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."

Comments

OS X is in its infancy

[Seanasy]

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.

Re:Evil bit support

[Build6]

I guess I shoulda made this more clear in my initial submission.

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/met ad ata-1.html

And, this "other thing" I'm talking about is a (properly) spatial finder.

I may sound really stupid, but....

[Captain Rotundo]

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.

Re:I may sound really stupid, but....

[IamTheRealMike]

The finder, for those who might not have used a Mac (ie quite a lot of people I should imagine), works something like this:

Basically, it is like Explorer in Windows, or Nautilus in GNOME. It runs all the time, you cannot quit it. I think it draws the desktop. The finders default mode is column based, this is rather different to traditional file managers. Each folder "level" in the heirarchy gets a new column, starting from left to right. Clicking a folder shows a new column with the contents and a vertical scrollbar on the right. You click and scroll your way through the hard disk, rather than interacting with a tree, like in Explorer/Konqueror.

This is quite a bit different from the one in MacOS 9. My knowledge of that OS is a little rusty these days, but I think it was traditionally what is called an "object oriented" file browser, see ROX on Linux for an example. Win95 took this approach by default (in the very first releases). In this model, each window shows one folder, clicking a folder opens a new window. There is no concept of a "file manager" as such, it's an integral part of the desktop. There is no concept of pathing - although MacOS 9 did indeed have a path separator, virtually nobody knows what it is (a : character).

Normally OO browsers have a spring loaded folders implementation to make the large number of windows that can be generated with this approach more manageable, unfortunately this technique is patented by Apple which one reason why Nautilus hasn't moved to it, the GNOME guys have been thinking of possible ways around this patent, as well as other browsing metaphors.

Anyway, I digress. Basically, IIRC people have several issues with the OS X Finder beyond its design, namely that it's slow (perhaps why it doesn't use lots of new windows??) and not multithreaded, so a blocking connection or blocked device will freeze it. Window resizes are also very slow, but that's more an issue with OS X in general.

It also pretty much abandoned the OO model in favour of a navigational one, the usability merits of which are hotly debated. You can still have OO style windows of course if you want them, but I don't think that's what new users see. The first releases didn't even have spring loaded folders, pretty essential for the OO model.

Other than that, I think the Finder is really quite a nice program, though I never used it heavily. The column system is OK, it's not fantastic or anything but gets the job done. The tree widget it uses is incredibly feeble, so it's just as well. The fact that you can drag any object into the toolbars is also a nice touch, think iconic bookmarks.

Re:Full Mirror

[Caesar]

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.

Re:OS X Finder Laundry List - Please add yours.

[Chmarr]

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.

Low end/high end divide

[IamTheRealMike]

It's an interesting article, although most of the points related to OO (spatial) vs navigational browsing have already been hashed out on the Nautilus list, which I read sometimes - I think if you want a view of both sides of the argument, that might be a good place to go now, especially as the issue isn't as clear cut as this article makes it out to be.

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.

Re:I don't agree with the article

[SewersOfRivendell]

I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Linux (any flavor) or Windows (any flavor) has recieved nearly the same amount of scrutiny and criticism with regard to UI. Why is that? Is it simply because Apple brags about it so much? Is it a recognition that Apple does it best (usually) and therefore it is fair that they should be evaluated based on that claim? I suspect that this is the reason.

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.