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Filie (discontinued)

Filie was an open source project that aimed to implement a fast spatial file manager for MacOS X. The Finder in OS X prior to 10.4 made it increasingly difficult to browse spatially, partially due to conscious design decisions, partially due to bugs or side-effects in/of certain features.

What were we planning?

Our main design document that we were working from was a set of articles at ArsTechnica by John Siracusa. We didn't intend to stick to them slavishly, but the general ideas John outlines, the motivations behind particular features, those were the things you might have seen in Filie once it hit 1.0.

The development of Filie followed these main goals:

Spatiality - There is a one-folder-one-window ground rule. The icon is the file. That said, we still wanted column view, just as a separate file browser window style.
Speed - Filie was to be fast and responsive. Finder spends too much time showing the spinning pizza of death. Our stated goal was to never ever show the pizza.
Extensibility - Filie would have been open for new approaches to file browsing. This would have included a plugin architecture for "file data sources" and alternate view styles.

Filie is no more

You can still read the archives of the Filie Yahoo group, which could be read as a mailing list or using the Yahoogroups web interface. This was where all the decisions were made, designs were worked out and where you could have offered your abilities to the project, but only two people did.

While Filie was a Cocoa application written using xCode on MacOS X, a lot of the file management stuff relied on Carbon for the heavy lifting, so we used to be interested in knowledgeable developers of either conviction.

Source code

Most of the source code is subject to the GNU GPL, but a few files are dual-licensed. Be sure you understand the licensing terms, which can be found in the file HOW_CONTRIBUTE.txt in the source code archive.

Getting the code

At the time of this writing (Revision 89), you need the following modules out of our Subversion repository to build Filie:

Filie
IconKit
NDAlias
UKDistributedView
UliKit

In addition, you'll of course also need the Subversion client. A GUI interface like SCPlugin is also recommended. You can of course just view the code in your browser.

Binaries of Filie

Filie is still at an early stage in its development, and is only of interest to developers right now.

Pronunciation

It rhymes with "Smiley".