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

a better finder?

[muyuubyou]

Maybe to find Apple's market share.

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.

mac problem

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.

I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.

Re:mac problem

[drgroove]

I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.

There aren't any ...
We used Macs at the last company I worked for (kind of a reversal of the standard mac-user scenario, as I have a pc @ home).
We were on OS9 for about 18 months, then on OSX for about 6mos (I left after that).
OS9, in my experience, was the equivalent of WinME. Buggy, crashed a lot, etc.
The switch to OSX was enthusiastically welcomed by everyone, in hopes that it would resolve the issues w/ stability & performance that OS9 faced.
The trade off, of course, was performance for stability. OSX was fairly stable as an OS (although we did experience the mac version of a 'blue screen of death' - kernel panics), but the screen rendering, file transfers over the network (including downloads from the web), speed of applications, etc etc was unbearably slow. Painfully slow. Our office used 800mhz and 1ghz chips, too... at the time, 'cutting edge' for macs. My work mac was an 800mhz, w/ 256k ram - identical to my dell @ home w/ p3 800mhz & 256k ram. The dell outperforms the mac, hands down, w/ at least a 3:1 speed ratio on OS9, 4:1 (or higher) on OSX.
For what its worth, the OSX finder is more useful than the finder on OS9, but both implementations are inferior when compared to Windows Explorer, or some of the windowing systems used in Linux GUIs (gnome, kde). The OSX finder, w/ its multiple-column view, which 'jumps' everytime you select a new folder, is unintuitive for any level of user, and the constant motion of the OSX finder requires dramamine to tolerate. However, it is far and away better than the OS9 finder, where every click on a folder produces another friggin window! (unless you hold down the option key or apple key or whatever).
Really, thats just the tip of the iceberg... in my 20+ years experience w/ mac & pc computers, I haven't found one intelligent reason to use mac over pc.

Buzzwords, buzzwords!

[thizzlewit]

My Open B.S. Detector is making the most awful screeching noise.....

Re:OS X is in its infancy

[Seanasy]

OK, I admit I only skimmed the article. But, I've gone back and skimmed it again and now I think the author is an idiot.

Bookmarks - A simplified version of this feature already exists in the form for "Favorites", but it seems only natural to expand this feature to match the bookmarking facilities found in web browsers.

How is favorites different from bookmarks again?

Back/forward buttons with history - The OS X Finder already has back and forward buttons, but they lack history pop-up menus. And although the "Recent folders" menu item keeps track of a handful of past locations, it is very limited when compared with the robust history tracking found in most web browsers.

So he says the Finder needs' Back/forward buttons with history.' Then he goes on to say that is has them. His only complaint is that the history isn't long enough.

A stop button - In a browser environment, users should decide when to stop waiting for a slow network disk, or other long-running task. A folder can just be closed if the contents are taking a long time to load, but browser windows are "reusable" and should not be tied to the performance or accessibility of any single location.

This is just dumb and the web browser comparisons are going too far. How can he be criticizing the Finder for HCI problems then go on to complain that it's missing web browser features. He later claims he isn't trying to make it into a web browser yet he wants most web browser features. The confusion of the two in Winbdows and KDE is, in my opinion, one of the biggest usability disasters to hit desktops. 'Stop' does not make sense in the context of a file browser. Network drives shouldn't take a long time to browse but other ways must be found to keep the Finder from hanging.

An address bar with auto-completion - This is probably an "expert" feature, but why not add a proper address bar to the list of toolbar components? In addition to history-based auto-completion, it should also support shell-style tab-completion for file paths.

Command-Shift-G. Auto-completion and everything. Put it in the toolbar and you'll confuse the average user as well as make the Finder look more like a web browser. Leave it as it is and the 'experts' have it at their fingertips, average users don't have to even think about it.