pacelvi wrote:Having a superficial understanding of what WinFs was going to be.. and to me that meant some meta-data layer on top of NTFS, i have to wonder what all the fuss is about that it’s being dropped or whatnot.I mean how many people fill out the Metadata options we have now for all the files we can make. I have never once entered document information for Office docs. I simply dont have time. Nor am I going to OCDesquely meta-label every media file I have.
So being the lazy content-creator that I am, what am I missing by WinFs not coming to life?
I filled it out. Or more precisely started to, but the "tools" are far from being easy and user-friendly. I was even considering writing an easier meta-data editor/organizer before WinFS, but I decided to wait for WinFS. Then it was dropped from Vista and we saw the disappearance of virtual folders.
What was cool about WinFS is that data becomes meaningful and you can have relationships between separate chunks of data. That's when you don't have to "meta-label" every file, but associate other data to them. For example associate a contact to a picture as in picture of X.Y. What's exciting about this is that looking at the picture you (and maybe the computer too) can immediately get the information about people in the photo. WinFS is not good because it adds meta-data (file, properties, summary). It's not good because it can search by meta-data (desktop search). The trick is (or rather was) in the relations.
And yes. WinFS is dead now, but I'm sure another OS will have it in 2 years. And Microsoft can play catch-up again like with mapping solutions (longhorn+keyhole demo springs to mind). Great
