“To some, Apple has had five chances to build a proper Mac OS X Finder and has failed each and every time. The Classic Mac Finder was a magnificent achievement in software engineering and the Mac OS X version was a pathetic imitation. Their logic has it that Apple should have just ported it over to its “world class” operating system without any alteration whatever. That would have been a great accomplishment and they should not have tampered with success,” Gene Steinberg writes for MacNightOwl.
“I will not, for the sake of this commentary, get involved in any speculation about the alleged desire on the part of the Mac OS X programming team, headed in large part by former NeXT people, to ditch as many traditional Mac elements as they could. That sort of speculation isn’t going to change the situation one whit. Instead, let’s look at the existing Finder, and see if there’s room for improvement,” Steinberg writes. “Some of the folks delivering their own wish lists for Leopard suggest that the Finder is way overdue for a major overhaul. It’s time for Apple to sacrifice some of the needless eye candy visual effects and do something practical that will provide a true 21st century file viewing mechanism.”
Full article here.
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I for one found pre OS X itterations of Mac OS to be good for nothing more than a punch line.
If Apple can honor the ease of use mentality of the OS then they have achieved their goal, in my mind.
All Finder needs IMHO is even better Spotlight integration…which I read here last week, is coming in Leopard.
MDN word: similar
As someone who left the mac when when I moved to a school that didn’t use them, and didn’t come back until OS X. Can someone tell me what was so amazing about the classic finder? What did it do that we still can’t do with the os X finder?
I think spotlight feature should be even more tightly integrated with the Finder functions.
And yes, it should be blazingly fast on decent specs.
MDN word: kept
(good things are kept secret)
I must admit, I have no problems with the current finder whatsoever… However, I never used a Mac pre-OS X, so I don’t know what the old finder was like. Either way, the current finder beats anything I was using in Windows before I made the switch.
I agree, I like the current finder better than the pre-OS X finder. That said, I would like to see the current Finder improved with some of the author’s suggestions. One thing I really want to see is, in column view, the columns automatically resize to fit the file names. That is really annoying.
Honestly, I don’t use Spotlight that much. If I absolutely cannot remember where I put something and/or named something I’ll use it in a pinch, but normally I don’t think it’s more useful than the Finder.
I hate to say it, but I think windows explorer is easier to use than finder. Its an area that I think needs to be redesigned.
The only thing I wish for the current finder is BETTER PERFORMANCE. It’s a dog and scrolling through a long list of files on all three of my machines (Rev A. iMac G5 1.8GHz 1GB RAM 20″; Rev B. iMac G5 17″ 2.0GHz 512MB RAM; PowerBook G4 12″ 1.5GHz 1.25GB RAM).
But I love my Macs just the same. Just please fix this one thing.
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full of shit!
tiger works fine, I can navigate much quicker around it by using quick keys than any incarnation of os9
Please spare the flames, but I have long thought that the Win95/98 Windows Explorer was the best GUI file browser I’ve ever used. It was one of the few good things about Windows, and they screwed it up in later versions.
What was so good about it?
1) the two windows approach, so I could have a detailed listing ofthe directory in one window while the other window had the directory hierarchy.
2) it was vertically oriented in browsning the directory hierachy. “List” view in Finder is harder to use, and “Column” view is a pain because it is horizonatally oriented – it speads acroos the screen, and long names require frequent resizing of columns. Just awkward. I never use “Icon” view.
Now if Apple would make Finder more like early Windows Explorer, and would make windows easier to resize (the limitation of the handle on the lower right corner is also a pain), they would have stolen all the good ideas worth stealing from Windows. (Ooops! Make that “copy”, not “steal”!)
The only thing that I find annoying about the current Finder is that it “cannot” find anything unless there is a Spotlight database. If you disable Spotlight by excluding a volume, and you go to search, it cannot resort to merely scanning the volume to locate files by the selected parameters, even if it is slower..
I’ve used Mac OS (and its predecessor Mac System Software) since 1984 (and Lisa System Software before that) and I watched it mature from a simple, well-designed interface (with room for refinement) into a bloated, unintuitive pile of features that any second-rate software company could have developed.
Mac OS X slashed extraneous and redundant features as mercilessly as Steve Jobs slashed the pork-ridden corporate culture at Apple. It’s better for it. Sure, there’s room for improvement, which is why Apple keeps improving it.
I’ve been a Mac user since System 6. Minor complaining aside, I’ve never been so PRODUCTIVE as with Tiger.
Spotlight, Automator and a plethora of menu shortcuts have made the current Mac the most productive ever.
I forgot to mention STABILITY, STABILITY, STABILITY.
In the old days, hitting Apple-S was just automatic.
I was one of the people who, at first, hated OS X’s Finder when compared to OS 9. I had a whole quiver full of utilities that gave me back some OS 9 functionality that I couldn’t live without. The only one left for me is FruitMenu which allows me to customize the Apple Menu. Once you understand the OS X Finder and the Dock, folder navigation and Application launching become so much more elegant than in OS 9.
With the addition of the SideBar, the Finder got even better. Spotlight – even better.
So what improvements are left? 3 major ones than I can come up with off the top of my head:
1. Buy the rights to “Default Folder X” and build it into the Finder (easily navigate to recently used folders while opening/saving + much, much more.)
2. Buy the rights to “A Better Finder Rename” and add Batch file renaming into the Finder
3. Add more Contextual menu support for common functions (copying and pasting icons, moving files, etc.)
I don’t know who these people are who are complaining about the OS X finder, but they are surely people who have only dabbled with it. I hate when I have to work on an OS 9 machine (very rarely these days), and I get physically ill when I have to work in the Windows environment (sort of like an anxiety attack). And that’s after applying skins, etc. to XP to at least make the icons look like OS X – talk about polishing a turd!
Magic Word: type – And why does type still look like crap in XP (not that I ever use windows to get work done). It truly is pathetic.
One thing I would love to see added in Leopard, which is not related to the Finder per se, is the ability to add Spotlight comments and colour Labels (plus other metadata?) to files as I save them. At the moment if I save something in whatver application it may be, I then have to find the file via spotlight or the finder to then add a colour label, comment, etc.
It would so increase the power of Spotlight (and in turn the Finder) if metadata of this sort could be added via the save box.
The one thing I miss from windows is the way I could set a folder view in the explorer bar and then have whichever view I wanted in the main pain. I could flick back and forth between a myriad of folder within one window. You can easily navigate in the Finder but it’s a few more steps, involves more windows (spring loaded or otherwise). The sidebar is great but I did like the windows way of doing it (at least in that one respect).
The classic finder sucked… These dinosaurs need to get out of the cave more often.
Here’s my wish list for the 10.5 version of Finder:
> make it possible to open new folders in list view, and not just column view
> when doing a ‘save’ or ‘open’ from within an application, improve the visual tree directory for viewing file locations within nested folders. As a recent Windows switcher, I find that that this is not at all intuitive on the Mac.
> make it possible to cut and paste files and folders from one location to another by right-clicking or control-clicking.
> make it possible to delete files or folders by pressing ‘delete’
Nobody seems to get it. The finder in OS X IS the finder from pre-OS X. The reason Apple never made a proper Finder is because of one word: Carbon. Apple knew that they would never actively maintain Carbon properly unless there was a good reason to, and they made the Finder that reason. However, the OS X Finder is a worthless piece of crap and will be changed for Leopard because Carbon will not be ported to Intel.
you people are a bunch of idiots. get over yourselves. could you be bigger geeks? do you have so little in life to worry over that THIS has to be a topic of conversation? SWITCH TO WINDOWS SO YOU CAN AT LEAST HAVE GOOD THINGS TO BITCH ABOUT.
Yep. I stumble around in the dark unable to find my way anywhere with Finder…don’t. Finder is absolutely OK by me.
BUT if Apple deliver something I never new I needed I will no doubt wonder how I ever got by without it. So come along Apple, my appetite is wetted…gimme gimmeeee!
Gog wrote:
> make it possible to delete files or folders by pressing ‘delete’
Try Apple-Delete.
global view options for icon, column, or list view. Nothing worse than browsing back thru a finder window only to have it switch modes.
This is also very frustratng for new users.
boomboom: In the old days, it was Command-S, not Apple-S, and still is.
“List view” is my favorite style. Navigating from the keyboard is a snap… up/down arrows to move the selection. Command-left/Command-right to collapse and expand sub-directories. Command-up to go up a level, Command-down to open the selection. Very powerful and quick. Of course, this worked in pre-X versions, too.
The sidebar was my favorite addition. I keep my most freqently-used folders there.
The dock will accept any folder and provide a hierarical menu, just like the Apple menu of OS 9 and earlier.
Having used both the pre Mac OS X Finder (8+9) and the OS X Finder I must say that the OS X Finder is much better. But it is indeed still lacking many of the nice features I was used to when I used the NeXTSTEP Finder. What I find incomprehensable is that Apple/NeXT had the best Finder around, probably written as a Cocoa app, and all they came up with was the current finder. NeXT was much more advanced in many respects so I hope they wil finally catch up with it when 10.5 comes out.
Indeed they also could try buying the rights of Pathfinder, a nice app which many people use as a replacement for the Finder.
MW time – it´s time they get it right
In a word: CONSISTENCY
Somewhere long the line, the NeXT engineers stirred in their ideas about how the Finder should work and in the process lost the consistency of how everything in the Finder works.
Apple needs to get back to it’s roots in this regard. Visual and functional consistency needs to return to the FInder!!!
MDN Secret Word: job… It’s a BIG job, but it’s got to be done!