Apple's Snow Leopard to sport Cocoa Finder and ImageBoot - Page 2

I think it is never a good time to change until a few years down the road. Then you see it was a good thing. I hope that is the case here.

Harsh. I believe he was referring to mini-DisplayPort and mini-DVI ports, not regular DisplayPort and DVI ports themselves. Hopefully I remembered this correctly, but I think the standard DisplayPort port might have fit on the new MacBooks too, as someone commented in another thread. I won't argue such points as I'm not an expert on computer hardware. I do believe that I can speak for many people when I say that proprietary ports can cause some frustration to end users with the added expense of more cables and converters than would otherwise be necessary if all manufacturers stuck to universal ports for all products. And at the same time, as I stated in my reply to the original poster of the quote in your post, I can see the good business decision of creating proprietary ports to lock in consumers to one company's product line.

In my opinion only, I think Apple made the right choice creating mini ports as their refined designs practically require them. And at the same time, I can appreciate another's point of view without mocking them.

Actually, yes, because if the Cocoa Finder is 64-bit, which I expect it will be, it may well run significantly faster due to the use of the X64 instruction set and its double helping of on-chip registers, not to mention the more advanced garbage collection available in Cocoa.

Re-writing Finder in Cocoa is OK, however the real issue is Finder design. That's what's broken. I see nothing about completely re-thinking the design aspect of Finder, which frankly is a disaster. A real shame for Apple, that such a central feature of an OS UI is broken. Shame, shame, shame.

True. What computers being sold today offer DisplayPort as standard yet? And Apple's already made a mini port, lol. I guess as long as Apple continues supplying miniDisPlayPort dongles. Will they continue to sell microDVI dongles for the 1st gen MacBook Airs, or are those people out of luck if they don't get one in time or theirs fails?

I guess that's the downside to propriety ports, they disappear faster than industry standard ones.

Can someone list the problems with Finder? I've run into a few problems, but none so bad that I regularly curse its existence.

Here is what I've seen:
1. The never-ending search party for network shares that don't exist
2. Stability issues (but not much more than any other program...certainly much better than Windoze explorer.exe)

Uhh...that's all I can think of right now

Can someone tell me what else they have run into, or what is so bad about it?

I think it's rather inconsistent. You can't copy-passte in Finder, how stupid is that?

Also, I don't see why BlueTooth has it's own little app and can't be directly included into Finder. I'd like to see my BlueTooth cellphone show up in Finder's left column.

I'm sick of the anti-Snow Leopard hyperbole, personally.

If Snow Leopard's performance comes anywhere near what we project it to, it should be well worth the cost of upgrading.

That's funny, because I just copied and pasted in Finder....


My biggest beef with Finder is the networking, which is still rubbish even in Leopard, with networked machines disappearing, or unable to log into them. Although I don't use it I agree about Bluetooth, that kind of generic "connected device" would be great within Finder.

I generally use PathFinder for file operations, I much prefer it to the Finder.

However, unlike Kasper Jade, Jacqui Cheng knows what the word wrap means in this context and doesnt just toss it around to sound clever.

Bombich has worked at Apple for years and NetRestore is like NetBoot and NetInstall (it actually uses NetBoot).

Aw this one made me giggle. Mike Bombich has literally worked for Apple for a long long time. It's nothing new.

NetRestore is a wrapper which accesses OS X components written by Apple engineering. Mike is a Systems Engineer... not a Software Engineer. That means he does advanced technical implementation and consultancy for customers. Ok, so they gave him the wrong shirt at one point at WWDC08 but he was first to admit that.

ImageBoot has nothing to do with NetRestore. It's just tapping into how a Mac boots up, piggy-backing on the NetBoot code inside the EFI. It's loca hard drive NetInstall basically.

This article has its facts wrong. ImageBoot appears to work soley for install disk images and has nothing to do with being able to run a workstation from a disk image. It also works with Leopard and is not unique to Snow Leopard.

I hope karma gets whoever leaked this. At least when it's on ADC we can blame Apple for letting anyone buy a membership, but the source this came from has generally been better behaved. Furious.

I hate hearing things like "completely" or "rewritten". How many times have I heard these words and be unpleasantly surprised that things weren't really rewritten...just updated.

Cocoa Finder was rewritten for Rhapsody in 1998, but was never released. Don't ask. Too many hours wasted on Old Mac Faithful, BlueBox, RedBox and more.

This new one will most certainly have been in the works and advanced for the past 5 years.

Extra Dongles won't be needed for future displays, you will find that many monitors & TVs of the future will begin adopting Mini-Display connections.

Mini-DVI may have been a move towards Apple Proprietary but Mini-Display is going to become an industry standard. Apple doesn't try to lock people to proprietary hardware, they try to push the industry to advance already. ADV was around for how long before DVI finally got standardized? ADV was Apple's attempt to actually put some sort of DVI type standard out there. Trust me, Display port is a very very good thing & will be replacing HDMI & DVI both.

As far as Firewire goes, it's a lost cause. Even with 3200 standard coming along it will never recover from the overwhelming adoption of USB in the PC industry. Apple has finally begun to realize that they have to work with popular standards, not against them. This is why they are picking up Mini-Display instead of advancing their own mini-DVI, why they are slowly weaning people off Firewire (USB 3.0 will be capable of 4.8GB/s). Firewire is now up against eSATA & loosing, it's a dying standard.

It's not Apple's fault the industry is moving on so quit whining about it. You aren't going to get any better firewire support from the PC industry, they would have had to adopt it in the first place to abandon it.

You CAN copy and paste in the finder! The difference is that the finder is working at the file level, it's a file manager, and copies files or folders appropriately. That paradigm is logical but Windoze lovers hate it. When you are in an app, copy and paste is there appropriately for the text level.

It's a design issue NOT a flaw.

Huh? What's wrong with Apple going to Cocoa and dropping carbon? FYI, Adobe CS5 is rumored going to be in Cocoa and that is scheduled for release like next year?. Its up to you to upgrade or not. If you think you are going to use the features introduced in CS4, then by all means UPGRADE .


Huh, please elaborate, I know its not perfect but its definitely not a disaster, ever used Windows OS search function? Now that is a disaster.

It might be, seeing as the main new thing from the consumers point of view is going to be the across-the-board Cocoa touch layer, which only one computer can use - the yet to be released Mac touch. Though with Apple they'd charge for water.

Null.

And HOW LONG have we been waiting for this? Sheesh. NEXTSTEP's Workspace Manager was already Cocoa...before Cocoa was Cocoa. Why didn't they just build on that in the first place?

My Finder Wishlist:

1. An end to all the hangs when dealing with servers and shared folders!!!
2. A system-wide tagging architecture
3. The ability to browse documents and data using a tag cloud

Good riddance, Carbon.

1) Release early - release often. Get it out there and rapidly stablise. If you don't find it 'suitable' or 'compatible' then stick with your existing setup until it does.

2) How is it Apple's fault for incompatible software - its the lazy software companies who have had build after build after build of MacOS X to test against, they continually use private frameworks and hacks - and wonder why things go pear shaped. Your flamage should be directed at those software companies, not Apple.

3) I'm an average user, if the introduction of a new finder, improved optimisation which means more 'teh snappy', then I'll be happy to pay for an upgrade.

And here is the biggest problem with Apple - their inability to be transparent when it comes to long term plans. For Microsoft, Adobe and so forth to know what they need to do in future - Apple needs to say, "Carbon is going to be gone from MacOS X in [x] of years". Lord knows I don't want to see Microsoft or Adobe make the excuse, "well, I didn't know" as to why they haven't made their applications Cocoa.

Taking the Finder Cocoa is great, but it needs to be repaired and improved as well. The Tiger Finder is the biggest source of problems in our facility (video post production) We have a bunch of Macs both PowerPC and Intel running Final Cut with Xserve RAIDS and internal RAIDS (MacPro) and Kona cards. Plus two Avids with Adrenalines. More often than not the Finder is the source of problems on these systems. Leopard FInder is better, but still exhibits a number of flaws (well documented here and elsewhere) that need to go away.

Hell I had the Finder freeze up on one of my Xserves yesterday. Granted I was using Time machine to restore an inadvertently deleted file for one of my employees, but still. The Finder crashed on a Leopard Server Xserve! That is BS and we are looking forward to SL.

I think DisplayPort is amazing. As for FireWire, I've never used it and all my friends (college students) thought it was a useless port on their current MacBooks anyway. I feel bad for the FireWire supporters but I agree with you, miniDisplayPort gained and FireWire lost aren't bad things for me.

Why is DisplayPort so amazing to you yet Firewire isn't? I like DisplayPort but in today's incarnation it's marginally better than DVI. Things should improve by version 2.0.

If you all are plugging in USB devices when you have Firewire as a choice I think I'd be the one feeling bad for you all. Bandwidth and processing power are always finite. I tend to favor technologies that are smarter and preserve CPU bandwidth.

Maybe so. And in all honesty, if Snow Leopard is as good as I have come to hope, I will pay for the upgrade. However I would part with my money even more easily, had the "upgrade" to Leopard (which I also paid for, BTW) not been such an terrible waste of money

I can't even guess why apple removed FireWire, regardless they did. I never used FireWire so it really won't affect me. I use few peripherals and none came with FireWire, all came with USB only. Maybe if apple hadn't removed FireWire options from iPods and included it on iPhones, I might have used that port.

As I said, I'm sorry for the FireWire crowd, it sounds like a great port, but it's removal doesn't affect me.

As for DisplayPort, I only like it for it's potential, especially it hdtvs adopt it.

Give me back Workspace Manager, please. I want my Shelf and with LocalApps, NetworkApps, so on and so forth.

We had some nice additional features with NeXTSTEP/Openstep which allowed me to do a Shift-tilda brings up the GO-TO menu that I then type in the user name and I could be immediately over to my colleagues shared public folder. People didn't waste time misusing NeXTMail by embedding files, and leveraged the NFS Shares and more to call upon NeXTMail services to run embeddedly assign applications appropriate to the content of the message.

Apple needs to reinvest in setting up OS X as the Enterprise Shared/Managed solution from top to bottom.

I could list dozens of examples which made me more productive on Openstep than OS X.

Finder doesn't even touch Workspace Manager.

I agree completely. I so miss the shelf!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And LocalApps, NetworkApps, LocalLibrary, NetworkLibrary, etc. It worked so well!!!

NeXT was way ahead of its time. I still miss my slick Turbo station. What a beauty!!! And while OS X is a pretty awesome OS at this point, I wish we hadn't lost so much of the NeXT UI. I still prefer the menu block, with tear-away menus, to Apple's menu bar any day. And I really liked how the dock was for apps and windows minimized to a different area of the screen. The current OS X "catch all" dock is very limited if one is running more than a few apps with more than 2 or 3 open windows.

It's a bit depressing to think that Workspace Manager, back in the early 90s when I had my NeXT box, seemed faster and more productive than today's Finder, some 15 or so years later.

I sincerely hope that if Apple does re-write the Finder, they do something RADICAL. Making it Cocoa (let's hear it for 100% Cocoa in all OS X apps!!!) is a step in the right direction. But it's just the first step. I hope they go all the way!

sure you can - select a file, copy, paste, you get a new copy of the file. What are you expecting it to do?

My guess is that the poster - and others - want to CUT and PASTE a file, ie: move it.

I don't know if you can call a replaced Finder a new feature...will it actually add anything to functionality or just be faster. Agreed this has been LONG overdue.

So you mean dragging the file to a new location in the window's sidebar structure or using spring-loaded folder actions to go deeper into the file system, all with one simple drag, isn't enough for them that they feel the need to CUT the file and therefore force the system to take a performance hit due to the overhead involved with adding the file to the clipboard? That's one of the reasons Windozes is so bloated and doesn't perform as good as the Mac OS. I'm glad Apple thinks these things out.

In the Mac world we use drag & drop. These people should NOT expect the Mac platform to conform to the way the Windoze interface works. We like the way our Mac interface works. It's better just because of not doing unnecessary finder actions like CUT of files. There is already too much Windoze appeasement going on in our platform. If they like the way Windoze functions, then let them stay there and enjoy Vista, and not try to bring us down to their illogical level.

Don't get me started on the Vertical/Tear away/saved-state Menus/Submenus where the main view was just that, the main editing view with the slidebars on the left-side to cut down on mouse movements across the page and back.

I loved the vertical sidebar for most used apps, three dots for running apps and something KDE mimicked in a way [slide down to the bottom leaving just the NeXT Icon].

The only way I imagine we'll ever see Workspace Manager 2009 is if Keith Olhfs comes out of retirement and takes Steve up on that long open offer to head the UI Design Team.

It's not _inability_ to be transparent, it's _unwillingness_ to be transparent.

Whether you agree or not, there are good reasons for Apple to keep their future developments secret:

1. They simply may not know as early as you think. Look at the switch to Intel. Apple had a side by side development program going for quite some time and only switched when they were ready. They are likely to be doing the same thing in other programs, as well, and may work on something for years before it's ready.
2. Pre-announcing products gives their competition a lead on copying. Since everyone is carefully watching what Apple does in order to copy it, the sooner Apple releases information, the shorter their lead time when the product finally hits the streets.
3. There have been times when Apple announced that they were working on something and then were unable to deliver. All the leeches came out of the woodwork and sued them for not delivering what they said they would (even though Apple never promised it). The best way to avoid this is to not talk about things until you're ready to ship.
4. It can reduce current sales. If customers know what the next version will have (and the next version of computer hardware is ALWAYS faster and/or less expensive than the current version), they may hold off on purchasing - which costs a fortune. Which computer company was it that went bankrupt for this reason?

Apple has very good reasons for not pre-announcing any more than they have to. In general, the people who need to know are under NDA and can get the information. A bunch of whiners saying "I demand to know what Apple is going to do in 2014" isn't sufficient justification to displace the above concerns.

I'm all for Apple dropping legacy support to have a lean and superfast system.

Just got to factor that in my purchase plans - was happily running PS7 till Leopard broke support for it, so now I'm running an even older version of PS in VMWare. (Starving student, and am fighting the temptation to pirate stuff).

All this talk seems to point towards Carbon being dropped. If that's the case and CS4's going to be broken in a short few years, then



As for Finder itself, I find myself using it less and less these days. I usually launch applications and find most of my stuff through Spotlight (really really awesome by the way)

I do hope Apple improves iDisk support and performance in Finder though

Finder has Cover Flow. Which is cool. But feels more at home in iTunes to be sure. As for Apple finally making Finder Cocoa - who cares? Shouldn't they first make it into a file manager?

They need to differentiate between functions and interfaces. Right now their FF has too much going on that doesn't belong there. If they put things in their proper places then a rewrite wouldn't be such a big deal.

I know cmd + c cmd + v works but why is there no copy in the right-click menu? I really don't see why not...

An era long gone, yes. It's amazing how the Mac OS UI hasn't evolved much beyond the NEXTSTEP UI, or any UI for that matter. If they start over, I would hope that a rethinking is done.

Mac OS X does kind of shoehorn NeXT concepts into its UI, but it's been mediocre at best. The broken Miller column browser (it doesn't incremently snap to column size widths). Sidebar instead of Shelf. Dock instead of Dock. On top of that, it still has Mac OS issues. The application menus are still in the MenuBar, which I think is a rather horrible location for today's gigantic screens and multiple monitor setups.

Expose is great though. Coverflow gets an "eh" from me. Quicklook gets a thumbs-up. Stacks are ok.