BLOON stubs

Every single item in BLOON corresponds to a file (or folder) on your hard drive, even items that don't have an underlying file on your hard drive, such as:

BLOON docs;
URLs; and
items that have an underlying file, but not on your hard drive, i.e. the underlying file is not or is yet to be downloaded to your device.

Items that don't have an underlying file (or folder) on your hard drive are nevertheless represented on your hard drive by lightweight (about 1 KB) placeholder files — BLOON stubs, or B-stubs.

Why BLOON stubs

B-stubs enable you to see the items contained in a bloon folder from within Finder or Explorer — i.e. not solely from within the BLOON app.

The content of B-docs and URLs is not stored on your hard drive. The content of URLs is stored on various servers around the world, and B-docs are stored on BLOON's servers. On your hard drive, B-docs and URLs are represented by B-stubs. This informs you of their existence when you happen to be in Finder or Explorer.

B-stubs are even more powerful when they stand in for items with underlying files that are not downloaded to your device. They apprise you of the existence of these items while taking up next to no disk space; at the same time, they enable you to download the underlying files on demand with just a double-click.

B-stubs for items with underlying files

In this example, the image item named "coffee" is greyed out in the right pane, meaning the underlying file is not downloaded to Patrick's hard drive, is not taking up disk space, and can't be accessed without being downloaded first. Meanwhile, in Finder (the Mac equivalent of Explorer), the item "coffee" is represented by a B-stub named "coffee.jpg.bloon". (If file extensions were instead set to hidden in Finder, this B-stub would display "coffee.jpg" as its filename.)

If Patrick were to double-click on "coffee.jpg.bloon", the underlying file would start downloading right away (or as soon as there is an internet connection). The downloaded "coffee.jpg" would be the actual JPEG file and take up substantial disk space (relative to a B-stub).