Hey,

I'm working on something similar for my OS and think it's a good idea. But, I'm planning to do it like Mac OS: simply a folder that is treated as an application. This folder will then contain a main executable, and can also contain the icon & some files that describe the application. Putting it in one file isn't really necessary, you can as well make it look to the user as if it was one application.

I don't like how Windows does this - they put resources into the executable. I think that the main executable of the application should be a plain executable, and all resources rather be packed into a wrapper, just like in .app folders.

I personally discourage interfaces that make things look different to the way they actually are. If something's stored as a directory on disk, I want to see it as a directory, even if it's a "special" directory that makes up an application. (The same applies to files. I hate file managers that "transparently" display archives as if they were directories.) At the very least, I should be able to override this behaviour without having to resort to renaming the directory.

In macOS you can right-click an .app bundle and then click the corresponding option to view the contents. This is, in my opinion, the best behaviour.

In macOS you can right-click an .app bundle and then click the corresponding option to view the contents. This is, in my opinion, the best behaviour.

Personally I find that that still makes the user (especially if they're non-technical) think that they're working with a file rather than a directory. So now they'll get confused when they try to email it, or copy it to another storage device, or view the properties of the parent directory and the child directory count is greater than they expect it to be, or whatever. As soon as you try to hide details like that from the user, you're adding room for confusion. (The same applies to the "libraries" in Microsoft Windows, for example - I've had plenty of users get confused when they put a file in a library and now they can't find it in a directory when it's actually in another directory, or why sometimes a file is there and sometimes it isn't when they're sometimes looking at a library and sometimes looking at a directory without realising it.)

This is why they will be .tar's in my OS.

About sending a directory over email: this should be implemented as an application feature. So user sees it exactly as if it were a single file (just like in MacOSX), and file grouping is done with mime parts in this case. In other words it's solved at a higher level: the user clicks on a file/folder to send it via email, and it's the MUA's job to create the proper attachment(s) (either one mime part, or more related parts). On Linux, you can use munpack or mimedecode to extract those from an attachment into files.

This is why they will be .tar's in my OS.