An Event Together/Apart
Yesterday Steve Jobs announced that Apple is taking iPhoto “to a whole new level” with their introduction of iPhoto ‘08. He summed up the upgrade saying, “This is what iPhoto ‘08 is all about - it’s about events.” At first blush the Events concept is an unremarkable one insignificantly different from Smart Folders - a ubiquitous concept we’ve come to take for granted as part of the Mac OS X experience. Events group photos in iPhoto based on a trivial (and admittedly flawed) rule: all photos taken in the same day belong together.
The admission of this flaw, however, is the main reason I believe Jobs’ hype that iPhoto has been “dramatically enhanced”. And moreover, it’s the reason I hope the Events concept spreads throughout the OS in the same way Smart Folders did after being introduced through iTunes.
Events are self-replicating Smart Folders with a simple twist: split and merge. Split and merge allow the some-what lacking rule Events are based on to cause no harm. Because the original rule (all photos taken in a day) is close enough to the desired organization it remains helpful while allowing human intervention to ensure meaning.
There is another application built-in to the Mac OS X that also has “self-replicating Smart Folders” but fails to offer the power of split and merge: Mail.app. Venture into the “View” menu and activate “Organize by Thread” to see these Not-So-Smart-“Folders” at work. The organization, which seems to be based partly on subject line and partly on the Message-Id header, is close to correct but not close enough.
Messages with a similar subject line are sometimes erroneously grouped or a subject line changes but Mail second guesses it based on the fact that it still shares a common heritage to a previous conversation.
It’s easy to argue that Mail should be smarter about what it does and does not group into a thread, Gmail seems handle this better, and maybe more importantly Mail already has a powerful Bayesian filter inbuilt. If a bit more of Mail’s spam flagging power was focused on deriving meaningful relationships between my legitimate email, threading could be nearly perfect.
But nearly is the key word. To truly harness the power of conversation threads email clients (and not just Apple’s) need to admit that any attempt to extract meaning from my data in a completely automated way will sometimes fail. When I do not have tools to correct these failures the automation becomes useless and that’s unfortunate because it could be just the opposite.
While Mail is an easy place to see how Apple’s new semi-automated self-replicating Smart Folders could be put to good use it’s not the only place. Imagine for example having an Events-like feature in the Finder that creates “Projects”. The original rule couldn’t be quite as simple as iPhoto’s but a future Finder that knows which documents I keep open at the same time and which I have a tendency to switch between could guess at what files should be grouped into current “Projects”.
Safari could group the sites that I visit with the searches that found them, Address Book could create location based groups, or even watch Mail to see which contacts seem to be regularly included in the same emails. The possibilities are limitless but they will only be useful if they are not forced upon us but suggested along the way.