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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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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.
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 guess I shoulda made this more clear in my initial submission.
t ad ata-1.html
I think the primary thing that the old MacOS had that the current one doesn't, is good handling of file metadata. I think most people who come from a Windows/x86 background don't really understand how magical it is to have a file system that, for example, can allow for different files of essentially the same "file type" yet be launched by different apps (file "creator" and file "type" tags exist).
This was discussed in Ars Technica quite a while back, as well:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/01q3/metadata/me
And, this "other thing" I'm talking about is a (properly) spatial finder.
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 Chooser for file sharing was a hacked together piece of shit. Even when they were still in OS 8 and 9, they made an app to replace the network part of it. If someone spends 5 minutes with the new Connect to Server dialog they will be used to it. Sure, if you're looking for something like the Chooser, you might not know what you *should* be looking for, but that is the case for anything that is changed between 9 and X. The Chooser was probably one of the more embarrassing things about the Mac OS, and bringing it on into OS X would have been like putting a rotary dial on a cell phone.
Honestly, if Apple *had* ported the Chooser to OS X, I think a lot of people would have pointed to that as an indicator that the Mac OS was doomed.
I can't think of a worse idea.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
Huh? Of course you can list by date:
Open finder. View->As List, or OpenApple-2, click 'Date Modified'.
There you go.
caleb
-- caleb
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.
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.
Too many files: Apple's Finder chokes on multiple thousands of files.
Does not. I have one directory with some 3000 directories in it, each with from 1-500 files inside, and I can open them up and do tonnes of stuff with them. Yes, it starts to slow down, but no more than my Windows box does on the same directory.
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.
Does not. Here, I'll test. Click and keep the mouse pointer over the file name. After 2 seconds it goes into rename mode, no further click required. (Yes, the delay is still required)
There is no undo for renaming.
Just renamed a file, and hit command-Z, and it undooed the rename just fine.
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?
Click on the detail view (The icon with the number of horizonal lines), and then click on the column title that you want to sort by. How hard is this?
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.
Granted the save dialog doesn't have the same viewing options as a finder window, but it's certainly movable.
Pop-up folders were swell, however I don't miss them like the labels.
Older versions of OS/X were missing this feature, but 'spring-loaded folders' are back.
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.
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?
BS. The black when your screen is on is created the same way the white is when its on. There is no 'natural color' for a CRT unless its off and you can't have portions of the screen off and portions on.
The Anti-Blog
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.
Do what I do:
:P
System Preferences/Universal Access/Seeing - "Switch to Black on White"
Then, when you need to look at a screenshot/diagram, switch back. Works for me
I hate Grammar Nazi's
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.
Does not. Here, I'll test. Click and keep the mouse pointer over the file name. After 2 seconds it goes into rename mode, no further click required. (Yes, the delay is still required)
Click twice, but quickly move the mouse after the second click. No delay, except for that between the clicks. Not fast enough? Click once, hit return. Instantly in rename mode.
Well, somewhat. The parent post is correct in that OS X has still by far the best UI out there. Mac OS is the benchmark by which all user interfaces are judged, and so all changes to it are held to a much higher standard.
The reason why the author wrote this article, though, is that, compared to the Mac OS 9 Fnder, the X Finder really is a mess (better in 10.2, but a polished turd is still a turd). Compared to Windows Explorer, X Finder still wins, but that's saying very little, isn't it? Nautilus is much better than Windows Explorer, but it still has at least a couple more major revs ahead of it before it approaches Mac OS Finder-territory.
For those who didn't bother to read the article: the author's not saying that everything from Mac OS 9 should be brought back. He's not saying that Mac OS 9 was the end-all of user interface. He's saying that the Finder, as the center of the user's OS X experience, should be a substantial advancement over OS 9, and right now it's not. It's a kludgy, poorly-integrated hybrid of NeXT and classic Mac OS. He's saying the Finder should bring the best of NeXT and classic Mac OS into a unified whole, along with a few other much-needed enhancements.
And I think he's right. Hopefully Panther (10.3) Finder will head in the direction suggested by this article.
For any newbies out there who might be confused: the Finder is the Mac file browser, equivalent to Windows Explorer, Midnight Commander, or Nautilus. It is not the user interface to all applications -- it is the tool you use to get to (or "find") your applications and documents.
Mac OS X opens the program in it's default application - determined by metadata if there is any, determined by the extension if there isn't. You can bring up the Contextual Menu and choose from a list of other programs registered to handle that file type, if you so choose.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
...in which case you should have concluded that the front-most window is simply another folder named "Library", and not the one shown in the background window! :) Anyway, I knew of the omission before the article was published by was too lazy to fix it due to the previously stated rationalization. It's fixed now, however.