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A Better Finder?
Build6 writes "Ars Technica opens today with another one of their deeply-thought-out articles relating to MacOS X issues, pointing out another thing which the old MacOS had and the current one doesn't."
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pointing out another thing which the old MacOS had and the current one doesn't.
Evil bit support? Support for the One BSD to Rule them All (even though they are all dying)? The Foreman iGrill? Volkswagens? Red and blue lasers? Sharks?
Any desktop uses a spacial metaphor for data - however, for me, the desktop is just a holding area - short term memory, if you will.
I do like the idea of other means of filtering: LifeStreams seems like a good idea: being able to filter based on time and document type (for example).
Anyway, it is a free world - I will stick with OS X.
-Mark
I have been a Mac user for some years and I just want to bleat that with OS X we have been paying more for a crippled and slow Finder as compared to Mac OS 9. This is the primary user interface to the computer and should have gotten as least as much attention as iTunes and those other toys. Also, what happened to AppleScript recordability of the Finder? BAH!!!!!
But one gripe I have is that they have dumped the chooser for some connect to network location thing. I may not use Macs much, but at school I have too and having to fumble about with an unfamiliar inferface when trying to get onto my shared folder is a pain. Adding to the functionality should of been a priority (it was quite restrictive imo) - not replacing it.
I love OS X. But it is such a huge change from OS 9- that I consider it a newborn new OS albeit with a very rich parents. I think what we've seen so far is just the beginning. They had to get things to work first. Refinements will be forthcoming.
While a lot of the article is interesting -- live folders sound useful -- I'm content with the Finder. It could -- and I'm sure will -- get some tweaking but I don't find it an obstacle in my daily work.
Now seriously, I've been thinking in buying a Mac to port software to MacOS... I wish they had some more market share so my decission would be a bit safer.
Actually, a smaller market share means fewer potential competitors that you will have to worry about. In the Windows market, you have to worry about competing with dozens of other developers and companies. There are many other advantages to developing for OS X as well, and if your code is already written for another UNIX platform, in many cases, much of the code can be brought over through a simple recompile. I am running code originally written for SGI that was simply recompiled for OS X and it runs in an X windows environment. Easy peasy.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Ok, I'll bite. If you're porting useful software to the Mac, there's no need to give that pudgy comment about "more market share." Useful software sells on the Mac. Heck, sometimes even seemingly un-useful software sells (Konfabulator?). I don't think a small business software designer (which I assume you are) needs to worry about Apple having 5% marketshare verses 15% or 20% marketshare. You'll sell just as much either way, most likely.
As a long time user of Linux, new to the world of OS X. I've found the best finder , is just to drop in to a terminal or iTerm and do things the easy way. Command line is faster, to me anyway.
8600 you say? a computer made in 1995? I don't think anyone would ever expect an 8 year old computer to do things as fast as one today. Plus, IIRC, that computer has a blistering 5MB/sec SCSI bus internally, not exactly made for fast file transfers (in today's terms). Try the same transfer on anything made in 1997+ (with the ATA bus in it) and I think you will see a huge difference. Not to mention your computer seems pretty hackneyed, there was no 8600 with a 300MHz proc. I guess you may have upgraded to a G3 (or worse yet a 300MHz 604), but it is still on OLD computer and if you are trying to use OSX on it (read not supported), don't judge it.
today is spelling optional day.
I love this one.
It's an old mac not running OS X. What's your point? (plus this is a troll I've seen a couple of times...)
YHBT, YHL, HAND.
Maybe this is showing my ignorance of Mac OSs, but why cannot Mac OSX simply have a graphical interface for locate? Locate looks at a database and very quickly returns all the matches (vs. searching through the whole disk). Since Mac OSX is supposed to be a close relative of NeXT this should be trivial.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
I'd rather hear some intellingent arguments rather than some very lame ones using outdated, unsupported hardware for current positions. That's just ignorant and pointless. Of course your NT 4 box is going to outperform a 8600 running OS 8.5 or 9. AND if you're running OS X on that... shame on you! Put Linux on it if you want a fair hardware comparison to that NT4. We all already know and admit that everything before OS X sucks. We dont need to be reminded. And, again, if you were talking about OS X, stop. You can't make legit comments on OS X sucking if you're not running it on recommended hardware.
Did I just get hooked by a troll?
What the hell is a 'finder' ? I don't use Mac OSX and never used MacOS, but I constantly see people talking about the 'finder' I am very curious what is it? I use GNOME, so if you could related it to a feature of that maybe I would understand better.
The author isn't saying that it sucks, just that from a usability point of view he believes that earlier Mac OS versions (Mac OS <= 9) were better.
Apple has (arguably) one of the best UIs around, the author is simply saying that they could do better. The article is a list of stuff that could be done to improve what's already there.
Stupid User.
See the finder?
See the 3 buttons above the word "View"?
Click the 3rd button.
Click the date column.
You could run BeOS on that 8600 and really see how fast it can go.
-- Boycott Shell
how many times is this EXACT post going to be made before people stop responding to it? this is an ancient troll folks... move along.
and how the hell did it get moderated informative?
i'm the jedidiahmarkfoster your parents warned you about
I don't know why people on both sides of the MAC vs WIntel debate are always tring to compair based on what X Mac does vs what Y PC does when X Mac costs $5000 and Y PC costs $2000. MacAdict had a laughable coverstory allong the lines of "Mac beats Windows in performance" and when you read it it turned out they were compairing $7k and $10k Macs to two $2k PCs (a Dell and a Gateway). People should be saying, "I really like my computer and use it all the time, that's why it is better than yours." Then, they respect eachother's opinions since both poeple can be right. Of course both camps are wrong, GNU/Linux is the way to go 8-)
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
The Finder is basically a file manager. Coming from a GNOME perspective, you could think of it as performing the same role as Nautilus, or gmc before that.
Yes, it'd be nice if the Mac market was a little larger. However, the Mac market is more tightly knit and word of new, cool, and useful software travels quickly.
When Konfabulator came out, I had three different people tell me about it. I've told several people about WeatherPop, and they've downloaded and used it. Same with NetNewsWire, Fire, and Watson. Because of the fewer Mac titles, there's less competition, too.
Actually, a smaller market share means fewer potential competitors
Congratulations!! You have the most idiotic post of the day! If there are 1,000 mac users and 10 mac vendors then there are 100 users per vendor. If there are 20,000 PC users and 200 PC vendors then there are 100 users per vendor. Obviously this is a simplified example but having a smaller customer base does not decrease competition.
I tried to read the first 3 pages but there were
no pictures. How can an article like have have no pics (at least in the first 3 pages).
I got one good reason, a great reason really. How about years and years on the net and not getting owned, or even having to take any special precautions? Never having your hardware bork on you? Being able to use any decent app you download without jumping through huge hoops or having it destroy something else? Getting any peripheral that says "works with a mac" and then by golly it works.
Besides that, that does seem like an excessively long time to copy that file. I don't ever recall anything like that happening to me. Now transferring from one machine to another with a printer cable, serial to serial, yes, 56k speed limitation, but on the hard drive? Something else is going on, and I can't tell you what it is. Maccentral forum question there for a more expert opinion wouldn't hurt for you.
With that said, old classic mac OS you had to set your memory by hand, I have found the default limits are always too low, it's like tiny cans of soup that say "serves four", it's just not realistic. Bump up your total RAM, max it out completely, and go around and up your application memory allotments, and only set virtual to existing physical RAM plus one meg.
Oh, the browser, don't use netscape, nyet, nein, nej, non, nope, use iCab instead, you'll be amazed how much faster it is and it uses a lot less system resources. On my much older mac than yours, only a 166 speed same 64 meg RAM, I can listen to mp3 streams (low bitrate but still live) from a net radio station and still surf adequately with iCab and using soundjam for the player, but if I switch to netscape I can't,or worse, netscape and quicktime, yech, that's a bad combo for system resource hogging. It makes that much difference picking better quality applications. And if you don't need all the features for a project that bbedit lite has, use textedit plus instead. Any time you can use a more efficient app when you are trying to multi task the better with classic OS, just is, is all.
Yes.
20 minutes for a 17 MB file? Duh, it's called lying.
The filesystems used by OS X are the same ones that have been used by OS 9 for years, with the recent addition of journalling. Apple have employed the designer of the BeOS filesysem (which is widely held up as the best example of a desktop filesystem) and is keeping everything under wraps for Panther. I would expect some developments in this area to be revealed in July.
Once the meta data is in place, and people have moved over to the new filesystem, look for a more intelligent finder.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
Everything the author said would make life using a Mac easier, more productive and significantly more intuitive.
Watch out, someone might be moving your cheese.
That article was from the summer of 1997.
Perhaps OSX can take a page from the X world and to think of the interface more as a component and less as an integral part of the OS (skin the OS if you will). It would be better than the X world currently is since the "default" Apple interface would rule since most people wouldn't bother to make any substantial changes. But for those "power" users, they can either tweak it themselves or use someone elses "video editing power user interface".
The difference between this and what some people already offer would be on Apple's end. Trying to make a very good desktop alternative is often difficult because it becomes too much of a monumental task to become a true replacement. And if your app just sits on top of the original gui, often times there are many things you either can't do, or can do but in a kludgey way. If the powers that be at Apple sat down and thought of a way to provide hooks into the gui (as well as the most important thing, to make sure that functionality is separated from the gui), then doing these types of things could be much simpler as well as providing a viable market for alternative interfaces.
All 8600-class machines had 2 SCSI buses: a 5MB/sec external bus and a 10MB/sec internal bus. The same holds true for the 7x00-class machines, and I think the 9x00s too.
Also, notice that the OP said that his PPro 200 was faster. That's *also* 8 years old or whatever. It's not like he's comparing the 8600 to an Athlon XP w/ SATA.
Even though you were completely wrong about everything you said, we appreciate the effort. Thanks for playin.
Love,
Slashdot
Isn't it swell that we can all imagine a perfect world? By COMPARISON, OS X has (IMHO) the quickest, simplest, and most elegant 'finder' [aka GUI] available today. All systems out there could stand some improvement, and while criticism of the sort can be constructive, wouldn't it be better to illustrate improvements rather than point out flaws?
Just as irrigation is the lifeblood of the Southwest, lifeblood is the soup of cannibals. -- Jack Handy
About the sluggishness of the screen redraws and interctivity, I agree.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
BeOS didn't support the 604 series of CPUs. It only ran on the 603s.
Did anyone read the article and think, that with the exception of saved searches and popup folders, that they're describing nautilus?
Really, the latest from debian unstable is very very good. very good.
Wow.. Still there? why do ou always post this mindless flame every time an apple story gets posted?
I think i`ll have to point out that my old amiga a1500 could transfer said 17meg file with no problems ,wut your saying at 16mhz 68000? Yup i`ll say,and if memory servs thats pre 1995.
I for one understand it, and I can't wait until a version of NTFS comes out that steals the idea. :) Well, either that or an x86 port of Jaguar.
In the Finder, press CMD-K and up pops a nice network mounting interface that shows local SMB as well as Apple servers. Way simpler than Chooser. And it actually makes sense, unlike the overloaded Chooser which was meant to choose printers back when people had, say, two choices.
Funny, Bill G doesn't seem to have wiped the floor with Unix from my perspective. I haven't used Windows for anything but games since at least 1995. Why? Because *nicies (*nixes) are musch more usable.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
...why is this article in white print on a black background? ... There's a reason books and newspapers are printed in black print on a white background: IT'S EASIER TO READ.
A person who can't hold a job can always make a living as a career coach.
I think it is definitely because of the fact that Apple is known for/touts the UI in its products. More specifically though, people pay a high premium to get the Mac UI, and are therefore less forgiving of its faults.
OS X should handle the iPhoto Library folder (where all iPhoto JPEG images are stored) like it handles Application bundles -- instead of showing the directory structure uncut and raw, it should display the photos in an easily-navigable format. The "Live Search" feature could be useful in this regard, as OS X could have a live search folder that contains all iPhoto pictures, or possibly variations like "all photos within the last month" or "all photos within the last year". This would make it easier to peruse one's photo collection, as you wouldn't need to fire up iPhoto every time you just wanted to look at your photos. It would also make it easier to have your rotating Desktop backgrounds show your entire photo collection.
I know that the "all photos in one folder" feature could be accomplished at the command prompt by running "find ~/Pictures/iPhoto\ Library/* -type f -print0 | xargs -0i ln -s {} destination ", but it would be nice to have it automatically done for you by the Finder.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
I'm still waiting for how a WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST promotes peace in the Middle East.
Honestly, I'm amazed by how little I even use the Finder in OS X. I use LaunchBar to launch all my applications (and about a million other things). I use the terminal or Project Builder to edit single text files. iPhoto to organize my pictures. iTunes to search through MP3s. locate to, well, find things. When I'm tabbing around between apps, Finder is usually one of the last things on the list. The main time I seem to use the Finder is to manage my downloaded files, or drag some new app from a disk image into the Applications folder.
It seems like a lot of the functionality that the Finder used to handle is now taken care of by indiviual, specialized apps, that know more about the files in question than the Finder does (i.e. MP3 tags, photo import batch, etc) and can manipulate the files better using that information.
In OS 9, the Finder was indispensible. In OS X, it has really become just another app. An interface for examining file system contents, dragging files around, and opening files and applications. But unlike OS 9 days, it's hard to think of much that the Finder does that can't be done using some other method. More options is a good thing.
Not to say that the Finder couldn't be improved. Maybe its pokiness and poor design is what has prompted so many to use alternative methods. But, I'm happy when the Finder just stays out of my way, which it does quite well now.
You drank my drink, you drunk!
You know, slashdot has very specific reasons for not caching web pages, ranging from bandwidth usage to the fact that a page might update in the middle of a slashdotting.
Shifting the bandwidth usage onto Sourceforge, in particular, seems a bit dumb - they are run by the same company. If Slashdot can't financially justify caching, what makes you think SourceForge can.
Oh, and I'd note that ars technica is not one that's going to get slashdotted anytime soon :)
Huh? Of course you can list by date:
Open finder. View->As List, or OpenApple-2, click 'Date Modified'.
There you go.
caleb
-- caleb
One of the things the article mentions are live search folders--basically folders comprised of an pregenerated search result (for which the index is automaticly updated).
This allows you to have different views of your existing data to separate the physical location from what you actually want.
Microsoft Outlook 2003 includes these search folders in it now. For example, you can have a search folder for all unread items in all folders. So if you have rules that filter your incoming mail to various foldes, you can just go to the search folder to see all unread items--and then mark them all as read there rather than having to select mark all as read for each folder.
If you want to have access to all email pertaining to a particular project, you can create a search folder to do so. The actual messages might be in your read and sent folders, and perhaps even in other public shared folders, but they'd all appear in your search folder.
Given how useful it is for Outlook, I can't imagine how useful it'd be for an entire filesystem.
Something tells me that this will be possbile in Longhorn with the new WinFS filesystem based on Yukon. It certainly will be interesting.
To quote from the article:
Even the seemingly chaotic and messy act of "drilling down" to a deeply nested file using the Spatial Finder, double-clicking one folder after another and spawning windows like crazy, can be accomplished with comparatively little conscious thought. The user finds his way using visual cues (reinforced by the coherency and stability of the Spatial Finder) rather than by rote memorization of file paths. In the same way that you might drive a familiar route without knowing all the street names or exit numbers, the Spatial Finder user might not know the actual path of the file on disk. But like the driver, the user does not need to know all the names of the places along the way. He only needs to know where he is, and how to get there from here. In a non-spatial system, users must remember "addresses." The Spatial Finder enables users to remember locations.
Now, there is a problem with spatial locations. Specifically, I can't remember the location of EVERY HOUSE AND BUILDING IN THE F*CKING CITY. Given that I have 100GB on line, in 60,000+ documents, and piles more on tape, I can't remember each file. What I do is give each of these and ADDRESS, just like my house has an ADDRESS. We have directories (on-line and off-line) that let us retrieve the location given the address. In other words, to manage larger pieces of data, people resort to EXACTELY the scheme that OSX uses (and most other modern GUIs). Also, addresses can be manipulated symbolically. If I know the library location of a book I am interested in (in the card catalog -- another fine example), I can look for other related material.Kind of demolishes the rest of the argument.
I do wonder if some people just can't reason symbolically. If so, there should be computer (and other) interfaces for them. As to light switches, etc., switches are ok, but if you are in a large building, -or- wish to automate, you need some form of symbolic addressing for the switches. A hierarchy then makes sense (assume lights/ac/sprinklers). And you're back to paths.
So, people who CAN'T deal with the "path" interfaces should have the "direct" option, but its their own problem when trying to deal with complexity.
Ratboy
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Windows vendors generate the same $10,000 in revenue, but only clear 8% profit (or even less, in many cases), because of a crowded and much more competitive environment (ie, competitive pressures among 200 vendors than 10 vendors is a very differenct competitive landscape). Therefore, the PC vendors each generates only $800 of profit from the same $10,000 of revenue. That is why Gateway and Apple can have similar revenue lines but vastly different returns and cash reserves (eg, Gateway is bankrupt and Apple is flush with cash). That is why the MacBU at Microsoft is one of the most profitable centers for MS. It is an important reason why Mercedes and BMW are so profitable, but GM and Ford struggle. Being small and addressing a smaller market can be a much better strategy than being all things to all people.
Renaming files: There is a delay in renaming that makes me crazy. I'll click on a file and it won't go into the rename unless I wait a moment and click again.
There is no undo for renaming. If I accidentally rename a file, I have to find the file (not easy with numbered files), find out what the original name was (could take a few minutes to never) and manually rename it. I want 'apple-z' to undo the rename. (It works for copy, paste and other finder operations.)
There is a delay in the update of windows after a file has been renamed and/or saved. This also shifts the files viewable up or down so that when I go to click on the next one, I click on the file that has somehow magically appeared under my cursor. Most annoying.
Copy/replace dialogs: There is information missing from these, that I could use to make my decision of whether or not to replace that file/s. Where is the date? It just gives me 'newer'.
Collumn view: No viewing by date, size, or anything but name. It's there in the other 'views', why can't I have it here?
Save Dialogs: Same with collumn view. I hated how the old os9 save dialog (think pagemaker - grr.) would pop up and be immovable - invaribly, I needed some info that was immediately under that window. Let me move it. Let me sort the contents by date, size, name.
Labels: If you haven't used labels, you have no idea what you missed out on. Putting a colored cast to an icon was about the most useful thing I had ever seen. I used it extensively in the short time before I moved to OS X. Now the labels are gone, still visible in some os9 apps, but unused by OS X. Nothing would allow me to find a folder in a sea of blue like one with a red sheen to it.
In fact, icons were easier to maipulate in os9 than X. It seemed I could take anything and make an icon out of it, whereas X requires more forethought and a concerted effort. This may be different now; I've stopped trying.
Pop-up folders were swell, however I don't miss them like the labels.
Lastly, Unresponsiveness and Instabillity: The Finder likes to sit for a moment and think about how it's going to perform the operation you told it to do. Copy the file, already. You've done it a million times, and you're wondering how this one is different? (pardon my anthromorphising). Recently, I had to ftp several thousand jpgs, and had to do it at home on my windows machine, since the finder choked at the prospect. "You want me to do what? Uh. I'm busy that weekend..."
Mac users should know that my widows machine said nothing, but did the requested operation with no flair at all, of course.
Apple *should* incorporate some of these features (LABELS!); they have years of a great user interface to build on. They have already impressed the hell out of me with OS X, it just needs some polishing.
Please add your thoughts.
Or perhaps the GUI is the right thing to use, and we have the we have the wrong people developing GUI's.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
who needs finder when you have... the console :)
Maybe not. If you think there are 10 mac vendors and 200 PC vendors, then you don't really know how much crap is available for the Windows market...
But seriously, I can remember from my youth, that being an Atari developer in a small Poland country (which is where I live) was really pleasant and easy - because of lack of competition... I was able to earn some real money (to buy more developer tools...) despite the fact, that Atari had a minor marketshare in Poland, maybe less than Apple today, and mostly in home-user market, not in lucrative creative market, as Apple.
Did you happen to get permission to host that article from Ars? I don't think so. I never gave that permission, nor did the author.
I know what you're doing is with good intentions, but our server is running just fine, and what you're essentially doing is hurting our business because mirroring this document without our permissions removes our ability to see important stats about the article's readers. We kinda need that info if we're going to continue to provide free content.
disguised as serious UI theory. Look, the moment the guy writes:
Labels - Like the feature introduced in System 7, but extensible, and with support for different scopes (e.g. globally visible labels, user-specific labels, etc.) The ability to "colorize" icons is a natural extension of the Spatial Finder, providing a quick visual cue for metadata that would otherwise have to be read as a text.
he loses credibility. Not because labels are a bad thing, they're a good thing, and I'd like to have them too, along with other metadata improvements; but labels have no connection whatsoever with the spatial metaphor he's talking about in his "spatial finder" rant: one does not normally label a doorknob.
The article suffers from that tendency in reasoning called "saving the phenomena" - he wants to come up with a catchall argument that explains why OS 9's finder was better than OS X's, damnit, and he'll do any rhetorical gymnastics he has to in order to fit every missing feature of OS 9 into the argument. Anything he says that goes beyond OS 9 is basically just a linear improvement on OS 9, like an OS 10 might have been, rather than a NeXT operating system.
Too bad, as I would love to see a good, original article on improving the UI.
Another victim of interface fundamentalism. A few decent points, but for the most part the guy sounds like he just wants his OS9 back. Rather disappointing; his articles are usually much more... hmm, how to put it... independent than this.
Look. Spatial orientation is a good paradigm. It is not, however, the be-all and end-all of interface design. This appears to be something that Tog and his apostles have yet to understand. There is a better way. I don't claim to know what it is; it's possible that it might not have even been discovered yet. But there's always a better way, and rather than slavishly imitating older designs we should be working to find newer ones.
The whole interesting thing about NeXT is that they managed to create a non-spatial interface paradigm that actually worked well. For all the theory behind spatial orientation being so much faster, it just doesn't hold up in the real world. In the end, they're basically equal, with each paradigm having its own advantages and disadvantages, but it all comes out in the wash. That's the interesting thing about the human mind: theory is good, but reality often breaks the rules. Would it be nice if the Finder actually remembered window positions and icons in a consistent manner? Yes, it would; it's rather convenient. I wouldn't mind seeing this fixed in OSX's finder, if it can be done in a manner that doesn't cripple its speed. But that's all it is: a convenience; there's nothing to show that it actually precipitates a fundamental, universal improvement in performance or usability.
Labels: Worse than useless, at least in the incarnation we know from OS9. Better systems can be devised, as the myriad workflow tools in existence have shown us.
Recordability: OK, touche on this one. I don't use AppleScript much myself, but recordability is a Very Good Thing in terms of convenience.
The "Finder Browser": I oppose the name pretty strongly, if only because it would likely spread the meme-virus common to Windows and the Linux desktop environments that the file manager and Web browser should be intertwined in the same app. Other than that, what I'd like to see, if Column View is taken out of the Finder, is an option to use it in place of the Finder, not just as a complement. It's a different paradigm, but for many people it's better, and so it should be able to replace the old.
Live Searches: Interesting, but I don't think these should be part of the Finder, per se. Don't make them folders; make them documents. Siracusa was wondering how to make them visually distinct from folders, and this would be the best way. Double-click, and it opens a new window, visually distinct from the Finder windows (and thus providing another contextual clue). The results are then displayed in a list format; since this is "non-spatial" there's no advantage to icon view and plenty of disadvantages, such as wasted screen space. In the space it takes to display twelve items arranged in a square for icon view, you could display 25 items or more in a list. That ability to see more items at once easily supercedes the advantage to icon-esque views, given the purpose of such searches.
Finder Plugins: These actually exist in OSX. They're very poorly documented, and almost no one knows about them; the only one I've ever seen was for viewing AppleWorks word-processing documents in the Finder.
Metadata: Hellz yeah. Metadata is a Great Thing, and needs to be used more extensively in OSX, not less.
OSX's lack of support for metadata: Um, OSX does support metadata. The problem is, as is the case with most of Apple's best stuff, there's no documentation on it, leaving developers out in the cold.
As a final note: with a Unix system, it isn't possible to achieve the one-to-one relationships between icons and files seen in OS9 and such. You can do it with windows and folders, which seems to be Siracusa's main beef, but it's impossible with icons and files, which may be equally impor
We have several folders on our main webserver that contain several thousand files and folders, and OS X always craps out trying to browse through it. This doesn't happen with local files.
This includes some save dialogs, such as Photoshop's, making OS X very difficult to use on our network. We resorted to making symlinks, based on the first letter of the directory names, into separate folders. eg. `folder2/b' would contain symlinks to everything in `folder' starting with `b'...
Note, this is not a network problem, it is strictly with finder. Using the command line to view the files is not noticably slower than the local filesystem.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
google has permissions to cache content? proxy runners have permissions to cache content? mostly, no.
Live search folders? Arbitrary file-system meta-data? Come back to me Be!
Why not fork?
If you've been writing portable code, it shouldn't be that hard. The dev environment's included for free and for simple ports you don't need top of the line hardware. What kind of software are you porting over?
good point.
and me without my mod points. oh well, guess you'll have to be satisfied with this little reply.
I wanted to read that article. Something about the Spacial Interface. Incredibly less convincing when it's such a pain to read at all.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
Duplo blocks are much easier to use than, say, technic building toys, spatially speaking:
Duplo fit the hands of the children using them, they are brightly colored, and they are simple shapes yielding a simple building experience.
Technic has parts that aren't even blocks. They are difficult to handle by the hands of the kids that use them because the parts can be much smaller than fingers (springs, bands, gears). The parts available for building are complex and frequently unintuitive.
So which is better, Duplo or Technic? I think Technic since you can't really do anything remotely creative or useful with Duplo unless you are a toddler.
But there aren't any characters in technic with happy smiles, that make you feel warm and fuzzy inside, like in Duplo. Yeah, sadly, there are no stupid smiley faces on non-mac computers to let you know that the computer feels warm and fuzzy inside either.
Grow up and start using the big boy toys.
the Drag and Drop. yes, drag and drop is an art in Mac OS and in X you can drag any file onto any app running or not, to launch said file. it works like a champ. grab ten jpegs and drop them onto Photoshop, boom! grab a file with no extension and a blank icon, drag onto stuffit expander and that .tgzipped doc from some solaris developer's package magically unzips.
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
Not a real mac fan anymore, used to, heck I started on a Mac 6116CD, and it was fun. In 2001 after a long time into pcs decided to get another iMac was nice, just not as functional as I presumed. Mac OS x was on, tried it and liked it. The problem is that is kinda slow, also the finder is in need of speed, and some usability. I think they are like 2 years away from that, hopefully. I still use my IBM iSerrie 117-4MU and some old emachines, and I rather like them then the iMac.
In particular, the navigational model has a few things going for it. Firstly, people have already been forced into it by the spread of the web. One of the most, if not THE most popular apps in usage today is the web browser. The web is clearly a navigational model, the browser is a viewport onto a small segment of the whole, with links between them. Clicking a link does not open a new window, and there is no enforced relationship between the website and the window. The concept of the "path" is forced onto the user via URLs, and the current path is constantly shown in a prominant place.
In the OO model of course, you are only allowed to have one window showing a folder at any point - opening it from somewhere else simply raises the window to the top.
Nonetheless, I have yet to find people who consider web browsers to be seriously confusing. The "spatial" model ties in with the physical world, but we deal just as much with the navigational model in the the real world as well, think TV/radio channels for instance.
I think he also misses the fact that mental modelling is not an absolute - it can and must fit in with other considerations. The OO model may well be more spatial and perhaps more natural, but it has other problems as well, like the fact that you can easily end up with many small windows open at once. In the absence of any equivalent to the taskbar, such a thing always irritated me in MacOS 9. When you do have a taskbar of course, OO browsing simply fills it up very quickly making it useless.
Not even virtual desktops can solve that problem. Virtual desktops of course have questionable usability in the first place, but in fact I've NEVER met anybody who disliked them, not even really green newbies. Virtual desktops make OO browsing even harder, because you can only have 1 window open at once for any given folder, if you open one, windows start jumping around from different desktops (unless you want to lock them together or place the window on multiple desktops at once - yuck!).
As an example of where breaking reality might be faster than sticking religiously to an OO model, imagine for a moment you have X-Men style super powers. You want to retrieve a piece of paper, that is in a box, in drawer, in a cupboard. Which is faster, opening the cupboard, pulling out the drawer, taking out and opening the box, getting the piece of paper and then putting it all away again, or using X-Ray vision to find the paper with the power of your mind, then kinetically pull it through the walls of the cupboard to sit in front of you?
A poor analogy, I'll admit, but what usability reviews often miss is that in return for some breakage of the mental model, you can get large increases in efficiency. Virtual desktops might well be unnatural, but once you get used to them you don't want to go back, no matter what your skill level is - perhaps people who'd never seen them before would get confused, but for everybody else the usability is enhanced, not decreased.
I guess I should qualify that this doesn't mean I'm in the "lots of crack preferences" camp a la Mosfet and the gang, I mean each feature should be weighed carefully for its cost in usability loss to newbies vs the increase in usability once you have understood the system.
You will also note that Evolution has vFolders. And yes, combining this capability with a database-like filesystem (ReiserFS) and Enlightenment 17, and Linux will go a long way toward usability.
When AOL's proxy servers go down, they take the internet with it, making the typical Slashdot effect seem like a mild inconvenience.
I'm positive Ars has a large readership on AO...
er, nevermind.
y
A few things to remember.
Monitors work by Additive colour sources (RGB).
Paper works by Subtractive colour sources (CMYK).
The contrast ratio on monitors is higher than on regular newsprint. This is one of the reasons that I find black text on a white background hard to read. In fact at small font sizes I find white on black easier to read.
Redhat's man pages are coloured for black on white now making my man pages impossible to read with my default black backgrounds, side note anyone know how to turn this off?
This is a very long-winded article with many rants, and little substance.
;)
In essence:
1. Macs rule
2. OS X sucks
3. OS 9 is the shiznit
The author describes what he/she wants. Which is fine. But a little organization on the users part goes a long way towards making things easier. UNIX is very particular in how it wants things placed. There is good reason for this; it makes things run faster and more reliably. Mac people understand this when talking about a visual interface (continuity) yet are absolutely against it when it comes to organizing files/folders. Why? Just because you have always done something one way, does not make it the best way to do it. Nor is changing it somthing else always the best way to do it. UNIX was designed by people who demand organization and intelligence; in short, it was designed by engineers. Not the 'software engineers' of today, but good old fashioned classicly trained pencil and paper engineers. They don't employ hacks, they do it the right way. The only way. The best way. Maybe not _all_ that, but they try. The people that make the decisions at Apple have seen the simplistic beauty of all of this. What worked in 1987 with 20-80MB of data is not the best way to do things in 2003 with 60-120GB of data that many people have to try to manipulate. Apple noticed that. Most of their "old school" users have not. If people can't make the jump from OS 9 to OS X, then keep using 9. Just don't bitch that Apple is no longer going to sell new hardware that supports OS 9. If OS X _needs_ to be fixed, than fix it yourself. If you can't, then learn. If you don't want to learn, and you want to bitch, then fine. Just don't expect compassion from the community for much longer. You can always try to get a job with Quark.
As to all the spatial stuff... geez! You want Safari to be your hard disk browser with a few flashy additions. Akin to Konqueror on KDE (hard disk and internet browser). To the author I say; "start coding."
Did you happen to get permission to host that article from Ars?
Yes, from the U.S. government. A rider to the DMCA permits caching online content without the permission of the copyright owner in some cases.
Will I retire or break 10K?
would be the Tracker from BeOS.
Well, maybe not in overall UI terms, but in terms of file management, it rocks. it's really nice to be able to search my hard drives for all mp3's from 1980-1989 excluding any from the Genre hair metal.
of course, that has more to do with the underlying filesystem than with the trakcer itself. hopefully finder will be able to do those kinds of filesystem acrobatics when dominic giampaolo is done hacking on hfs+.
my pet machine
Furthermore, as astute readers have already figured out, the shelf eliminates any need for the perversion of interface metaphors that is the use of copy and paste for files. The "Edit -> Copy File" command now becomes "File -> Place on Shelf", and the "Edit -> Paste File" command now splits into two commands, "File -> Copy from Shelf" and "File -> Move from Shelf", making it more powerful that copy/paste (since "cut" is not an option) in addition to being more sane and consistent with the rest of the UI.
Why the hostility? The "Cut" feature is practically the only thing from Windows that I miss in OS X. It's annoying to not be able to move files in OS X without dragging. Often you know you want to move some files, but say you get to the destination and want to make a new folder for them. This is incredibly annoying to do with OS X, but would be way easier with keyboard Cut as well as Copy/Paste.
What is the down side to having a "Cut"? I assume there's some usability study that shows users messing up more with Cut around. But I find this hard to believe. Cut and Paste to a hidden clipboard is so ingrained in computer users that introducing an explicit "shelf" makes things more, not less complicated. In fact, OS X is going in the opposite direction... nowadays you can cut and paste almost everything to a hidden clipboard and it tries to sort out what you meant (e.g. copy a file and paste it into a text editor, or drag a file onto a terminal window).
You can get an OS X version of the shelf mentioned (a kind of visible clipboard) at XShelf today. I have it around as a kludge for moving files more easily. But it would all be solved by having a "Cut" option as well as Copy and Paste.
- Eric
This sounds like a statement from an Apple developers guide... "Why should YOU develop software for the Macintosh platform?"
The sad thing is that people have come up with this argument because they've basically accepted defeat. Apple will never gain a larger market share if the developers decide they're doing it for the non-existant competition!! Competition is generally a good thing because it keeps you on your toes and makes your products better. Why else do you think that many Apple software titles are often subpar compared to the PC offerings?
They should consider keeping ads intact, though...
Me email iz skyewalkerluke at microsoft's free email service.
I went to the article to find out what exactly these wonderful modest proposals for the finder were...and I gave up after four pages. I've got a to-do list that doesn't spare me enough time to read such exhausting prose.
Why not put the new wonderful ideas for the finder FIRST, then spend the rest of the dictionary defending/supporting them?
Apple in the beginning was obsessed with the details. And this matters because the structure behind the details was right.
So what is wrong? Finder windows.
In OS 10, the finder windows could be open in the background and they would update live and pretty damn soon! you could organize them so that the most recently added or updated windows listed their files at the top of the window, a godsend if you had a window you (or someone else) were saving files to.
What happens now? If the window is open, you must click on the/a file to see the contents update and reorder themselves. Damn useless if you ask me.
What is equally as bad is the new columnar windows with support for long filenames. You can not individually drag the columns to make long filenames fit AND you can not sort the contents be "most recently" modified.
Also, finder window contents are not remembered unless the window is closed, so setting a window to list view and then opening another folder within that window FORGETS the settings you just gave it. Infuriating to have this happen with every window. Makes you want to use the old finder window system since that actually remembered what you told it!
Sure, OS X doesn't crash like the Mac OSes before it but usability of several areas has taken a SERIOUS hit.
What is worse is support for samba (windows) shares. If the contents of a window have changed on the share you have visible, you must remount the volume and repoen the window to see the new contents!
I'm a mac user since 1985 and my g3 266 booted to OS 8.5 seems to act crisper than my 1G Ti with regards to UI responsiveness.
In some ways, it feels like OS X is a user hostile unix command like with a sluggish gui tacked on.
It's hard to like a new IU like this when whenever asked to comment about it, your comments turn into a bitch session. Makes you wonder if apple's engineers are really wondering about the details.
I am sad.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
One of my half-baked ideas for a Finder enhancement (that may or may not be able to survive the transition to fully baked), would be to somehow integrate the Finder and Terminal applications into a single user interface.
When accomplishing a task, it is sometimes more convenient to use the Finder's graphical user interface. Other, generally more complicated, tasks require the use of the Terminal's CLI. To perfrom a sequence of tasks, I often find myself switching back and forth between one or more Finder and Terminal instances to get the job done. If the two applications were combined into one, the transition between GUI-oriented work and CLI-oriented work would not be as mentally disconcerting. In addition, the strengths of both approaches could be combined to offset their weaknesses.
The Terminal would be embedded in the Finder as a splitter pane above or below the graphical view of the file system (according to user preference). The working directory of the Terminal could either be linked to automatically update during point-and-click navigation through folders or decoupled with a sync-to-current location button provided to update the Terminal's working directory. Special "pipeable" objects would be provided to redirect the results of Terminal commands to the current GUI view.
Here is a simple example to illustrate this:
1.) The user opens a new Finder window and navigates to a folder using the GUI.
2.) The user types a command in the embedded Terminal: ls *.log | FinderView.
3.) The results of the command are piped to the Finder's current view and presented graphically.
Obviously, there are many issues that would have to be resolved to make all of this work properly, but I think it would be worth the effort to create a hybrid CLI/GUI Finder-like application.
I was surprised to see the request for "live search" folders. This seems to me like an advanced feature that novices won't know how (or want) to use, and most people will have only one of them. And, I think it would complicate the Finder's interface.
The behavior he describes for search results is pretty much exactly the same as what you already get with the Search Results window. I think the idea of saving search criteria is just fine - I doubt I'd use it much myself, but as he said, some people want this feature, and I can understand that. Fine - add a "Save Criteria" button to a search results window (so you can save the results AFTER searching, to make sure your criteria are what you want before saving). It would be nice to be able to drag something out of the window onto the Desktop or into a Finder window as well, like I can drag the icon to the left of the address bar from my web browser to save a bookmark of the page I'm on. Wouldn't be difficult to do.
I completely agree with his view of the file browser. There was an old shareware app called Greg's Browser, by the same guy who made Kaleidoscope, which was a column-based file browser exactly like what we're talking about here. It was a seperate application, and the (spatial) Finder was still there, and there could be no confusion between the two. The Mac OS X Finder needs to abandon the notion that any window may be toggled between spatial (icon or list view) and browser (column view). A browser window should be a different kind of window that can only be a browser window. Double-clicking a folder in a browser window should open that folder in the spatial Finder. A contextual menu item, toolbar button and keyboard shortcut in a spacial Finder window should open a new browser window (or with a modifier, reuse an existing browser window) with the current folder or file selected.
It should not be possible to open the Desktop folder in the spatial Finder, because it's already open on the Desktop. No reason you shouldn't be able to open it in a file browser though.
I like the shelf idea, and I agree that copy/pasting files needs to go away. Not sure about the implementation though.
Definitely like the idea of view plugins; Windows XP does some interesting things with views. Again, not entirely sure about the best implementation. I believe XP chooses the view based on the contents it detects. XP also reserves part of the window space to show information about the selected item(s); the Mac uses a column for this in column view.
Overall, he's got a lot of good points, and interesting ideas. Sadly, I have little faith that Apple will do the right thing. I hope they surprise me.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
"We kinda need that info if we?re going to continue to provide free content. "
selling user information should be a crime
have a shit fit y don't you
The Open/Save dialogs.
Under Win2K I can do the following in the open/save dialogs:
* Customize my view style (icon, list, etc)
* Filter visible files by my own criteria
* Directly manipulate (move, rename, delete, etc)
* Right click to do things like compress the file before choosing it
* Sort by other than name
* type first letter to jump to file
* quickly see where in the hierarchy I am all at once
These are not trivial features but they would be trivial for Apple to implement.
Too confusing for the neophyte? Give us an expert mode, please.
Syntax error: loose != lose, affect != effect, then!=than
Mostly you are complaining about an adobe problem specifically, not a mac problem. And if the older app is working, not a lot of reasons to switch, is there? There's some reasons, but you can still run the older apps on newer faster equipment. The RAM part is real, macs have always needed maxed out ram to be efficient, or "more" efficient, makes all the difference in the world, and then tweaking your memory management, ie "learning more than the basics". You'll still have problems, so what? All computers, operating systems, applications have problems, ALL of them.
And sure, it had negative aspects to the classic OS, I'd admit that readily, but so what? It had and has both, overall all things considered it was a decent OS. Like I said, years and years on the net, no nothing but running the stock OS, never got owned, watched my friends deal with broken computers, broken this, viruses, getting owned and trojaned, getting this or that,and setting irqs to get something to work? huh? I used to think what the heck is that and why do you need to set it? My windows friends were always complaining about that and some "corrupt registry" and what not I never even knew or cared much about. oh, but they saved a hundred dollars or two hundred, well, so they did, then they spent hours every week fixing busted stuff. And stuff like that there. Me, nada, never happened. Buy a printer, stick it on, it worked, buy a cam, stick it on, it worked, buy a modem, stick it on it worked, yada, yada, yada, do this or that, worked. Once in a while a bomb, sure, MOSTLY with netscape that I recall. That's just personal anecdotal but it's true, too.
I've found people with lots of problems (any computer) tend to not really learn their system, just a few applications. big mistake, IMO. Some computer users are like that, and it doesn't matter what OS they are using. You can't compare geeks or near geeks, the step above a raw user, with "application drivers", on any platform or machine. "Application drivers" are classed as low level users, nothing much more than that, even if they sit in front of a screen all day at work with a computer,do it for years, and they rarely learn to do anything different or really make an effort to get the most out of their machines. Just is reality, it's not a put down or anything like that to anyone, and it'sd always applied to all OSes and still does today.
I also see the parent post was a troll, oh well, thought I'd drop a few tips, I run linux and mac classic, I like both for different reasons, and NO way do I get rid of old mac hardware, whereas any generic peecee running anything I have no problems with selling/giving away, getting new. With macs, I save them, buy a newer one once in awhile. It's because.... I dunno, just like them way more than any normal gadget you might buy.
And so many other mac people are like that there's something to it. If you don't get it, or don't agree, it doesn't mean anything, it's no biggee to anyone else.
OS X has (IMHO) the quickest, simplest, and most elegant 'finder' [aka GUI] available today.
The point of the article is that your statement is true only because Mac OS 9 is no longer available.
Will I retire or break 10K?
fuck you
I admit that I found Mac OS X's finder very confusing when I switched to it. Two things that drove me crazy were:
:-)
1) Having my documents folder 4-5 levels deep.
In OS 9 my documents were only two to three levels deep at most.
2) The whole "group" system of domain organization.
Fonts, applications, documents, and settings can be set up to be used just by certain people. This is a fantastic improvement over Mac OS 9 where everyone had universal access to the disk. Sure there are ways to break this security but the organization this provides on a multi-user box was badly needed. Unfortunately, it's a major shift from the way things were done in Mac OS 9 and it's not the easiest thing to learn. I've heard more than a few users ask "Where do I put my fonts? there are four different font folders!" But having different domains is pretty simple once you get the hang of it. Apple tried to implement domains in previous Mac systems with products like At Ease and Simple Finder but had horrible problems because Mac OS was single-user system.
The Simple Finder in Mac OS 9 got a horrible reputation because it used "behind the scenes" trickery to force apps to save, open, and navigate just to the special areas that it was showing the user. It was slow and it often caused an app to break because it expected to be operating on a single-user system with universal disk access.
In Mac OS X, the Simple Finder is much friendlier and more permissive in what it allows you and your apps to do (since Mac OS X is a multiuser system). It does some of the things that John wants his "spatial finder" and even though it uses "behind the scenes" trickery to give a different view to the user. It doesn't have the same problems that older Mac OS's did because the system and applications already know how to deal with multiple users on a controlled access file system.
My mom might think it odd that ls in terminal is different from the folder organization she sees in the Simple Finder, but as long as it doesn't confuse the shell scripts and apps she uses she probably doesn't care.
For the power-users, I think there current Finder is about 70% there. For novice users, I think the Simple Finder is about 90% there.
While I think it might be a cool idea for Apple or a third party to come out with a Less Simple Finder, I think what John is really advocating is the chucking of the user / group system for the simplicity and consistency of the Finder of old.
Personally, I'll gladly trade labels and popup folders and some of that simplicity for the nifty organizational advances of the new finder (and column view
...insert mouth.
Burn me at the stake if you wish, but much of what he describes as improvements on the Finder (which I recon is akin to the Explorer in Windows - I've used some Macs in the past but not picked up the lingo) are already present in the OS we all love to hate; Windows. Been there from 9x too - along with what he seems to dislike; pathnames. Whats so wrong about knowing where you put your file?
I guess much or most of what he yearns for are present in the various flavours of Linux / FreeBDS / other open operatingsystem of choice (I'll admidt it, I don't have that much experience in those either) as well. maybe the Mac isn't as great as the Mac-fanatics tries to make us believe?
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Nope, but then they didn't modify the source to our copyrighted pages, either. Slashcache surely didn't do it on purpose, but the caching process broke the ad code. For all I know, maybe our code isn't all that portable, who knows.
In any case, I've talked to Jared, the man behind Slashcache, and he was exceedingly cool about the whole thing.
He said VENDORS not customers you jackoff. Why don't you go kill yourself now?
My impression is that, when Mr. Siracusa speaks of spatial orientation, many times he is actually referring to basic consistency.
First points: labels and pop-up windows are a bit of a moot point, as they are coming in Panther. (Yes, I've seen builds.) So don't sweat it.
Spatial qualities are useful; however they are just that, qualities. The original Finder was very much in the vein the author describes; a window was a folder which contained icons that were your files. The current iteration of OS X, I might point out, pretty much sticks to this as long as you have the toolbar collapsed (that underused widget in the right side of the toolbar). Collapsing this toolbar will give you something very very similar to what we had before. Furthermore OS X takes it even futher with the use of packages - I'm surprised he didn't mention this - which allows whole applications to keep their guts in one place. Therefore the icon is the application now, as well. I could see Apple taking this further: imagine being able to install a Photoshop plug-in by just dragging it onto the single Photoshop icon.
Now, as far as spatially oriented interfaces being insufficient for the task of managing many thousands of files... there is something to that. The old Finder would have absolutely choked on certain computing situations common now (giant nested MP3/photo folders, for instance). It just doesn't scale to that many files cleanly.
Having said that, it shouldn't have to. A user generally has far fewer abstractions they are mentally adhering to than what is presented in your interface. I think this is where half-baked implementations like favourites really fall down. Favourites is a great idea. When you save something, or move something, you are generally thinking about the project you are working on. Odds are you have one master folder for this project, with several sub-folders divided the way you like. The data contained within these folders takes various forms (text, code, media). Depending on what kind of work you are doing, one 'view' that is entirely appropriate for say, code, is not appropriate for graphics previewing. You want to work in the view that is appropriate, and have it 'stick'. You don't want to drill through 'My Computer -> My Documents -> My Whatever' to get to it, if possible. This mixing of standard OS bits and pieces with your actual 'work' files is what causes people to lose their work in some loopy abstraction. While the idea of just having a filename field and a pull-down for a Save dialog is great, people just don't take the time to define Favourites as they are quite used to simply creating folders when they need them, and then navigating each time to that folder. OS X could do a better job by remembering which folder you last saved to, no matter what. I hate it when Flash constantly thinks I want to save Flash projects in the Flash application directory. If you could tell the OS, when you create a folder, that is is a project folder, and have it automatically add it to your Favourites (I like 'Projects', can you tell?), that would be spiffy.
So Mr. Siracuse's idea of Finder plug-ins is sound. I might just add that you only really need one plug-in, QuickTime, which can handle damn near anything you throw at it. What QuickTime can't catch, Quartz sure can (i.e. previews of PDFs and other vector artwork). The idea that the Finder should be an end-all to every kind of work is somewhat mad. The author's ideas about metadata are great, and I also think Apple is working on this (that Be guy they hired). I'm not sure about abstracting the Finder to a true 'browser' even more, I can't make up my mind on that. What I don't want to see is a schizo metaphor like Windows, where you have two distinct ways of browsing and no preference given to either (i.e. re
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
"It runs all the time, you cannot quit it."
actualy in Mac OS X you can quit the finder. using a tool like TinkerTool to put the quit command in the file menu. I can quit the finder and run a terminal window and pretend I'm using BSD.
You've got something else wrong with your system. There is no reason transfering a 17 Meg file should take that long, even on an old machine. I could do a comparison from my 7500, but I reloaded it with NetBSD a couple years ago and don't have a bootable OS 9 disk....
"The avalanch has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote." -Kosh
It's behavior like Slahdot's that (sadly) makes me believe we actually need DRM legislation. Copying and using digital content that you have no rights to is far too easy and more widely abused every day.
The sad thing is that Ars was never even contacted for permission. It would seem like common courtesy and could have avoided any bad-blood that may now exist between the two.
Precicely sums up every complaint I have had with MacOS X's interface.
Reading the bit on Copland was a trip down memory lane - it had so much potential. It's a shame that the project was canned.
Though, for what it's worth, BeOS has an implementation of "live search folders", in a fashon. You can save a file query as a document, right-click on it (or double-click it), and get a constantly updating result list. Add to that the ability to search on file metadata, and it was file-searching nirvanna. Pity Be, Inc. is dead now. That OS had real potential.
"Jesus saves, but everyone else in a 10 foot radius takes full damage from the fireball."
damn, I must say I've always wanted to press a stop button on explorer and finder a zillion times. I wish web browsers were just a *tad* more responsive to the stop button. Everything should have a forward, back and stop button, and in there a browsable history...
but I hate the 1 window 1 icon thing, I like an interface made up of panes with panels and controls, tree browsers to delve into the path, though mostly the tree isn't needed, it would be nice if it was easy to access without having to chase it.
spatial metaphors work well in vr 3d interfaces, but they don't apply to such a non-hand like 'pointer' that a mouse is.
it is good to see thinking being done on the subject, interfaces are an extremely complex and personal subject, habit and logic are mixed up in everyone's view of them. some things are obvious, but some are habit too - to illustrate in more mundane primitive ways - left to right top to bottom is only a habit, other cultures have right to left and bottom to top to throw into the mix.
the best way to provide for all people is to have lots of different ways of doing things. This is pretty much the philosophy behind windows UI concepts, though it could go much further IMHO. after living with xp for some time now, I couldn't go back to the mac, the only thing I miss is pop out tabs like the control strip. mint audio is a beautiful example of a smart and compact interface for controls. but everything else on a mac just means so much more clicks and drags and stuff than it is on windows. I could never go back to two three buttons, let alone 1, my scrolly mouse makes life so much easier. The closer the mouse gets to being able to behave like the hands the more powerful it becomes.
endlessly this subject can be discussed...
It's now quicker for me to look up Milton's Sonnet on His Blindness by typing into the Google box in Safari than walking across the room to where I can see Milton's Complete Works on the shelf.
It's also quicker for me to find a document hosted halfway across the world than a file on my own computer.
As a *Nix newbie I am starting to get my head around the command line, but it's not yet second nature. So many basic organisational tasks are still far too slow and we get no conceptual help with them.
For instance. I want to flick through the 4685 photos I took in SE Asia and select some of them to play around with. I want to view them fullscreen and tag the ones I like with a keystroke. I can't do this from the command line. I don't want to guess with an icon view and select holding down command only to lose the list. All the image editors I've seen think that displaying images is a passive affair and that ordering and sorting the files doesn't need you to be able to see them full resolution.
I can't use folder of images on a network volume for my screensaver reliably.
I have to think before opening a folder on a network volume whether it has too many files (>1000) for the Finder to cope.
And yet it's a supercomputer and I'm a big fan.
Well through clever use of expire tags and such proxy servers are non issue. However a full blown mirror takes that away. Google caches are designed so most people only use them then the page is not currently accessible. You only tend to click on the cached version after the rgular version.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
20+ years experience with Macs?
I might buy it if the Mac were 20 years old yet.
Losers.
Soooo simple. Thanks!
You don't need labels, although I will admit that they are more convenient.
.psd format, the image document's icon will be the image in the document. Use the same cut and paste routine via the information panel to transfer your new icon from the photoshop file to your target file/directory.
Why don't you just go to iconfactory.com or some other place that makes OS X icons, download a set with multicolored folders, select the folder of the color you want, hit apple-I, click on the icon in the information panel, hit apple-C, then select the folder whose color you want to change, click on its icon in the information panel, hit apple-V.
Even better, make your own icons by creating images in Photoshop. When saved in
I like to see OSX held to a higher standard. Im sitting here about ready to kill this crappy NT machine I have to use at work...and while I wish it was an OSX machine I know so much can still be done with OSX to make is so much better than it is today. I can only hope that someone at apple reads articles like this, and that the info gets relayed to the upper crust.
OSX offers stability that OS9 could only aspire to...now its time to get working on matching that stability with functionality.
*twitch*
You say :wq, I say ZZ. Why can't we all just get along?
:x instead of :wq since they both do the same thing except that :x only saves if changes have been made.
Can't help it picking a nit with your sig, but most vi users know say
I doubt any bad blood exists between the 2 right now, as this service isn't sponsored by /. It seems like it's being run by an independent person, who isn't supported by /. The front page of the site says that CmdrTaco doesn't endorse what he's doing.
for a dude that use linux and gnome your knowleged of computers is less then I exprected.
I, for one, have been using primarily Linux for the past eight years. For the past twenty years I have used such computers as TRS-80, Commodore64, Apple II, RS/6000, various IBM PC "clones", and on rare occasions Apple Macintosh.
Until this thread, I never really knew what the Apple "finder" really was, though the name implies that it helps you find files. In the little time I spent on the Mac, I never saw the finder, or knew that I was looking at it.
To me, knowing about Apple's finder is like knowing about AOL's "chat rooms". Being a frequent user of either seems indicative of a lack of technical knowledge or inclination, rather than the contrary, as you imply.
I appreciate what Siracusa is trying to do, but I think he's missing the forest for the trees. His explanations of a spatial finder is nice, and it's obvious he has the experience to back up his claims about a proper finder being spatially oriented. However, I think his solutions are rather weak. It's easy to complain, but a finder that uses an iTunes-like browser? A middle-man dock-like station for files when moving them? These may be spatially pleasing, but they are certainly not intuitive, and intuitive interface (not a spatial interface, as Siracusa claims) has always been the hallmark of the Mac OS.
It's true that the OSX Finder does have its share of problems, but it's getting better, and will only improve with time. Does he honestly think Apple forgot about their own inventions like pop-up folders and the ability to change font sizes? I agree, these things are missed (as is my favorite, the application menu. Why, Apple, why?) but I think I see the point that Apple is trying to make in all of this: OSX should be intuitive for the new user, and simple for the new user to operate, while at the same time maintaining an unprecedented level of control and functionality for the power user. It succeeds admirably at both.
Perhaps new users would understand the Finder better if it were more spatially oriented, but it is still very easy to use in its current form. And the Mac faithful? The millions of fans like who have been loyalists since the days of the 512? We know there's problems but we also see what Apple is trying to do, and that's survive in a very competitive market. Because the OSX Finder is suitable for novices, longtime users, and power users, I'm willing to forgive its inconsistencies and annoyances at the expense of the greater cause, which is to keep Apple alive in the first place.
http://www.walkingtaco.com
Gaytoo is not a production enviorenment OS. OS X is. Gaytoo is for fan/tbois who like to waste time with their computers
Why don't you just...
Because you can't sort by that in a list view. In Mac OS 9, you can sort by label.
And because a label can be quickly selected from a menu, instead of 1) going to Get Info, 2) copying the icon, 3) launching a graphics app, 4) pasting the icon, 5) changing the color, 6) copying the new icon, 7) pasting it back, and 8) probably losing the alpha channel along the way.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Here's a quote from the article:
Even the seemingly chaotic and messy act of "drilling down" to a deeply nested file using the Spatial Finder, double-clicking one folder after another and spawning windows like crazy, can be accomplished with comparatively little conscious thought. The user finds his way using visual cues (reinforced by the coherency and stability of the Spatial Finder) rather than by rote memorization of file paths. In the same way that you might drive a familiar route without knowing all the street names or exit numbers, the Spatial Finder user might not know the actual path of the file on disk. But like the driver, the user does not need to know all the names of the places along the way. He only needs to know where he is, and how to get there from here. In a non-spatial system, users must remember "addresses." The Spatial Finder enables users to remember locations.
Here's the problem. In the Mac OS 9 Finder, this *is* really chaotic and messy. If you go to basically the same folders all the time, it's not so bad, because over time you set the size, settings, and position of all those folder windows and you really do remember how to get everywhere without thinking about it. BUT if you're like me and you go onto network servers and drill down 8 levels constantly, it's a total pain in the ass because every single window opens up in unsorted icon view.
The column view kicks ass in this scenario because of how quickly you can navigate, especially if you use the keyboard.
Now, if you set the Finder to open new windows all the time, you can switch between the oh-so-dreamy spatial Finder and the lightning-fast column view easily. You open a column view window, double-click on a folder, and it opens in its own window with whatever settings you used last time. Or you open a folder window in List or Icon view, and switch to Column view to drill down 8 levels easily. Don't get me started on how brain-dead it would be to have two separate apps (spatial Finder and browser Finder). Sometimes I want to get around one way, sometimes the other, and having to do anything more than a mouse-click to switch is just plain stupid.
So the pure spatial Finder idea is abandoned. You can have the same folder open in two different windows - who cares? How does this make my life harder? So you can open the Desktop folder in a separate window - oh well.
Apple decided to abandon the lovely ideological purity of the spatial Finder in order to create a (IMHO) much less irritating way to get around the system. In the past, I've often thought the Finder was easier to use and Windows Explorer was faster to get around with - with OS X, Windows is beat easily on both counts.
Also, In the very first (mock?) screen shot, Mr. Sircusa will have to blame something other than his photoshop skills for this omission! That "Library" folder icon's appearance hasn't changed in any way to indicate that it is open in another window elsewhere on the screen. To me, that's a very big deal, especially in the context of his article, which emphasises the importance of a "connection" between a folder and its Finder window.
Apart from that, I agree with most of the article, and I think John puts into words what so many Mac users have difficulty explaining.
I know I should probably be posting this on Ars, but I don't have an account there, and historically John S. has always checked the /. responses to his articles. John if you're reading I'd like to know what you think.
As for "most readable" yet "least straining" colours, doesn't anyone remember word processors, terminal programs, and so on before the "paper" metaphore took over? With complete configurability of colours, both users and companies seemed to settle down on yellow or white on blue as the best choice. I still use a text-mode computer at home set to yellow on blue - I still think that's the best colour combination, if you don't have to worry about making the appearance of GUI junk on the screen look pretty.
Historical note - that's why the Blue Screen of Death is, in fact, blue, with white text. It simply was the universal standard colour scheme for presenting text at the time.
The single greatest enhancement to OS X is Launchbar--
Find, manipulate, launch anything anywhere on your computer...applications or files. You will not understand how you lived without it.
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
Yes. Yes you did. Not as common as Father O'Day or the reply to Father O'Day, but this one shows up from time to time. (BTW, my kudos to whomever thought about trolling responses to trolls. To bad it's out of order now and then.)
Or I was the only one to read:
Apple: A better finger?
Oh man... April's fool got me paranoic
May the source be with you!
The conclusion of this post is left as an exercise for the troll^H^H^H^H^Hreader.
"Inflammable means flammable? What a strange country!" -Dr. Nick, The Simpsons
MacBU at Microsoft is one of the most profitable centers for MS because... they face so much competition for Office on Windows? I hardly think so.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
Though it's great fun to pick around with Linux and newer Mac OSes, when I want to get some serious work done and not worry about a damn thing, I turn to my old Mac IIfx, running System 6.0.8. Reliable,stable, and absolutely mindless ease of use. Not to mention the fact that it it runs System 6 blindingly fast- faster than any of my newer machines running newer OSes.
Personally, I'd very much like to see a return to the simplpicity and mindless ease of use found in the earlier Systems. It's not necessarily a bad thing. I see the endless customization of Linux and the quirks of newer systems as a hobby. It really is fun to plpay with, and yes, you can get some work done. This is in the same sense that you might keep one car around to tinker with, fix, upgrade, and so on. But anyone who does that almost always keeps a "beater" on hand that will keep running as long as there's gas in the tank. System 6 is my beater, and I'm not giving it up any time soon.
IAAL
Actually why should people be dealing with files anyway? There's two things that people do with their computers. Create something, or manipulate something they've already created[1]. Maybe a more app-centric POV is needed. Pick the app you want to use, then "select" brings up all the things that that app can deal with, with the capability to filter further down (time,subject) in a fuzzy manner. Maybe Natural Language Interfac sensitive to FS Metadata.
[1] Divide that into playing, or changing (adding, subtracting).
That's great and all Caesar, but perhaps you should email the mods instead of airing your business in a public forum?
Maybe it's just me, but in my business, when a supplier, vendor, competitor, or business partner steps out of line, I contact them directly.
I seem to get better results that way than opposed to, say, posting to a public forum on a global network.
Beacause of the similar names, people confuse "spring-loaded folders" with "pop-up folders", but the two terms are used to refer to different things in the Mac world.
"Spring-loaded" means that when the user drags something over a folder's icon, that folder's window will open after a short delay, allowing the user to continue dragging. This allows the user to drag into a nested folder several layers deep wthout opening it first.
"Pop-up" windows, (also called drawers by some), exist only in the classic Mac OS (although there are rumors of a comeback in OS X Panther in June). These are windows that have been attached to an edge of the screen such that they normally display only as a small tab with the window's name. When the tab is clicked or dragged onto, the window slides open onto the screen, automaticaly closing into a tab again when it loses focus.
Apple did one thing right a few years ago. They used FreeBSD as their core API and provided the FreeBSD userland. But then they insisted on tacking on lots and lots of GUI bells and whistles that slow the system down to the point that interactivity is totally screwed. I really resent that, especially since I'm forced to work with the damn boxes and don't have the time or access to turn off all the fluff.
Finder mostly works but it's a little less stable than pretty much any other app installed by default on a fresh OSX install.
It doesn't quite understand file permissions / ownership. I mount my home directory via NFS from a Linux server and often can't create, copy or move files in the Finder because of spurious permission errors that don't seem to apply if I do it manually from the Terminal.
Also, try disconnecting the ethernet cable while you have remote volumes mounted. The Finder becomes steadily less responsive and pretty soon you can't do anything. I often put my laptop to sleep, go home, open the laptop and find that I need to reboot because I forgot to unmount something before I left the office.
I've heard it's a Carbon app. The Carbon libraries are very OS9 centric and might be useful for porting old apps to OSX but are hardly suitable for the app which is the front end of the whole GUI.
Now wash your hands.
An excelent Mac OS X Finder replacement is Path Finder by cocoatech.
http://www.cocoatech.com/
This doesn't relate to some of the problems that Ars talked about, but surely solves alot of the shortcommings in the Apple Finder.
"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" - Albert Einstein
This guys a quack. I cant believe I wasted my time reading this. These HCI guys really get to me when they start overanalyzing like this. Face it, there is little to no "mental juggling" involved with using a back button. Think of it spatially as a stack of papers in which you can only see the top. The reduction of desktop clutter is far worth this sacrifice.
You can tell this is the type of guy that really loves to hear his own voice.
Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself cou
I just wanted to point out that the article is not about metadata. The author carefully separates that as a separate issue. The article is about the concept of a "Spatial Finder" and the current lack of emphasis by Apple on the Finder vs. their old metaphor that the Finder IS the computer. Read the article! Very interesting.
Currently hooked on AMP
The spatial finder is not a bad idea, but I think the author's insistence on its superiority is based on some narrow and dogmatic assertions about human psychology. While it's certainly the case that large chunks of the human brain are devoted to spatial thinking and that people deal well with spatial interfaces, it's also the case that large chunks of the human brain are devoted to verbal, sequential, and auditory thinking, and that people can deal with non-spatial environments very competently also.
The idea of the back-button, for example, is based on sequential thinking, and most people who are not living in homes for the retarded can think sequentially with ease. Likewise, the verbal skills required to navigate a command-line or address-bar are deeply ingrained in the human consciousness, which in fact depends on words to define many complex concepts.
In short, people think in a multitude of ways, and it is senseless to limit an interface to only one way of thinking. While many of Apple's users are indeed visual thinkers (graphic artists, photographers, etc.), most of these people are capable of speaking in complete sentences, reading books that do not have pictures in them, and finding periodicals in a library or large stack. As the history of UI design has shown, humans can use numerous different interface paradigms, as well as cross-paradigm hybrids like the current crop of graphical UIs. The best sort of UI is one that can be adapted to different types of thinkers, but even so there are few people so stupid they cannot master a file browser.
I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
Err WTF?
I have just tried it on a 7200/200.
*Time to duplicate a 17.4 Mb file about 8 secs
*Time to move a 17.4 mb to another folder on the same Hard Drive about 0.2 secs
*Time to copy a 17.4 Mb file to an external Hard Drive about 12 secs
I think you need a new watch...
a finder with 1+ windows with TABS a la safari/camino? I am suprised no-one as seen fit to mention this. This would be perfect for me, any others??
I have always thought that labels are extraneous. What do they do that a different Icon can't do, even in 9?
Sorry - meant to say 'apple & pc'. My first computers were an apple iic, then later a commodore64, then a pc/386 ... trust me, i've seen 'em all!
They allow you to sort by label.
Back when I was writing a lot of web pages at my old job, I used labels to indicate which files needed to be edited or had already been edited. I couldn't change the filenames -- web links (stupidly at times) rely on them. And I couldn't keep things in different directories, because then I'd lose the basic structure of the site, and could not step through it, and inspect it. (or have linked files work, such as inline graphics, stylesheets, or scripts)
Furthermore, with regards to the icon, you're flat out wrong there too. It is faster and easier to set a label than it is to find an icon, copy the icon, and paste it onto the new file. Particularly since I don't want to change the basic shape of the icon -- just tint it. And tint it to a particular user-selected color, rather than one that might be supplied by a vendor.
Lots, and I mean LOTS of people use labels constantly. Presently I'm using Windows. Rarely does a day pass when I don't wish that it had labels -- a lovely feature that the Mac had since the late 80's IIRC.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Criticism is ok when you can offer an alternative - at least as good, or a really different one.
This article was split to 25 pages, that is 100-150 banner views later you have read the article and then? I don't like "philosophical" comments about the programs. If you know how you wanted Finder to be, just _CODE ONE YOURSELF_ and offer at least an alfa version of it! Code that spatial finder, and give it to download.
I could rant about some features of terminal and console - or I could simply get other programs that satisfy me more, or hack the core of the programs and make them behave as I want.
And if you can't do what you bothered to describe with 25 pages (= about 2 split to give 100-150 banners to be seen) then just post in on a philosphy board.
Gobbledegook. Hot air. Rhetoric by one who deserves not to breathe.
What is important is how Apple have gutted the old NS code and left the underpinnings of the Finder wide open. Today, the OS X "shell" is so vulnerable it isn't funny. Sanity checks in file operations are not at file system level, but in the Finder itself.
Remember that first Safari download of build 48? Remember how people got their entire systems hosed by a bad call?
That was a call to NSWorkspace. The dumb thing has no sanity checks today. The original NextStep version had tons of sanity checks, but Apple have taken the code out. They have code for sanity checks in the Finder, but that didn't help Safari, or the poor users who got their systems trashed.
I used SID extensively for quickly sorting very large numbers of old text files. SID was so useful at this, that I would routinely use tar archive entire directory structures to QIC 150MB tapes, cart the tapes home, extract the archives on my trusty old Amiga, use SID to sort out and clean up the files, and re-organize them into more meaningful directory structures, then tar the results onto a tape to take back to my UNIX boxes at work. Back then (1988 - 1992) I routinely wished for SID for UNIX.
Today I still wish I had SID on Mac OSX. I no longer fire up the old Amiga - finder's detailed list view - with side by side finder windows showing different directories is pretty close to what SID looked like, so I no longer tar things off to the Amiga for SID sorting... but I wish SID were available for Mac OSX, because it was much more useful than two finder windows are. Much faster at many operations too.