That Finder Thing
John Gruber in 2002 (via Talus Baddley):
Once the NeXT regime stepped in and assumed top positions in Apple’s software division, they started putting their stamp on Apple’s UI design, despite the fact their input on such matters was neither wanted nor needed. The hallmarks of NeXT’s UI design are extravagant attention to cosmetic appeal, and nearly no attention whatsoever to actual usability. This is enough to fool many people, especially converts switching from other platforms, where the interfaces are both ugly and dysfunctional. If it looks better, it must be better, right?
[…]
Look no further than Mac OS X’s System Preferences. The icons looks nice, and the window smoothly slides around and redraws itself as you change from one panel to another. But because the list of preference panels occupies the same space as the panels themselves, you can’t switch directly from one panel to another, except for the handful of panels you put in the favorites list atop the window.
The favorites list is now gone. There’s now a Customize… command to hide certain icons, but this is not a replacement for favorites, more a way to hide panes that you never use. The Show All Preferences feature does not, actually, show all of the preferences; it just takes you back to the icon view that has some icons hidden. Switching panes still takes two clicks. Lists are still needlessly constrained in size because the main window isn’t resizable.
And so Apple was inundated with feedback complaining about the Desktop file manager. The complaints could be summed up as “Bring back the Finder.” But instead of bringing back the Finder, they simply brought back the name, along with a few superficial features.
[…]
The most common question I’ve heard about the new OS X Finder is “Why doesn’t it remember the size and location of open windows?”
13 years and a Cocoa rewrite later, the Finder still doesn’t remember how many windows I had open, or their sizes or locations. It doesn’t remember that I always like to have the status bar shown. (I wrote a script to put the windows back where I want, and even then the Finder doesn’t always obey the command to show the status bar.) It sometimes forgets my preferred sidebar and column widths.
Icon view doesn’t use the same pixel-perfect icons as the other views, and it is still so unreliable that it’s not worth using except to quickly view a bunch of image thumbnails. And I’m not even talking about remembering manually positioned icons, which I’ve long since given up on; the Arrange By feature doesn’t work reliably, either.
The classic Finder is like using your own hands. The OS X Finder is like using a joystick to control a set of robot hands — clumsy and inherently less intuitive.
[…]
Keep the new column view, but not as an alternative to icon and list views for normal (spatial) Finder windows. Instead, create a distinct new “Column Browser” window class, which acts like the column view in the current OS X Finder. When you double-click a folder in a Column Browser, however, it should open in a regular (spatial) Finder window.
Gruber said he wasn’t holding his breath, and that was wise. I’m not surprised that Apple never brought back the spatial Finder. What does surprise me is the state of the browsing Finder. It’s gained some browsing features such as the path bar, tags, and tabs. But the basic browsing functionality is still no match for Apple’s Web browser, Safari, which has better window state retention, bookmarks/favorites, tabs, history, and search.
