Ideal OS: Rebooting the Desktop Operating System Experience

Start with a system wide document database. Wouldn't it be easier to build a new email client if the database was already built for you? The UI would only be a few lines of code. In fact, many common applications are just text editors combined with data queries. Consider iTunes, Address Book, Calendar, Alarms, Messaging, Evernote, Todo list, Bookmarks, Browser History, Password Database, and Photo manager. All of these are backed by their own unique datastore. Such wasted effort, and a block to interoperability.

BeOS proved that a database filesystem could really function and provide incredible advantages. We need to bring it back.

 

A document database filesystem has many advantages over a traditional one. Not only can 'files' exist in more than one place, and they become easily searchable, having a guaranteed performant database makes app building far easier.

Consider iTunes. iTunes stores the actual mp3 files on disk, but all metadata in a private database. Having two sources of truth causes endless problems. If you add a new song on disk you must manually tell iTunes to rescan it. If you want to make a program that works with the song database you have to reverse engineer iTunes DB format, and pray that Apple doesn't change it. All of these problems go away with a single system wide database.