing a "searchable" (note my scare quotes) index to get back to them. Their idea of searchable is laughable, and this has really thrown a wrench into my ability to organize my work.

nontroppo:
This app appears to start down that road
--- End quote ---

But this should be done at the OS, not application level. Metadata is going to be useless in Noah when all your other applications know nothing about Noah's way of doing things. Metadata is my hobbyhorse. I've long campaigned for Opera to unify its data stores; currently we have page history, bookmarks, mail, RSS, IRC chat all in their own little fiefdoms. I wanted all this to be stored together with rich metadata, and the browser to be broken down into a data miner, in much the same way Noah is structured. But really that just pushes the problem one step further, because then that data is inaccesible to my file manager, my global search interface, and any other software that could take advantage of it.

justice:
amen. please convenience the powers that be and I will move to the OS that does this best. Vista tried, then removed it before the public releases. Leopard is on its way. Beos users know how powerful this can be... searching through your mail, contacts etc as they were all stored as metadata and individual files. I'm sure if BeOS was still going strong we'd be there by now :( alas. It's mind blowing, provides an amazing degree of freedom and changes the way you manage and combine previously isolated information.

nontroppo:
The problem with metadata, as Armando clearly posited, is portability. Currently as it is Leopard has fantastic metadata support (they hired the BeOS file system designer after all!). There are some 120+ core metadata attributes for any file in my system, this is accessible from any app, or even the command-line. A daemon, mds (metadataserver), uses FSEvents notification so when any new file lands in the file system from anywhere, it scans the file and fills up as much metadata attributes as it can. Any developer can code a metadata importer to import their proprietary formats metadata in the same transparent way. All of that is immediately available via spotlight, or whatever UI you want to build round the core framework. And as a core part of the OS and file system (not some 3rd party hack on top), this service is available to all. Apple even have a way of saving this metadata on non-apple drives, where a sidecar file is generated (like XMP in some ways).

BUT - when I give my file to my colleague who is not using OS X, they can't use all that juicy metadata goodness. I and many others were hoping Vista would pick up the can from the crappy metadata support in XP, so that a bridge could be built. But alas.

Another problem is stasis. People are used to folders, they've twisted their mental models to traversing up and down hierarchies like an indecisive mountaineer; of arbitrarily having to classify something as "a" OR "b". And so though the technological base is finally there at least in one popular OS (BeOS not being so popular sadly ;)), adoption of it will take time, and people are wary of change. I want the future today goddamit! But until then clumsy stopgaps and programs like Noah will have to do.

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