Why can't Apple admit the OS X Finder is a train wreck which no amount of "truth tables" or optimizations can fix? They really should consider giving up and rewriting it from scratch. If Apple is working on a great new meta data filesystem and plans to use the current Carbon Finder along side it, god help us.
Why can't Apple admit the OS X Finder is a train wreck which no amount of "truth tables" or optimizations can fix? They really should consider giving up and rewriting it from scratch. If Apple is working on a great new meta data filesystem and plans to use the current Carbon Finder along side it, god help us.
I agree. The finder is consistently the most unstable application on the OS for me. Tonight, a networked server was disconnected (the other Mac was put to sleep) and it sent the Finder into conniptions. I couldn't even kill the finder.app with a sudo kill -9. I had to force restart because the finder wouldn't quit. I hate the finder. I hate it hate it hate it.
I agree. The finder is consistently the most unstable application on the OS for me. Tonight, a networked server was disconnected (the other Mac was put to sleep) and it sent the Finder into conniptions. I couldn't even kill the finder.app with a sudo kill -9. I had to force restart because the finder wouldn't quit. I hate the finder. I hate it hate it hate it.
Right, the same thing occur to me yesterday after a disconnection. It's a shame that Apple miss the reset button.
Thanks for this info, i feared that i have done mistakes.
PS : it did not belong here , but contrary to what some people said, i have connected two jaguar computer with an OS 9,2,1 one. I just choose the manual setting and typewrited the IP adress of the other computer.
Eugene risks re-igniting the Great Tab Wars of 2003....
Quote:
That's right, Mac users actually manually arranged their windows like so many pieces of paper on a desk. Insanity! The height of inefficiency! Au contraire. I won't bore you with the details yet again, but suffice it to say that there is a vast well of cognitive resources just waiting to be tapped by a bunch of boringly coherent and stable objects on a screen.
Just watch a old-school graphics designer using classic Mac OS (if you can still find one in the wild) switch among a seemingly overwhelming sea of windows faster than you, as a mere observer, can even identify what they are. The user knows what they are because he knows where they are, and where they'll be the next time he needs them--they're where he put them.
In short, identifying windows based on their size, position, and appearance (i.e. spatially) is massively efficient and imposes the absolute minimum cognitive load on the user. This is what people do best ? not memorize, maintain, traverse, or chose from lists or tree-like data structures, but recognize and manipulate coherent, stable objects in space (virtual or otherwise).
I don't know if it's your case, but personally i have the feeling that i open a higher number of windows years after years. As the computer gain in memory, power, the software become more complex, the screen larger, we tend to have more and more windows open.
Anyway i love the windows. Otherwise i loved the old fashion classic, where the HD are the roots of everything. Now i am a bit confused with computer, start, (favorite and applications are ok for me) and my account start.
Sometimes i have problems to find a particular folder (luckily there is the search function, but you must have the exact syntax). It was never the case under classic.
Another dazzling read by John. I strongly disagree philosophically with parts of it, but who else these days writes an OS review that actually has a philosophy you can argue with, instead of a fluffy features list with a light frosting of opinion?
First of all, the discussion on Exposé and the problem of window management is just wonderful. He cuts right to the core of the issue, and takes a step back to survey the field historically and across OSes in a way that's quite enlightening. Lovely job.
Here, though, is my ever-continuing beef (which pops up in the above discussion), something I respectfully disagree with, and something that I imagine he and I will always disagree on. John rightly points out that spatial thinking is a critical part of using an interface, but in his zeal for this philosophy he exaggerates its good aspects (which are many) and downplays its negative aspects (which are considerable).
Here's an example, from the digression on window management, leading up to Exposé:
Quote:
That's right, Mac users actually manually arranged their windows like so many pieces of paper on a desk. Insanity! The height of inefficiency! Au contraire. I won't bore you with the details yet again, but suffice it to say that there is a vast well of cognitive resources just waiting to be tapped by a bunch of boringly coherent and stable objects on a screen.
Just watch a old-school graphics designer using classic Mac OS (if you can still find one in the wild) switch among a seemingly overwhelming sea of windows faster than you, as a mere observer, can even identify what they are. The user knows what they are because he knows where they are, and where they'll be the next time he needs them--they're where he put them.
In short, identifying windows based on their size, position, and appearance (i.e. spatially) is massively efficient and imposes the absolute minimum cognitive load on the user. This is what people do best ? not memorize, maintain, traverse, or chose from lists or tree-like data structures, but recognize and manipulate coherent, stable objects in space (virtual or otherwise).
It's a great passage, salty and funny, and a nice homage to this form of window management (which anyone, including myself, as an "old-school graphics designer" has participated in).
It's also a homage that brushes aside the very deep frustrations of managing windows spatially. Overlapping windows pile up in a way that become extremely frustrating to navigate, no matter how carefully arranged, ultimately requiring keyboard-chording, window-menuing or (in OS 9) Window-shading just to see what's going on. And this scales ferciously poorly -- the more windows, the more complicated it becomes; the more apps, the same for every app. This is from the viewpoint of someone who's been using the Mac for over twelve years: it's a solution that can work, once you acquire a high level of experience and skill. But it's a lot of work, and it's complicated work. It's no more a solution (rather less of one, really) for the "average" user than hitting command-tab 8 times.
Now John clearly isn't recommending we all return to organizing our windows in every application like pieces of paper solely to manage our windows -- he's bringing up techniques that very experienced classic Mac OS users used to handle the problem. He's doing this, I assume, in order to highlight the philosophy he feels is most neglected by the people who are currently in charge of the OS X UI.
Understood, and point made. When going back to OS 9 -- as I'm occasionally obliged to using a machine that attached to some ancient hulking SCSI scanner that will never be updated -- I'm always greeted by an initial rush of pleasure, a combination of both the older OS's sheer responsiveness and the immediate pleasure of operating in the classic Finder's purely spatial environment. That pleasure doesn't last long: the machine locks up randomly; I'm reacquainted with happily forgotten quirky classic Mac OS items like the Chooser; I spend chunks of time tunneling through directories that could have been traversed through column view in a fraction of the time. Interesting, but in the end -- no thanks.
But that initial pleasure is worth noting. I'm glad we have someone like John fericiously defending this turf, even if I'm not in his camp -- I no longer find the one-to-one relationship between a window and a folder valuable for everyday use in a file manager, and so far I rather like the Panther Finder. (Of which, grumble, its excellent new features -- the Sidebar is not a small change -- are almost completely glossed over in the review in favor of how the Finder still doesn't work consistently when used spatially). The key to future improvement, and satisfying all camps, I think may lie in the core functionality of features like Exposé -- a UI that acknowledges the importance of spatial memory (but isn't slavishly beholden to it), but is also clean and simple, and springs into action and then disappears with one mouse movement or a simple click.
I am impressed you were able to be as diplomatic as you were with a couple of the issues. While I still don't understand why anyone would want to select and Get Info on "thousands of files", I think the Finder is probably slower than it should be at this stage with even a few hundred files being manipulated.
There are people who talk about this all the time in the Adobe forums, as if the ability to constantly move and otherwise handle "thousands of files" at one time is not an indication that their workflow is FUBAR. That's not directed at you John; I just don't get why some people refuse to organize their files in a more practical and logical way. Especially graphic designers. Their creative brain has developed at the expense of their logical brain it seems.
Obviously, if you have to drop 1300 files on your desktop to move them or rename them or whatever, you've done something wrong prior to this dilemma. IOW, some of the Finder's shortcomings are simply that it cannot adequately handle User Mistakes as well as the old Finder. To me, this is almost a non-issue beyond a certain point. Call it 500 files.
Also, it sounds to me (and I won't have much opportunity to test it at my home office) like networking is still very much in need of work. Like basic Finder operations, networking operations should more or less require zero thinking / tinkering to get it to work right. Apple is still a long way off from this in terms of networking reponsiveness I think.
Finally, I wish you had made a (visual) point of showing some of Panther's UI glitches (mis-aligned buttons / controls, goofed up sunken widgets that take on slightly different proportions in one state vs. the other, etc.). There's no excuse for Apple to have released the OS without at least making it look darn near perfect... even if there were some problems in the belly of the beast they knew they had to fix (10.3.1).
All in all though I think the review was really well-written / thought-out. Thank you.
To me, the spatial/cognitive means of organizing your windows and workflow makes perfect sense, especially when dealing with multiple apps and multiple documents, if that isn't stating the obvious. Spatial window management is a good thing, but I guess my question is: why does the Finder need to be more than a window (with the option of more of course) to fit that spatial model of window management? Is file management the same as window management from the Finder's point of view? Does that really make things easier or does it restrict what would otherwise be superior solutions to each independently? Does a spatial window managment system necessarily mean that folder = window in the Finder like document = window in other apps? Why is it OK for iTunes to be indexed like this but not OK for the Finder?
I think that these "source" or what I call "index" types of apps have proven to be quite beneficial. Are they MDI? In a very strict sense, sure. But these apps' strengths are being able to deal with many items at once, to sort through the files in question and allow the user to find things quickly. It's more compact, logical, familiar, consistent (well, more or less) and Apple has done it in a way that doesn't require a lot of effort on the part of the user. I think this source view typology is a good thing, despite what Siracusa rightfully points out about the flaws of the metal UI "guidelines."
To me, these things describe the function of the Finder rather well, so it makes sense to me that the Finder be treated more like iTunes, not saying anything about how well this is implemented. I suppose it would be one thing if the Finder managed the files themselves, but it really handles proxies of files and represents directories and groups of files with folders. It's all abstracted. If we could have the system keep everything open and available, just sitting waiting to be handled directly, well then the Finder in the Classic sense of that term would be superfluous. But alas it's too cumbersome so we have this system that we traditionally think of as the Finder instead.
Anyway, I'm babbling.
I guess I'm arguing that spatial window management isn't synonymous with spatial Finder folders, and that more cognitive means of managing documents and clutter can coexist with the indexing type of Finder in Panther, though it still has things to work out.
As for the circular slider, it can be used for good as well as evil and therefore isn't an inherently bad control. An example of a good use is using it to choose the angle of a text shadow. ...
That's an interesting point. In my area we have medical equipment that can rotate 360. Software maker use a circular type of widget all the time to represent it in the user interface. One interesting thing is that some rotations are not a full 360 and thus should have limits on it.
I know, it's an annoying color scheme. I used Firebird and set colors, but you shouldn't have to do that, (brad, master of good interfaces, you hear me? ) and anyway iUse Safari for most browsing tasks; my other tabs are there.
Excellent review. I think John's criticisms of the Finder are mostly right on the money, even if I find the spatial Finder to be a little overrated. I don't think he gives Apple enough credit for the new sidebar, though. Your mileage will vary depending on your work habits, but for me the new sidebar, with its larger capacity and ability to show mounted volumes automatically, has made the Finder much more useable.
One other thing -- if you look closely you'll see that the title bars of inactive Aqua windows still have subtle pinstripes, so it may be a little premature to mourn their passing just yet. :^)
One other thing -- if you look closely you'll see that the title bars of inactive Aqua windows still have subtle pinstripes, so it may be a little premature to mourn their passing just yet. :^)
The active ones do to. To see it I have to grab a window and open it up in GraphicConverter and use the "detail" tool.
Comments
Originally posted by pensieve
[my eyes are still crossed from reading all that white on black text. What's up with that god-awful color scheme on Ars?]
I agree 100% I had to put my glasses on to read the whole article and I wear them maybe twice a year at most. Other than that a great article.
Originally posted by KANE
It's /. (slashdot), not ./ (dotslash)
It was originally dotslash, actually, in homage to the exact thing that \\/\\/ickes was thinking of when he said that.
At some point I guess they figured that "slashdot" sounded better.
Originally posted by Kecksy
Why can't Apple admit the OS X Finder is a train wreck which no amount of "truth tables" or optimizations can fix? They really should consider giving up and rewriting it from scratch. If Apple is working on a great new meta data filesystem and plans to use the current Carbon Finder along side it, god help us.
I agree. The finder is consistently the most unstable application on the OS for me. Tonight, a networked server was disconnected (the other Mac was put to sleep) and it sent the Finder into conniptions. I couldn't even kill the finder.app with a sudo kill -9. I had to force restart because the finder wouldn't quit.
Originally posted by pensieve
I agree. The finder is consistently the most unstable application on the OS for me. Tonight, a networked server was disconnected (the other Mac was put to sleep) and it sent the Finder into conniptions. I couldn't even kill the finder.app with a sudo kill -9. I had to force restart because the finder wouldn't quit.
Right, the same thing occur to me yesterday after a disconnection. It's a shame that Apple miss the reset button.
Thanks for this info, i feared that i have done mistakes.
PS : it did not belong here , but contrary to what some people said, i have connected two jaguar computer with an OS 9,2,1 one. I just choose the manual setting and typewrited the IP adress of the other computer.
Originally posted by drewprops
Eugene risks re-igniting the Great Tab Wars of 2003....
That's right, Mac users actually manually arranged their windows like so many pieces of paper on a desk. Insanity! The height of inefficiency! Au contraire. I won't bore you with the details yet again, but suffice it to say that there is a vast well of cognitive resources just waiting to be tapped by a bunch of boringly coherent and stable objects on a screen.
Just watch a old-school graphics designer using classic Mac OS (if you can still find one in the wild) switch among a seemingly overwhelming sea of windows faster than you, as a mere observer, can even identify what they are. The user knows what they are because he knows where they are, and where they'll be the next time he needs them--they're where he put them.
In short, identifying windows based on their size, position, and appearance (i.e. spatially) is massively efficient and imposes the absolute minimum cognitive load on the user. This is what people do best ? not memorize, maintain, traverse, or chose from lists or tree-like data structures, but recognize and manipulate coherent, stable objects in space (virtual or otherwise).
*Sigh* At least John Siracusa gets it...
Anyway i love the windows. Otherwise i loved the old fashion classic, where the HD are the roots of everything. Now i am a bit confused with computer, start, (favorite and applications are ok for me) and my account start.
Sometimes i have problems to find a particular folder (luckily there is the search function, but you must have the exact syntax). It was never the case under classic.
Originally posted by Amorph
It was originally dotslash, actually, in homage to the exact thing that \\/\\/ickes was thinking of when he said that.
At some point I guess they figured that "slashdot" sounded better.
Well what do you know!
Originally posted by Powerdoc
I ... Otherwise i loved the old fashion classic, where the HD are the roots of everything. ...
IMHO thats it
But that WAS the classic root. The reason why i always preferred macos over windows is/was the classic macos is/was always predictable , right
THAT'S the keyword IMO.
The ars guy mentioned somewhere in his article, that the new finder particularily lost this feature
Well, now, is it a feature or is it a bug? Thats the mother of all (distracting) questions.
PS: Well, when i click on whatever button i'd expect the very same behavior, systemwide, at least on an apple machiine
best
First of all, the discussion on Exposé and the problem of window management is just wonderful. He cuts right to the core of the issue, and takes a step back to survey the field historically and across OSes in a way that's quite enlightening. Lovely job.
Here, though, is my ever-continuing beef (which pops up in the above discussion), something I respectfully disagree with, and something that I imagine he and I will always disagree on. John rightly points out that spatial thinking is a critical part of using an interface, but in his zeal for this philosophy he exaggerates its good aspects (which are many) and downplays its negative aspects (which are considerable).
Here's an example, from the digression on window management, leading up to Exposé:
That's right, Mac users actually manually arranged their windows like so many pieces of paper on a desk. Insanity! The height of inefficiency! Au contraire. I won't bore you with the details yet again, but suffice it to say that there is a vast well of cognitive resources just waiting to be tapped by a bunch of boringly coherent and stable objects on a screen.
Just watch a old-school graphics designer using classic Mac OS (if you can still find one in the wild) switch among a seemingly overwhelming sea of windows faster than you, as a mere observer, can even identify what they are. The user knows what they are because he knows where they are, and where they'll be the next time he needs them--they're where he put them.
In short, identifying windows based on their size, position, and appearance (i.e. spatially) is massively efficient and imposes the absolute minimum cognitive load on the user. This is what people do best ? not memorize, maintain, traverse, or chose from lists or tree-like data structures, but recognize and manipulate coherent, stable objects in space (virtual or otherwise).
It's a great passage, salty and funny, and a nice homage to this form of window management (which anyone, including myself, as an "old-school graphics designer" has participated in).
It's also a homage that brushes aside the very deep frustrations of managing windows spatially. Overlapping windows pile up in a way that become extremely frustrating to navigate, no matter how carefully arranged, ultimately requiring keyboard-chording, window-menuing or (in OS 9) Window-shading just to see what's going on. And this scales ferciously poorly -- the more windows, the more complicated it becomes; the more apps, the same for every app. This is from the viewpoint of someone who's been using the Mac for over twelve years: it's a solution that can work, once you acquire a high level of experience and skill. But it's a lot of work, and it's complicated work. It's no more a solution (rather less of one, really) for the "average" user than hitting command-tab 8 times.
Now John clearly isn't recommending we all return to organizing our windows in every application like pieces of paper solely to manage our windows -- he's bringing up techniques that very experienced classic Mac OS users used to handle the problem. He's doing this, I assume, in order to highlight the philosophy he feels is most neglected by the people who are currently in charge of the OS X UI.
Understood, and point made. When going back to OS 9 -- as I'm occasionally obliged to using a machine that attached to some ancient hulking SCSI scanner that will never be updated -- I'm always greeted by an initial rush of pleasure, a combination of both the older OS's sheer responsiveness and the immediate pleasure of operating in the classic Finder's purely spatial environment. That pleasure doesn't last long: the machine locks up randomly; I'm reacquainted with happily forgotten quirky classic Mac OS items like the Chooser; I spend chunks of time tunneling through directories that could have been traversed through column view in a fraction of the time. Interesting, but in the end -- no thanks.
But that initial pleasure is worth noting. I'm glad we have someone like John fericiously defending this turf, even if I'm not in his camp -- I no longer find the one-to-one relationship between a window and a folder valuable for everyday use in a file manager, and so far I rather like the Panther Finder. (Of which, grumble, its excellent new features -- the Sidebar is not a small change -- are almost completely glossed over in the review in favor of how the Finder still doesn't work consistently when used spatially). The key to future improvement, and satisfying all camps, I think may lie in the core functionality of features like Exposé -- a UI that acknowledges the importance of spatial memory (but isn't slavishly beholden to it), but is also clean and simple, and springs into action and then disappears with one mouse movement or a simple click.
I am impressed you were able to be as diplomatic as you were with a couple of the issues. While I still don't understand why anyone would want to select and Get Info on "thousands of files", I think the Finder is probably slower than it should be at this stage with even a few hundred files being manipulated.
There are people who talk about this all the time in the Adobe forums, as if the ability to constantly move and otherwise handle "thousands of files" at one time is not an indication that their workflow is FUBAR. That's not directed at you John; I just don't get why some people refuse to organize their files in a more practical and logical way. Especially graphic designers. Their creative brain has developed at the expense of their logical brain it seems.
Obviously, if you have to drop 1300 files on your desktop to move them or rename them or whatever, you've done something wrong prior to this dilemma. IOW, some of the Finder's shortcomings are simply that it cannot adequately handle User Mistakes as well as the old Finder. To me, this is almost a non-issue beyond a certain point. Call it 500 files.
Also, it sounds to me (and I won't have much opportunity to test it at my home office) like networking is still very much in need of work. Like basic Finder operations, networking operations should more or less require zero thinking / tinkering to get it to work right. Apple is still a long way off from this in terms of networking reponsiveness I think.
Finally, I wish you had made a (visual) point of showing some of Panther's UI glitches (mis-aligned buttons / controls, goofed up sunken widgets that take on slightly different proportions in one state vs. the other, etc.). There's no excuse for Apple to have released the OS without at least making it look darn near perfect... even if there were some problems in the belly of the beast they knew they had to fix (10.3.1).
All in all though I think the review was really well-written / thought-out. Thank you.
I think that these "source" or what I call "index" types of apps have proven to be quite beneficial. Are they MDI? In a very strict sense, sure. But these apps' strengths are being able to deal with many items at once, to sort through the files in question and allow the user to find things quickly. It's more compact, logical, familiar, consistent (well, more or less) and Apple has done it in a way that doesn't require a lot of effort on the part of the user. I think this source view typology is a good thing, despite what Siracusa rightfully points out about the flaws of the metal UI "guidelines."
To me, these things describe the function of the Finder rather well, so it makes sense to me that the Finder be treated more like iTunes, not saying anything about how well this is implemented. I suppose it would be one thing if the Finder managed the files themselves, but it really handles proxies of files and represents directories and groups of files with folders. It's all abstracted. If we could have the system keep everything open and available, just sitting waiting to be handled directly, well then the Finder in the Classic sense of that term would be superfluous. But alas it's too cumbersome so we have this system that we traditionally think of as the Finder instead.
Anyway, I'm babbling.
I guess I'm arguing that spatial window management isn't synonymous with spatial Finder folders, and that more cognitive means of managing documents and clutter can coexist with the indexing type of Finder in Panther, though it still has things to work out.
Originally posted by John
...
As for the circular slider, it can be used for good as well as evil and therefore isn't an inherently bad control. An example of a good use is using it to choose the angle of a text shadow. ...
That's an interesting point. In my area we have medical equipment that can rotate 360. Software maker use a circular type of widget all the time to represent it in the user interface. One interesting thing is that some rotations are not a full 360 and thus should have limits on it.
One other thing -- if you look closely you'll see that the title bars of inactive Aqua windows still have subtle pinstripes, so it may be a little premature to mourn their passing just yet. :^)
Originally posted by crypto
...
One other thing -- if you look closely you'll see that the title bars of inactive Aqua windows still have subtle pinstripes, so it may be a little premature to mourn their passing just yet. :^)
The active ones do to. To see it I have to grab a window and open it up in GraphicConverter and use the "detail" tool.
Originally posted by Scott
The active ones do to. To see it I have to grab a window and open it up in GraphicConverter and use the "detail" tool.
Huh? Looking at Pixie at 12x zoom I only see gradient.