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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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
...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.
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
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 :)
NTFS already has it, no one uses it because hidden metadata is a stupid idea that breaks all the time. As someone who works with Mac OS 9 clients and Unix servers, I can tell you it's a lame and unnecessary hack, designed to compensate for incompetant users.
Do a google search for "alternate data streams NTFS"
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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