File Open/Save Dialog Boxes Should Integrate with Shoebox Apps
On desktop OSs, there are two types of apps:
Filesystem apps, where you manually open and save files one at a time.
Shoebox apps like Apple Photos, where the filesystem is abstracted away.
These are two different worlds, and import and export are the bridge to connect them.
In this blog post, I want to make this bridge easier to cross, by letting shoebox apps hook into File Open / Save dialog boxes: when saving a file, shoebox apps should1 appear in the left pane, similar to an external drive. If you’re saving a .txt, Apple Notes will appear as a save destination. If it’s an image, Apple Photos will appear. When you select it and presses Save, it gets imported directly into Photos.
If the file wasn’t saved before, it doesn’t exist in the filesystem any more, only in the app it was saved to. For example, if you create a new text file, type something into it, and save it to Notes, once you close the text editor window, the only place it now exists is Notes.
This goes for the File Open dialog boxes, too: if you’re in some app and want to attach a photo, in the Open dialog, you should be able to select Apple Photos in the sidebar. Then the main pane will show your albums and photos in a mini-Apple Photos UI. You pick one, and it gets attached directly.
This eliminates the current multi-step process you have to go through:
Open Photos.
Export the file.
Attach it
Delete the temp file.
In practice, you may find that the destination app doesn’t support the format you’ve chosen, in which case you have to repeat the process.
With this integration, both apps will communicate with each other to find a common format.
Say you have a HDR photo in Apple Photos. Did you know that exporting it as HEIC preserves HDR while exporting it as PNG downgrades it to SDR? If anything, people think PNG is lossless, which is no longer true in the days of HDR. You shouldn’t have to know that — your time should not be wasted learning tech mumbo-jumbo. Apple Photos should automatically export to HEIC if the receiving app supports that format.
This system should be extensible to third-party apps, but Apple and Microsoft should take the lead.
If there’s loss of information during import, such as Apple Notes being able to import a .docx but lose some of the formatting, a warning will appear. The user can confirm, or save the file to the filesystem the traditional way.