8 ms·

They are 100% correct about the spatial Finder; 15 years later and what the current OS has is still laughable compared to some of the gems of the Classic Finder

They are 100% correct about the spatial Finder; 15 years later and what the current OS has is still laughable compared to some of the gems of the Classic Finder. A few years back Steve Jobs had the audacity to describe some Cocoa rewrite as a “whole new Finder” and I got excited only to realize it was still garbage. You sort of have to experience the Classic Finder to understand just how wrong the modern Finder really is. From small details (like EVERY window remembering exactly how you arranged it) to not having to wonder what will happen when you click something, not to mention the pop-up tab windows from 8.5+. Also, to this day I don’t quite understand why Apple went so far away from Platinum. Today’s toolbar icons and buttons are downright ugly compared to the UI that was achieved with far fewer colors on Classic Macs. They “almost” had it when 10.5 Leopard managed to unify most of the OS and apps but then they started fiddling again. While I do like the “vibrancy” effect in parts of the current OS, even that is overdone (scrolling under toolbars, really?). It would have been better to combine the vibrancy technology with more professional user interface elements reminiscent of Classic.

duaneb 10y ago
> From small details (like EVERY window remembering exactly how you arranged it) This—along with the rest of the 2d layout—is my absolute least favorite aspect of the finder. If I could completely disable that (along with the .DS_store and __MACOSX absurdities) and force everything to use three-column layout, I would in a heartbeat. It's just a recipe to PREVENT easy access to your data—how can they allow dragging icons out of the view or overlapping each other? You can't even "reload" to reset their location, and people can even send you ZIPPED FILES where the locations are broken. Coverflow is even worse for usability. I have no idea how people can work with either icons or no ability to switch up the sorting on demand—I don't think I've used my desktop except as basically a "tmp" folder for screenshots in years. Why not just use launchpad as the desktop? Does anyone actually use their desktop to store often accessed files, or is it just a replacement for ~/Documents at this point? I wish they would give ANY love to the finder at this point. I don't care how it's written; it's gotten steadily less usable with every iteration.
- nihonde 10y ago
  I agree with all of your points and would add: 1. Why is it so hard to keep track of recently recently touched files and folders in Finder? 2. Why does the save/open dialogue constantly forget where I was just saving/opening stuff? 3. Why doesn't opening a new tab open to your current location instead of ~/? 4. Why can't I completely customize the sidebar in a Finder window? 5. Why isn't there a native window switcher keyboard mapping? 6. Why do menubar items just vanish without a trace when menus need horizontal space? I could go on but these things persist as problems for years while Apple focuses its efforts on superficial UI gimmicks.
  - mistersquid 10y ago
    > 1. Why is it so hard to keep track of recently recently touched files and folders in Finder? This one's sort of on the user. Not sure how it could be simplified. > 2. Why does the save/open dialogue constantly forget where I was just saving/opening stuff? This is dependent on the application doing the saving, not on the Finder. Some applications are very good at remembering last-saved location. Photoshop and BBEdit are good examples of this, especially Photoshop which has per-menu-item preferences for things like Open, Save, and Export. However, many applications have developers not familiar with macOS conventions and so don't provide such affordances (I won't single out any applications because they really are too numerous to mention.) > 3. Why doesn't opening a new tab open to your current location instead of ~/? This is customizable in Finder > Preferences… I'm not sure what you mean by "current location". If you mean duplicate where you are now there are other ways to do it. I personally have a AppleScript that copies my current POSIX path to my clipboard. I type Command T to open a new tab, Type Command-Shift G to "Go to Folder" and type Command V to paste what's on my clipboard. But I'm not sure that's what you're looking for. You might head on over to http://discussions.apple.com http://discussions.apple.com and ask over there. > 4. Why can't I completely customize the sidebar in a Finder window? Yeah the customizability is restricted, mainly because letting it be too customizable means inexperienced users can get their sidebar where it's next to impossible to provide support. That said, advanced users usually know that the sidebar is only to store a few handy items. I mainly use it only for visual confirmation that my remote mounts and local disks are mounted. I use keyboard shortcuts to navigate the file system in the Finder. > 5. Why isn't there a native window switcher keyboard mapping? I think you're looking for Command ` and Command-shift `. This works pretty much system wide (except for a few applications by software vendors that. Just. Refuse. Native. Keyboard shortcuts.) > 6. Why do menubar items just vanish without a trace when menus need horizontal space? Do you mean that your menubar is so crowded that you lose menu items? I think I recall this happening and, to be honest, I don't have any solutions here. You might head on over to http://discussions.apple.com http://discussions.apple.com. People can be really helpful there. Good luck.
haroldp 10y ago
> They are 100% correct about the spatial Finder; 15 years later and what the current OS has is still laughable compared to some of the gems of the Classic Finder. And every version that comes out, the Finder moves further away from spacial and towards a disk browser. I hate it so much. > I don’t quite understand why Apple went so far away from Platinum. For the purpose of looking cool in a demo. OS9 had Platinum, and it was the standard, and third party apps that didn't fall in line, really stuck out in an uncomplimentary way and collected a lot of flack. Since then, OSX has gone through... how many re-skinnings? How many optional app UI kits? Do you remember the brushed aluminium one that was popular for a minute? Remember all of their one-off, over the top, skeuomorphic apps? Now Chrome can get all fucky with the title bar and no one even notices. And one of Apple's own flagship apps, iTunes, is such a user-surly, confused mess of UI mistakes it's hardly usable. > not to mention the pop-up tab windows from 8.5+. Finder Drawers! I miss them too. I especially miss the huge contextual menu ecosystem that OS9 had. Anyone else miss WindowShade?
- philwelch 10y ago
  Compared to the UI used between 1984 and the launch of Mac OS 8 in 1997, Platinum itself was a short-lived re-skinning. The 1984 UI was colorized in 1991 with System 7 and only fully reskinned in 1997, a 13 year span. Mac OS X is 15 years old now, for contrast--plenty of time to fit in a few reskins.
  - Kadin 10y ago
    Not really sure the numbers make the point you're suggesting they do. The "Classic" Mac OS UI developed incrementally over about 15 years, in a mostly evolutionary process. Even Platinum wasn't an especially dramatic change except in the context of that conservatism. But over the product's lifespan, it represented significant improvements. Over about the same amount of time, OS X has ping-ponged around, undergoing a series of major reskins, without much in the way of consistent direction. It seems to be a lot of change-for-change's-sake, and it's not clear to me as a user throughout the entire period that the end result now, in 2016, is all that much better than where we started out back in 2000. Apple's had nearly as much time with OS X's Aqua UI as they had to take the Classic interface from its start (512x342 1-bit pixels on the 128k) all the way to Platinum, and the results are not exactly impressive.
Doctor_Fegg 10y ago
Amen. I get exasperated that you still can't properly disable browser-type windows in the OS X Finder. Yes, you can press cmd-option-T to "Hide Toolbar", but 1 in 10 new windows still appears with the browser appearance - network drives, USB sticks, something you've unzipped, or just randomly because Finder feels like it. I miss the whole spatial Finder, but if Apple could just give me an option for "no browser windows, ever", that would solve 80% of my angst. (Well, Finder-related angst, at any rate.)
- thesmallestcat 10y ago
  And in recent versions, the zombie Preview pane. Still haven't figured out how to obliterate that thing for good.
MBCook 10y ago
I stop using Macs around 1994, so I remember the spatial finder existing but not how useful it was. I didn't come back to the Mac untill 10.4 was out and obviously by then it was gone. I know John Siracusa really wants it back, but I couldn't remember how great it was. Recently it hit me that iOS is completely spatial. I don't know where any of my apps are, except that they are on this location on the screen on this page of apps. The only way I can find them is by their spatial location. I'm not looking for Overcast, I'm looking for the thing that second from the bottom of the second page on the left-hand side. More than once I've opened an app and forgot what I was looking for until I opened it because I was only thinking about where it was in the interface. Oh well. We'll probably never get it back.
- cyberferret 10y ago
  One of the most annoying things to me about the Apple Watch is the fact that the icons tend to move around to random locations whenever an update is done. My eyesight is not up to par any more, and I rely on the app I need being in a particular spot on the cluster of tiny icons on my wrist, and when it moves, it is nigh on impossible to find quickly. I appreciate the irony that the company touted for reinventing and improving UX is now setting fire to that legacy.
  - MBCook 10y ago
    The bubble screen is terrible, but at least in watchOS 3 you're supposed to almost never have to use it. It's one of those interfaces that looks great in the video and it's horrible to use in real life.
    - fredsir 10y ago
      I dread the bubble screen. Having used watchOS 3 for months, I cannot remember having used it for months. It's just not how you do it anymore. You either pin apps in the dock, which is awesome, or as a complication on one of your watch faces. I currently have 5 watch faces I all use for different scenarios. It's awesome compared to watchOS 2!
lr 10y ago
I'll take Classic Mac OS Finder, BeOS FS UI, and NeXTSTEP UI over OS X Finder any day.
thought_alarm 10y ago
The problem is that OS X Finder tries to support both Spatial and Browser modes. It has never separated the two modes properly, going all the way back to OS X 10.0, and as a result both Spatial mode and Browser mode are worse for it. > From small details (like EVERY window remembering exactly how you arranged it) to not having to wonder what will happen when you click something The problem is that Finder tries too hard to remember window sizes and positions when in Browser mode. Finder doesn't have a configurable browser window size. Instead, it stores the window size and position in each folder. So when you browse around to different folders you clobber any existing settings those folders may have had. Try this: create a new folder on the Desktop and open it. It will be the non-configurable default Finder browser size that is way too small. Now use that browser to navigate to your home folder, etc. You've just clobbered your home folder window settings. As a result, you never really know what size the Finder window is going to be when you open a folder. OS X Finder needs to do the following: - Embrace the differences between Spatial Mode and Browser Mode. Allow the user to choose whether they prefer Browser Mode or Spatial Mode. Command+N always opens a new Browser Window. - Completely separate Spatial view settings and Browser view settings. - A Browser window shall never affect the Spatial view settings for a folder. - The default size of a Browser window needs to be user-customizable, and it must use the user's preferred size for every new Browser window. The size of the Browser window should never be dictated by a folder's Spatial window size or position. - Provide menu items and keyboard shortcuts for the "Use as Defaults" command for setting the default view settings, as well as for reverting a folder's custom settings to the default view settings. If I enter a folder that has some goofy custom font sizes or column widths, I want to be able to hit a key and have it snap to my preferred layout.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  Two words: Path Finder.
  - rsl7 10y ago
    Its focus is still on being a file browser though, right? Last time I used it was even less about spatial features than the Finder, and more about cramming every possible gizmo into a single-window browser.
frik 10y ago
What you describe about Finder is sadly similar with Windows Explorer. The tipping point was Explorer/Shell32 that came with Windows 2000. It remembered what you personalised for every folder, it had HTML support, it could be customised including the toolbar and the sidebar(s). If you entered a URL it transformed to Internet Explorer. It worked like that from Windows 95 (with ShellUpdate that came for free with IE4, and already integrated known as Win98) and lasted until Windows ME and 2000. WinXP wasn't bad, but several UI decision were bad. And the trend continued with Vista that had a stupid bare bone Explorer that forgot too many settings all the time (lack of love, and the halted complete rewrite in C# that had to be scrapped, and the missing WinFS were probably the reason). Win7 is like Vista but misses the advanced search menu, making the local search even more useless, and WinFS was declared dead. The UI of Win8/10 sucks, though some former undocumented hidden features of Explorer/shell were integrated to the Ribbon-bar. The good thing about pre-Win10 you can replace Explorer.exe with your own favorite shell (file manager plus desktop in one exe). The cool thing about Win32 UI is that it has very good optimisation for low latency, as it had to run on very low spec 1980s PCs. You can interact with the UI even before the UI is rendered on screen. So you can open a menu and navigate around and do some action, all with the keyboard as fast as you want even if the UI is slower on your system. MS got it completely backwards with WinRuntime aka UniversalApp. Opening the start menu in Win10 takes 500ms or so and the lag is very annoying, and opening most apps shows even a opening animation to hide that it takes way to long to get a useable app - open the calc.exe in Win7 and compare it to opening the calc app in Win10 - what a vast difference, what a complete failure and a huge step backward. The best would be if a new MS manager would scrap the Win10 UI development incl UniversalAppFail (starting such an app takes more than 500ms wtf and shows a loading picture), and take the Win10 kernel and start development again taking the Windows 7 Shell/UI and for the Explorer take the Win 2000 or WinXP Explorer as base and start from there.
- 72deluxe 10y ago
  I thought XP's Explorer was the best, and it went downhill from there. I would have to agree with your appraisal of Windows 10's Explorer, which puts those stupid Action directory shortcuts back after every update, which I then to remove by forcing a registry key. I do not understand why you try and give users access to Documents and Downloads in 20 places and then hide the actual drives and directories, instead of educating users. Nobody struggled using Win 3.11 File Manager. Calculator and Pictures are the big UniversalApp failures. Thank goodness you can use the bundled older Photo Viewer as it doesn't take minutes to start. Weirdly, UWP apps are just COM apps like everything else so why are they so slow????
rsync 10y ago
"They are 100% correct about the spatial Finder" I never used OS9, so I don't know about this ... Was the "spatial finder" still a hierarchical viewing of the underlying filesystem, just presented in a better fashion ? Or was it non-hierarchical ? Did OS9 even have a filesystem as I, a UNIX user, think of ? Or was that completely hidden with abstraction ?
- lukifer 10y ago
  OS9's file system was actually very similar to modern OS X (earlier incarnations of HFS). So it's an abstraction of a standard directory hierarchy, albeit a very elegant and disciplined one. The major difference under the hood was the presence of resource forks for various kinds of metadata and UI (icons, for example).
- WorldMaker 10y ago
  "Spatial Finder" was still a hierarchical viewing of the filesystem, yes. There are many articles on the subject, but the "spatial" was about the idea that files and folders "remembered" where you put them, so that the same file was always in the same (pixel-exact) space you chose to place it and folder windows remembered their exact same size, shape, and location on the screen. Regardless to how you navigated to them, but since on the Mac Classic OS the Desktop was the "root" folder, you typically navigated to your folders in the same physical way every time (to the point where you might muscle memorize where your files and folders "are" in the space layout of your screen). As a Unix user it used to be you could get a basic spatial mode from Gnome's Nautilus, if you wanted to play with it, but it looks like Gnome File Manager dropped that feature somewhat recently.
  - rconti 10y ago
    Yeah, it's really weird how Windows and OS X have a 'loop' where the Desktop is a directory inside of your home directory.

duaneb 10y ago

> From small details (like EVERY window remembering exactly how you arranged it) This—along with the rest of the 2d layout—is my absolute least favorite aspect of the finder. If I could completely disable that (along with the .DS_store and __MACOSX absurdities) and force everything to use three-column layout, I would in a heartbeat. It's just a recipe to PREVENT easy access to your data—how can they allow dragging icons out of the view or overlapping each other? You can't even "reload" to reset their location, and people can even send you ZIPPED FILES where the locations are broken. Coverflow is even worse for usability. I have no idea how people can work with either icons or no ability to switch up the sorting on demand—I don't think I've used my desktop except as basically a "tmp" folder for screenshots in years. Why not just use launchpad as the desktop? Does anyone actually use their desktop to store often accessed files, or is it just a replacement for ~/Documents at this point? I wish they would give ANY love to the finder at this point. I don't care how it's written; it's gotten steadily less usable with every iteration.

nihonde 10y ago
I agree with all of your points and would add: 1. Why is it so hard to keep track of recently recently touched files and folders in Finder? 2. Why does the save/open dialogue constantly forget where I was just saving/opening stuff? 3. Why doesn't opening a new tab open to your current location instead of ~/? 4. Why can't I completely customize the sidebar in a Finder window? 5. Why isn't there a native window switcher keyboard mapping? 6. Why do menubar items just vanish without a trace when menus need horizontal space? I could go on but these things persist as problems for years while Apple focuses its efforts on superficial UI gimmicks.
- mistersquid 10y ago
  > 1. Why is it so hard to keep track of recently recently touched files and folders in Finder? This one's sort of on the user. Not sure how it could be simplified. > 2. Why does the save/open dialogue constantly forget where I was just saving/opening stuff? This is dependent on the application doing the saving, not on the Finder. Some applications are very good at remembering last-saved location. Photoshop and BBEdit are good examples of this, especially Photoshop which has per-menu-item preferences for things like Open, Save, and Export. However, many applications have developers not familiar with macOS conventions and so don't provide such affordances (I won't single out any applications because they really are too numerous to mention.) > 3. Why doesn't opening a new tab open to your current location instead of ~/? This is customizable in Finder > Preferences… I'm not sure what you mean by "current location". If you mean duplicate where you are now there are other ways to do it. I personally have a AppleScript that copies my current POSIX path to my clipboard. I type Command T to open a new tab, Type Command-Shift G to "Go to Folder" and type Command V to paste what's on my clipboard. But I'm not sure that's what you're looking for. You might head on over to http://discussions.apple.com http://discussions.apple.com and ask over there. > 4. Why can't I completely customize the sidebar in a Finder window? Yeah the customizability is restricted, mainly because letting it be too customizable means inexperienced users can get their sidebar where it's next to impossible to provide support. That said, advanced users usually know that the sidebar is only to store a few handy items. I mainly use it only for visual confirmation that my remote mounts and local disks are mounted. I use keyboard shortcuts to navigate the file system in the Finder. > 5. Why isn't there a native window switcher keyboard mapping? I think you're looking for Command ` and Command-shift `. This works pretty much system wide (except for a few applications by software vendors that. Just. Refuse. Native. Keyboard shortcuts.) > 6. Why do menubar items just vanish without a trace when menus need horizontal space? Do you mean that your menubar is so crowded that you lose menu items? I think I recall this happening and, to be honest, I don't have any solutions here. You might head on over to http://discussions.apple.com http://discussions.apple.com. People can be really helpful there. Good luck.

haroldp 10y ago

> They are 100% correct about the spatial Finder; 15 years later and what the current OS has is still laughable compared to some of the gems of the Classic Finder. And every version that comes out, the Finder moves further away from spacial and towards a disk browser. I hate it so much. > I don’t quite understand why Apple went so far away from Platinum. For the purpose of looking cool in a demo. OS9 had Platinum, and it was the standard, and third party apps that didn't fall in line, really stuck out in an uncomplimentary way and collected a lot of flack. Since then, OSX has gone through... how many re-skinnings? How many optional app UI kits? Do you remember the brushed aluminium one that was popular for a minute? Remember all of their one-off, over the top, skeuomorphic apps? Now Chrome can get all fucky with the title bar and no one even notices. And one of Apple's own flagship apps, iTunes, is such a user-surly, confused mess of UI mistakes it's hardly usable. > not to mention the pop-up tab windows from 8.5+. Finder Drawers! I miss them too. I especially miss the huge contextual menu ecosystem that OS9 had. Anyone else miss WindowShade?

philwelch 10y ago
Compared to the UI used between 1984 and the launch of Mac OS 8 in 1997, Platinum itself was a short-lived re-skinning. The 1984 UI was colorized in 1991 with System 7 and only fully reskinned in 1997, a 13 year span. Mac OS X is 15 years old now, for contrast--plenty of time to fit in a few reskins.
- Kadin 10y ago
  Not really sure the numbers make the point you're suggesting they do. The "Classic" Mac OS UI developed incrementally over about 15 years, in a mostly evolutionary process. Even Platinum wasn't an especially dramatic change except in the context of that conservatism. But over the product's lifespan, it represented significant improvements. Over about the same amount of time, OS X has ping-ponged around, undergoing a series of major reskins, without much in the way of consistent direction. It seems to be a lot of change-for-change's-sake, and it's not clear to me as a user throughout the entire period that the end result now, in 2016, is all that much better than where we started out back in 2000. Apple's had nearly as much time with OS X's Aqua UI as they had to take the Classic interface from its start (512x342 1-bit pixels on the 128k) all the way to Platinum, and the results are not exactly impressive.

Doctor_Fegg 10y ago

Amen. I get exasperated that you still can't properly disable browser-type windows in the OS X Finder. Yes, you can press cmd-option-T to "Hide Toolbar", but 1 in 10 new windows still appears with the browser appearance - network drives, USB sticks, something you've unzipped, or just randomly because Finder feels like it. I miss the whole spatial Finder, but if Apple could just give me an option for "no browser windows, ever", that would solve 80% of my angst. (Well, Finder-related angst, at any rate.)

thesmallestcat 10y ago
And in recent versions, the zombie Preview pane. Still haven't figured out how to obliterate that thing for good.

MBCook 10y ago

I stop using Macs around 1994, so I remember the spatial finder existing but not how useful it was. I didn't come back to the Mac untill 10.4 was out and obviously by then it was gone. I know John Siracusa really wants it back, but I couldn't remember how great it was. Recently it hit me that iOS is completely spatial. I don't know where any of my apps are, except that they are on this location on the screen on this page of apps. The only way I can find them is by their spatial location. I'm not looking for Overcast, I'm looking for the thing that second from the bottom of the second page on the left-hand side. More than once I've opened an app and forgot what I was looking for until I opened it because I was only thinking about where it was in the interface. Oh well. We'll probably never get it back.

cyberferret 10y ago
One of the most annoying things to me about the Apple Watch is the fact that the icons tend to move around to random locations whenever an update is done. My eyesight is not up to par any more, and I rely on the app I need being in a particular spot on the cluster of tiny icons on my wrist, and when it moves, it is nigh on impossible to find quickly. I appreciate the irony that the company touted for reinventing and improving UX is now setting fire to that legacy.
- MBCook 10y ago
  The bubble screen is terrible, but at least in watchOS 3 you're supposed to almost never have to use it. It's one of those interfaces that looks great in the video and it's horrible to use in real life.
  - fredsir 10y ago
    I dread the bubble screen. Having used watchOS 3 for months, I cannot remember having used it for months. It's just not how you do it anymore. You either pin apps in the dock, which is awesome, or as a complication on one of your watch faces. I currently have 5 watch faces I all use for different scenarios. It's awesome compared to watchOS 2!

lr 10y ago

I'll take Classic Mac OS Finder, BeOS FS UI, and NeXTSTEP UI over OS X Finder any day.

thought_alarm 10y ago

The problem is that OS X Finder tries to support both Spatial and Browser modes. It has never separated the two modes properly, going all the way back to OS X 10.0, and as a result both Spatial mode and Browser mode are worse for it. > From small details (like EVERY window remembering exactly how you arranged it) to not having to wonder what will happen when you click something The problem is that Finder tries too hard to remember window sizes and positions when in Browser mode. Finder doesn't have a configurable browser window size. Instead, it stores the window size and position in each folder. So when you browse around to different folders you clobber any existing settings those folders may have had. Try this: create a new folder on the Desktop and open it. It will be the non-configurable default Finder browser size that is way too small. Now use that browser to navigate to your home folder, etc. You've just clobbered your home folder window settings. As a result, you never really know what size the Finder window is going to be when you open a folder. OS X Finder needs to do the following: - Embrace the differences between Spatial Mode and Browser Mode. Allow the user to choose whether they prefer Browser Mode or Spatial Mode. Command+N always opens a new Browser Window. - Completely separate Spatial view settings and Browser view settings. - A Browser window shall never affect the Spatial view settings for a folder. - The default size of a Browser window needs to be user-customizable, and it must use the user's preferred size for every new Browser window. The size of the Browser window should never be dictated by a folder's Spatial window size or position. - Provide menu items and keyboard shortcuts for the "Use as Defaults" command for setting the default view settings, as well as for reverting a folder's custom settings to the default view settings. If I enter a folder that has some goofy custom font sizes or column widths, I want to be able to hit a key and have it snap to my preferred layout.

TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
Two words: Path Finder.
- rsl7 10y ago
  Its focus is still on being a file browser though, right? Last time I used it was even less about spatial features than the Finder, and more about cramming every possible gizmo into a single-window browser.

frik 10y ago

What you describe about Finder is sadly similar with Windows Explorer. The tipping point was Explorer/Shell32 that came with Windows 2000. It remembered what you personalised for every folder, it had HTML support, it could be customised including the toolbar and the sidebar(s). If you entered a URL it transformed to Internet Explorer. It worked like that from Windows 95 (with ShellUpdate that came for free with IE4, and already integrated known as Win98) and lasted until Windows ME and 2000. WinXP wasn't bad, but several UI decision were bad. And the trend continued with Vista that had a stupid bare bone Explorer that forgot too many settings all the time (lack of love, and the halted complete rewrite in C# that had to be scrapped, and the missing WinFS were probably the reason). Win7 is like Vista but misses the advanced search menu, making the local search even more useless, and WinFS was declared dead. The UI of Win8/10 sucks, though some former undocumented hidden features of Explorer/shell were integrated to the Ribbon-bar. The good thing about pre-Win10 you can replace Explorer.exe with your own favorite shell (file manager plus desktop in one exe). The cool thing about Win32 UI is that it has very good optimisation for low latency, as it had to run on very low spec 1980s PCs. You can interact with the UI even before the UI is rendered on screen. So you can open a menu and navigate around and do some action, all with the keyboard as fast as you want even if the UI is slower on your system. MS got it completely backwards with WinRuntime aka UniversalApp. Opening the start menu in Win10 takes 500ms or so and the lag is very annoying, and opening most apps shows even a opening animation to hide that it takes way to long to get a useable app - open the calc.exe in Win7 and compare it to opening the calc app in Win10 - what a vast difference, what a complete failure and a huge step backward. The best would be if a new MS manager would scrap the Win10 UI development incl UniversalAppFail (starting such an app takes more than 500ms wtf and shows a loading picture), and take the Win10 kernel and start development again taking the Windows 7 Shell/UI and for the Explorer take the Win 2000 or WinXP Explorer as base and start from there.

72deluxe 10y ago
I thought XP's Explorer was the best, and it went downhill from there. I would have to agree with your appraisal of Windows 10's Explorer, which puts those stupid Action directory shortcuts back after every update, which I then to remove by forcing a registry key. I do not understand why you try and give users access to Documents and Downloads in 20 places and then hide the actual drives and directories, instead of educating users. Nobody struggled using Win 3.11 File Manager. Calculator and Pictures are the big UniversalApp failures. Thank goodness you can use the bundled older Photo Viewer as it doesn't take minutes to start. Weirdly, UWP apps are just COM apps like everything else so why are they so slow????

rsync 10y ago

"They are 100% correct about the spatial Finder" I never used OS9, so I don't know about this ... Was the "spatial finder" still a hierarchical viewing of the underlying filesystem, just presented in a better fashion ? Or was it non-hierarchical ? Did OS9 even have a filesystem as I, a UNIX user, think of ? Or was that completely hidden with abstraction ?

lukifer 10y ago
OS9's file system was actually very similar to modern OS X (earlier incarnations of HFS). So it's an abstraction of a standard directory hierarchy, albeit a very elegant and disciplined one. The major difference under the hood was the presence of resource forks for various kinds of metadata and UI (icons, for example).
WorldMaker 10y ago
"Spatial Finder" was still a hierarchical viewing of the filesystem, yes. There are many articles on the subject, but the "spatial" was about the idea that files and folders "remembered" where you put them, so that the same file was always in the same (pixel-exact) space you chose to place it and folder windows remembered their exact same size, shape, and location on the screen. Regardless to how you navigated to them, but since on the Mac Classic OS the Desktop was the "root" folder, you typically navigated to your folders in the same physical way every time (to the point where you might muscle memorize where your files and folders "are" in the space layout of your screen). As a Unix user it used to be you could get a basic spatial mode from Gnome's Nautilus, if you wanted to play with it, but it looks like Gnome File Manager dropped that feature somewhat recently.
- rconti 10y ago
  Yeah, it's really weird how Windows and OS X have a 'loop' where the Desktop is a directory inside of your home directory.