Dylan Greene dot com

I have tax information from my mutual fund and I don't know where to store it: Should I put it with the rest of my mutual fund information or with the rest of my tax information? In the real world it's hard to store one item in multiple places.

You might have the same issue with emails that you try to categorize using folders. What happens when an email relates to two projects? The same problem occurs with documents, bookmarks, music, and more. Because of the real-world metaphor that an object can only be in one place at a time, you're forced to store in one folder or make a duplicate of the item, which isn't ideal, especially for documents and music files.

Outlook 2003

Outlook 2003 has a great feature to help with this called Search Folders. A Search Folder is contains the results to any search you specify. I have a Search Folder for all unread email across all of my folders, another one for Flagged Items across all folders, and several others. The Search Folders act like real folders, so I can forward, delete, and move items as if items in the Search Folder are in a real folder. Unlike a typical search feature, the contents of Search Folders are updated as you receive or organize your email.

While not hard to set up, Search Folders are not perfect for every situation. I'm not going to set up a Search Folder for every possible category, mainly because it's still much easier to drag emails to appropriate folders or use the Rules Wizard.

More info: How to use Search Folders in Outlook 2003.

iTunes

iTunes has a similar feature called Smart Playlist, which is very well described on Apple's web site. With iTunes you can have Smart Playlist of music in your collection that you have never listened to and optionally have it update as you add more music.

Smart Playlist differs from Search Folders in that (as far as I know) you can't organize or delete the actual music files from the Smart Playlist view because you are looking at entries in a play list, not collection of files. In my opinion this isn't ideal because the user is still required to go back to the normal view organize and delete files. Apple may change this behavior.

More info: Smart Playlist video.

Windows Media Player

I use Windows Media Player for playing music. I've never bothered to create a playlist and instead I just rely on the folder organization on my hard drive. Windows Media Player has a built-in Smart Playlist-like feature which choices like "Fresh Tracks", "Tracks I listen to on Weekends", "Music I haven't heard recently", and several more.

Unlike iTunes you can't customize these searches, nor build a playlist out of a custom search. Windows XP can show metadata from music files such as Artist and Album name in the Windows Explorer (right click on the column name), but you still can't use Find in Windows to find music using the metadata.

More info: Unofficial Windows Media Player FAQ

Longhorn

Longhorn is Microsoft's code name for their next major revision to Windows, and is expected to be released in June 2061 (but could be as soon as 2005 if the European Union forces Microsoft remove a feature or two). Longhorn's file system is very different than the file systems we use today. Files are not stored in folders, but instead are assigned a folder or folders. (Basic techie details: the file system is implemented using a database; files and folders are stored as records; folder contents are the results of SQL queries).

So finally with Longhorn a file can easily live in multiple locations. Plus folders also work like Search Folders/Smart Playlist, showing the results of some complex query of metadata.

The technology for this feature is called WinFS, and Longhorn does not limit WinFS to the file system (so I'm not sure what the FS stands for). One example is that WinFS is used to organize your contacts in Longhorn, so if you have a contact that is both a friend and a co-worker, so put them in both places at the same time.

More info: Longhorn and WinFS video.

Conclusion?

Once Longhorn comes out and applications like Outlook, Windows Media Player, and maybe even iTunes start taking advantage of features like WinFS, I think we'll finally start to get away from the broken mental model that items on your computer must live in just one place. Until then, I'm still not sure how to best organize all my financial paperwork.