Finder Followups

Daring Fireball has posted followup comments about the OS X Finder:

Mostly, though, I think they’ve been conditioned by years of exposure to poorly designed file managers. If your file manager is irritating, you learn to stop managing your files.

That the OS X Finder is good enough for some does not mean it is good enough for all. When newcomers to the Mac—no matter how experienced they are with other platforms—dismiss long-time Mac users’ criticism with a bit of “good enough for me” hand-waving, it belies their ignorance of what the Mac truly stands for. Let’s turn the tables and imagine that the GNU bash shell (favored by many Linux users) wasn’t able to run on Mac OS X. Bash advocates would, rightly, complain loudly. Now imagine if a long-time Mac user responded to their complaints by saying, I only use the Terminal to run “top” and to open hidden files once in a while, but I don’t see anything wrong with tcsh. You Linux switchers are just complaining because tcsh is a little different.

What a great way of explaining it. Also included is this comment from Steven Frank, which matches my experience and reaction:

At WWDC last year, my co-workers and I sat in quiet horror as we heard the umpteenth presenter say, “Now I’m going to turn on the new ‘metal’ look for this window, because it looks pretty cool.” This from actual Apple employees, in Apple’s actual engineering department. What happened to all the people who gave a damn about the Mac user experience?