>Installing a database-backed clothing management system like you would find at a dry cleaner in my house solves my organizational problem, but introduces alot of complexity and overhead.
This would be complex to implement, but would greatly simplify things for the user.
Imagine I had a big box I could throw all my stuff into, and when I wanted, say, my shoes, I could just say "Computer, retrieve winter boots" and my personal robot would pulled it out of the box for me. This would be awesome. Sure it would be complicated to implement a physical system like this, but storing an retrieving files in this way is easy. OS X's Spotlight gets us most of the way there. Now we just need tags.
The problem with complexity is that it ends up being rigid. What happens when you get boots that the robot can't pick up?
I scan alot of stuff at home and tag it with PDF tags. It's totally awesome, because Spotlight can index them, and the metadata is associated with the file vs. the file system. So I can use it in Linux or Windows as well.
The problem? I can't do that for all filetypes. My TaxCut files for my personal and business taxes have no meaningful metadata that Spotlight can use. I could use Spotlight Comments, but that metadata isn't portable. The portable facility for this sort of file that I have is directory structure.
On iOS, I'm just fucked. Unless the file in question is a picture, I'm stuck emailing things around, storing them within apps and whatever nonsensical filing system they have, or storing them in iCloud and only using Apple apps.
Apple wants my Mac experience to be like my iOS experience. Which is why I need a portable way to organize my junk.
This would be complex to implement, but would greatly simplify things for the user.
Imagine I had a big box I could throw all my stuff into, and when I wanted, say, my shoes, I could just say "Computer, retrieve winter boots" and my personal robot would pulled it out of the box for me. This would be awesome. Sure it would be complicated to implement a physical system like this, but storing an retrieving files in this way is easy. OS X's Spotlight gets us most of the way there. Now we just need tags.