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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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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.
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.
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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.
Yeah I remember lifestreams and I agree it's a fantastic idea. I'd love to see it developed further!
I also appreciate (sincerely!) the criticisms of OS X one finds at Ars. They are consistently thorough and honest. Still, sometimes it seems like OS X is held to a far higher standard with regard to UI than other products. 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.
I fear, however, that it gives the casual Windows or Linux-using reader the wrong impression - the impression that OS X UI stinks. It doesn't. It's a relatively new UI and needs refinement, but as I said, I believe the level of criticism leveled at it is mostly due to the recognized fact that Apple does it better than most others.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
...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.
In any case, I agree with the author. Just to name an example, having to "associate" icons with "file types", as both Windows and Nautilus do, is a totally retarded way of doing things. One thing you could do on the Mac was click any icon on the desktop and paste in a new image from the clipboard. Because Classic MacOS files stores icons in the files themselves, this would work, always, even if you put the file on a floppy and moved it to another Mac: the file would retain its icon. This was also true for icon and window positions: thus, you could arrange icons and windows (and the icons within windows) in the way that makes the most sense, then burn a CD that preserves all this information.
The whole mess we have now with "icon databases" that maintain relationships between files and their icons is dumb and broken in comparison. Even now, as filesystems slowly are starting to acquire metadata in the form of file attributes (fifteen years after Classic MacOS), a system like Linux has yet to learn how to copy a file and actually retain the attributes on the copy.
In my more cynical moods, I sometimes think that as long as we have "minimalist" CS types telling us that "files should be flat" and that "everything should happen in userspace" we will continue to suffer schizophrenic, fractured interfaces.
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)
.jpg to open in Preview even if the default is still GraphicConverter. I can also easily change the default application as well. This is essentially the same thing, except that it's reliable and easier to use.
So magical, indeed, that it would, not infrequently get corrupted and lose track of what was what and you'd end up with documents of certain types looking like generic, unknown documents that in some cases couldn't be opened by anything except BBEdit. The especially cool thing is that then you got to use an equally magical "rebuild the desktop" startup key combination that, again not infrequently, didn't do any good. I had documents that stayed generic up until I switched to OS X. Then it was easy to fix the problem and get it to open with the right application using the Get Info window on the file in question.
Moreover the argument was bogus to start with. In OS X you can set any file to be opened by any application regardless of what the default application is for that file type. I can set a particular
To add to the OS X crunchiness, I have graphic files (JPG, GIF, PS, etc) open in Gimp by using an AppleScript application/droplet as a conduit of sorts to Gimp under X11. I just set my script as the default app for those file types. Nifty.
Yours miserably (like that arstechnica guy),
Steve
--- What?
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 :)
The command line is faster if you have a good memory. And it's easier to search for and manipulate files based on their filename/size/type from the command line (assuming you have a decent shell, and a good command of regex expressions). However, if all you want to do is go a couple directories deep and copy a group of files from that directory to another, a file browswer like Konqueror is just as fast. What I think would be great is a shell that's linked to a graphical file browser. If Konsole and Konqueror were linked, such that when I typed, "cd ~/Stuff" in Konsole, Konqueror would act like I'd clicked on "~/Stuff," then I would get the power of a terminal but the easy visualization of the graphical file browser. THAT would be killer.
"Now gluttony and exploitation serves eight!" - TV's Frank
I can't speak for Windows but Linux does for sure, in the past 12 months I must have seen more "usability reviews" of various parts of the Linux desktop than I've had hot meals. Most of them are worthless, but in general the noise over usability has had an effect, go see the effort and elbow grease being put into GNOME (especially) and KDE now for instance. The Nautilus team have been hard at work doing what is basically just polish and optimization (just as well, it really needed it!) lately for instance.
Well, when you look at the Mac value proposition, basically it boils down to their user interface. They can't sell on price or speed or number of apps, nor do they have the "nobody got fired for buying Foo" mentality on their side. Their no 1 selling point is that Macs are supposedly easier and more efficient to work with.
As such, people talk about that, it's the one thing that makes Apple unique. Personally, although they still do better than most companies, I think their reputation for UI expertise has taken a bit of a battering with the Jobsian era - go read some reviews of MacOS X from former OS 9 users, who point out some of the more laughable usability errors in OS X. These days, I think they're trading a lot on reputation, people think "Macs are easy!" and because ease of use is so subjective, they rarely get challenged on that point. That's what makes articles like this one so fascinating.
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
Oh, and the cached metadata should hide in a dotfile right? user:group 0000 was fine for '70 textfiles but it's excuciatingly insufficient today; that's why KDE, GNOME and the other lots have resolved to dotfiles or (I'm a unix guy sorry for any mistake) forks. The natural evolution for filesystems is to extract previews, tags, extended attributes in short and index them for fast live searches like in BeOS. Man, one reason I HATE M$ is that it crushed BeOS into oblivion without doing anything remotely close in functionality; M$ groupies you don't know what chance you passed by!
EA are the future, they're on Solaris (as far as I know, though I've never played with one; only old DIGITAL, sigh!), FreeBSD and of course LINUX. These are pretty much staple food for every system like 16 bit sound vs PC Speaker. It's time they be put to use and I think next wave of unix Desktops will do.
Apple is only doing what's obvious (perhaps duplicating some data but who cares if my mp3 ID3 tags are indexed by the kernel). No more mailbox maintenance code, just make a MUA from a souped up live query on the email datatype tag. Cool (BeOS was there...)
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
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
I'd say that is because Mac users are a lot more opinionated about how their little world should be than most. There are lots of quirks in the Windows UI, but people just learn to deal with them and move on. Mac users write five-page articles.
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.
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I could be snide and say "use each feature and find out for yourself", but I'll be nice and say that Favorites are a flat list with a fixed order, whereas most web browsers allow bookmarks to be arranged into folders, ordered arbitrarily, and include niceties like menu separators.
First, you're ignoring the request for history pop-ups on the back/forward buttons. Second, decent web browsers do more than just provide a long, linear history list. Take a look at Safari's history menu or Mozilla's history pane for some examples.