At the WWDC keynote this week, Steve Jobs remarked that when trying to teach someone how to use a Mac, “everything’s going along fine until you hit the file system, and then the difficulty is staggering for most people.” I remember having my own difficulties understanding file systems back when I was a computer neophyte, and I’m sure others would agree.

On iOS, this learning curve is non-existent, as it has no file manager. Instead, apps use a “library” metaphor, where each app is responsible for presenting its own documents. For example, when you launch Pages for iOS, you get a view of all your documents, so you can swipe through and choose one to edit.

Pages for iPad uses a library to display its documents.

But how can Apple make file management easier on the Mac? Truth is, it has been laying the groundwork for years. The iLife suite, iTunes, and Photo Booth have used the library system since the beginning, and I suspect a new version of iWork will come out that does the same. Apple is furthering this groundwork with Lion; Auto Save, Versions, and Launchpad are all designed to be easier alternatives to using the Finder. AirDrop, the new simple local file sharing tool, is also part of the transition, even though it’s integrated into the Lion Finder. All Apple has to do is take it out of the Finder, and integrate it into each app’s library.

Another piece of the puzzle is iCloud, which makes syncing files across multiple devices easy, requiring no intervention on the user’s part. iCloud has the potential to make drag ‘n’ drop file management a thing of the past. No more copying that important Keynote presentation from one Mac to another with the Finder; With iCloud, it’ll already be there.

It follows that in the future, we could see a Mac OS where there is no Finder, and none of the complexities that come with it. When you want to work with a document, you’ll just fire up the app that’s associated with it and select it from the library. Shared libraries could work between apps, too, like they do now with iPhoto and other Apple apps. There won’t be any need to save files, or launch applications with the Finder; the OS will take care of that for you.

All this isn’t to say that it’ll be easy for Apple to replace the Finder. There are still questions that remain unanswered. For instance, how Apple would deal with downloads or the Desktop folder. Despite this, I have little doubt that Apple will continue to move us towards a Finder-less future. The gains in terms ease of use are simply too great for Apple to pass up.

What are your thoughts? Should Apple ditch the finder, or are the compromises required too great?

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The mouse. Apple may have brought the mouse to the masses, but with one multi-gesture swipe, it could flick it away forever. So many of the new features being introduced with OS X Lion will require complex gestures that replacing the mouse with a touchpad will be nearly essential.

The file system. Thanks to drag-and-drop sharing with AirDrop, and Documents in the Cloud available to all developers, Apple has threatened not only the flash drive, but also file systems themselves. Users won’t need to know where files go, because it will all happen automatically behind the scenes.

Paper and traditional newsstands. While I may not be ready to ditch my RSS readers just yet, I will be opening articles in mobile Safari far more often than I do now. With the ability to tweet, read and save multi-page articles in Safari, I may depend far less on RSS. I’ll also probably stop using Instapaper, and with the addition of Newsstand, I’ll transition from print to digital subscriptions much more quickly.

Desktop app launchers. Bringing the iOS-style app organization to OS X with Launchpad is a welcome addition. It could eliminate the need to use other launchers like Quicksilver, Alfred and Butler, especially when combined with Mission Control, the more versatile Exposé replacement.

To-do apps. In the same vein of getting things done more efficiently, the new Reminders app for iOS devices could make third-party to-do apps redundant. It all depends on how advanced your needs are, but Apple’s system has location and time-based notifications, so you can’t ask for much more.

BlackBerry Messenger and SMS. With Apple’s new iMessage service for any owner of an Apple device, the one remaining killer feature of BlackBerry devices  may be rendered inert. The remaining question is whether or not families will keep their SMS service with their carriers. Creating a way to direct message family and friends with other Apple devices, as well as deeply integrating Twitter into the iOS itself may eliminate that need, depending on what hardware your circle of friends and family is using.

Weather apps. I’m not a fan of the stock weather app that comes with iOS, but that’s about to change. With the integration of weather updates on the new notifications, and the added bonus of hourly forecasts, a lot of what I was looking for in third-party apps is taken care of.

Once again, Steve Jobs delivers the goods and has the tech world scrambling to keep up. But this time around, consumers might be the ones doing a little scrambling, too. Apple is aggressively moving to the cloud, which might throw some users unused to the concept for a loop, and the fact that Lion can only be downloaded might leave some of those without fast or dependable Internet connections behind. But Apple seems to have set its sights firmly on where tech is headed, and it’s willing to roll over existing offerings and services in order to get there.

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Today it’s the foundation for all modern pre-installed Windows systems. It replaced the aging FAT (File Allocation Table) file system with a leaner, meaner standard. It’s more secure, more flexible, and has more built-in gadgets than a Swiss Army Knife. It’s NTFS, of course — the New Technology File System.

I grew up with NTFS. I was there when it was introduced with Windows NT, and I insisted on reformatting every Windows machine I ever got my hands on — wiping out stuffy old FAT32 — with a file system so much more capable and pleasing. Yeah, OK, I was total nerd about the whole thing, I know.

So it came as something of a surprise to me that I didn’t think about file systems when I was switching to the Mac. And I didn’t think about file systems when I took a terabyte hard drive from my old PC and put it in my Mac Pro. And I didn’t think about file systems when I first clicked around that drive’s contents in Finder.

I did think about file systems when I tried to save changes I made to an old document that migrated to my Mac along with the drive. I was rewarded for my Saving efforts with an unwelcome dialogue telling me I couldn’t write to the drive. And then the penny dropped. My big, new shiny Mac Pro was using HFS+ while that second HDD was formatted with NTFS. And then I had to go and have a lie down for a bit due to an acronym-induced headache.

You’re unlikely to have experienced this access problem unless you have an external drive you like to use for both a Windows machine and a Mac.

Until Apple gets around to building full read/write compatibility into its operating system (and let’s not forget Snow Leopard is right around the corner) we have to find third-party solutions that cajole our hard drives into getting along with each other. One popular (and free) solution is NTFS-3G: a reasonably simple, though somewhat fiddly, application that requires users mount their NTFS drives/partitions in order to have full read/write access to the data stored therein. This can become cumbersome if an external drive is improperly unmounted on another machine. It’s not impossible to fix, mind you, but not effortless by any means.

If you need a simpler solution that offers transparent, and deceptively native, interoperability with NTFS formatted drives, you could try Paragon’s venerable (though horribly named) NTFS for Mac OS X 7.0 (or NTFSMOSX7 as I shall now refer to it because that string of characters is marginally less cumbersome than the full name).

NTFSMOSX7 is a small download, at a little under 3 megabytes and, once installed, ticks away in the background. There’s no user interface or settings to tweak. This really is nothing more than a driver.

If you buy the full version of the software, the download will undoubtedly be larger, since the paid-for app includes Paragon’s MacBrowser software for Windows. I might have tested MacBrowser for the purpose of this review, but Paragon never responded to my emails requesting more information, so if you have used it, and have an experience to share, please add a comment at the end of the article.

The only real problem I had once the hard drive was once again mine to use and abuse, was a conspicuous lack of Spotlight functionality. This is because, by default, Spotlight doesn’t index NTFS volumes. It’s not impossible to do, but it’s also not easy to achieve. The Spotlight preferences panel is typically spartan, so it’s necessary to bypass the Spotlight settings GUI and get your hands dirty in a Terminal session.

For those of you interested, by the way, the syntax for manually adding an NTFS volume (or any volume, for that matter) to Spotlight’s index via Terminal goes like this:

sudo mdutil -i on /Volume/VolumeName

Once entered, Spotlight will begin indexing your volume, which means it’s time for you to go watch some “Galactica” or “Big Bang Theory” while you wait.

A lot has been made of the apparent (and the not-even-remotely-important) differences between NTFS and HFS+. While HFS+ was ahead of the game at a time when too many Windows users were still mired in FAT (no jokes, please), NTFS was, and remains, a sophisticated file system. In fact, it bests HFS+ in many ways. Overall, though, is it better? I don’t know for sure, and I suspect for 99 percent of everyday users the question “who cares?” springs to mind.

Sidenote: Exuberant Apple supporters — aka Wailing Fanboys — muddy the waters with their auto-hate for anything not intrinsically Apple, claiming time and time again on discussion boards that “NTFS sux.” Occasionally, a particularly tech-savvy zealot will talk about comparing streams and counting data forks and probably even get into a debate over which Enterprise Captain is the best.

None of that matters so long as you can access your data quickly and painlessly, and, at least on the Mac, NTFSMOSX7 makes that possible. If you have to use NTFS volumes regularly but can’t reformat them to use HFS+, the $40 asking price for NTFSMOSX7 is perhaps not so steep in return for the convenience of seamless data interoperability. If, on the other hand, you want occasional quick-and-dirty access to an old NTFS volume and the ability to write data to it is not a serious concern, $40 is much too expensive for what amounts to a simple driver, and I’d suggest you stick with a free alternative.

You can try NTFSMOSX7 free for 10 days by downloading it from the Paragon web site. You can see which Enterprise captain is superior by clicking here.

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is only available a read-only option from the command line,

Read-only means that at a later date, if there are ZFS volumes, those systems would be able to read ZFS volumes

What this means to the rest of us is that we can’t write to a ZFS drive with Leopard. However if you’ve got some server (Solaris being most likely) running ZFS, Leopard will allow you to read that drive. Um, woohoo? I guess it could be worse, and we’d get no comment/support on the ZFS front, but this is clearly a let down. If you’re not sure why ZFS is a big deal, there’s a great article about it here.

I’ve been defending the Keynote and somewhat lackluster features in the past couple posts, but I think I’m about to surrender my stance at this point. Microsoft took an awful lot of heat for delays and cutting back all the breakthrough features that Longhorn (Vista) was to ship with, most notable being WinFS. Now here we are on the eve of Leopard – which has suffered its own delay in ship date – and the much-hyped ZFS will be absent from the party for Apple as well.

It almost appears that Cupertino has been using their photocopiers…

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