This link was from Visa.. Irate Scotsman wants Mac OS X apps to automatically save documents. Yeah, nice idea - could be taken further, though. Get rid of files completely.

The thing that really attracted me to PalmOS all those years ago was not the well designed UIs in the apps, although they certainly didn't hurt, but the well-designed OS (well, in one respect, anyway): no files, just documents.

And it never ceases to amaze me that here, in 2003, we still use computer operating systems that force the user to see a difference between RAM (volatile "working" memory) and disk (persistent memory). I mean, "user unfriendly" server applications like databases don't. Maybe with 64 bits and practically unlimited address spaces finally approaching, now is the time for that to change.

The way I see it, an operating system should provide just one service in place of this whole filesystem mess: persistent objects. Basically, flatten the address space from the current RAM+disk to just one space, with RAM acting as the cache for active objects (compare that to CPU caches, if you like - that would make the complete hierarchy something like CPU registers - L1 - L2 - (L3) - RAM - local disk - network services like Freenet or iDisk). Any object (document) manipulated by an application would automatically be persisted to disk, too (with a writeback cache for performance, obviously).

That would even be trivial to implement. There ARE some frameworks kind of like that: Prevayler for Java, for example. The other, slightly harder part of the big picture would of course be providing versioning for those objects. An app could pretty easily do that by itself by cloning the document at user-selected milestones, but I think the OS should provide this service as well.

Getting rid of the filesystem would leave one "detail" open - locating documents. Each app keeps a structure of objects belonging to it, and the operating system provides an indexing service to assist searching for them.

Which is first to provide this, Mac OS X or Linux & Gnome? I'm still rooting for the latter option, myself.