5 ms·

Bluh, don't get me started on Finder. Icons in directories would randomly be overlapping just because I hadn't been in them in a while and new files were added,

Bluh, don't get me started on Finder. Icons in directories would randomly be overlapping just because I hadn't been in them in a while and new files were added, they added this weird tagging system with colors that just doesn't make sense to me at all, it randomly thinks I want to view some sort of "recently used files and some random shit" list instead of my homedir. I don't know what the devs of it were thinking. Even bone stock Windows Explorer seems better. Easier to understand what's going on at least. I don't know why people seem to think Apple is some sort of UI god when they can't even make a usable file manager. Objective-C looks like a clusterfuck and I never want to touch it. Swift seems like a quite good solution to that and I hope it eventually becomes the full replacement - but now more non-Apple laptops have high DPI screens, so I don't think I'll be around to see it happen.

DonHopkins 10y ago
From day one, they should have called it the "Loser" instead of the "Finder".
- seanp2k2 10y ago
  for anyone unaware, mdfind foo on Mac does the same as locate foo on Linux. CLI spotlight search. Also, open bar will open a thing (file, folder, application, whatever) in the associated application. I typically do open . to pop a finder if I want a GUI to mess with files in the current dir.
rileymat2 10y ago
I completely agree with you, the "All My Files" view that it defaults to seems to not fit me very well. The nice thing is that it is configurable.
dahart 10y ago
The finder is a wart. Apple does have a lot of good UI elsewhere, but the finder needs an overhaul so bad it hurts. Know what drives me the most nuts? That there's a single default key (Enter) to rename a folder, while you have to use a key chord (Command-O) to enter a folder. It's so backwards, renaming is not something I spend even remotely as much time doing as moving around. That's not to mention the so completely obvious missed opportunity to let the Enter key do what it says and Enter the folder.
- cmrdporcupine 10y ago
  What's ridiculously annoying is how good the Finder was under classic Mac OS compared to what exists now. The new Finder is a bad translation of some of the classic functionality overtop of the NeXT workspace manager. And it's a bad fusion of the two, in my opinion.
- derefr 10y ago
  > (Command-O) to enter a folder. I use Command+Down, which opens Finder shell-objects generally. It's the "descend" to Command+Up's "ascend."
  - dahart 10y ago
    Not sure why I haven't been using that, but that is better than Command+O for sure, thanks! Still, all navigating should be single-key-able, right? I guess it is technically, with left & right arrow keys in the List & Columns views, but I don't use those or like those as much, for whatever reason.
dahart 10y ago
> Objective-C looks like a clusterfuck and I never want to touch it. This is pretty much moot now, the Apple world is abandoning Obj-C, but AFAIK it's just old, not bad. Like, came out at the same time as C++ old, and has seen fewer changes to the language than C++ has. It's a compiled, C-like language, so yeah, hard to use and very easy to crash, just like C & C++. Interested to hear your point of view on what makes it seem like a cluster, if you want to share. (And I'm only interested in hearing and understanding your opinion, not on debating or contradicting your experience.) Obj-C had a pretty cool calling mechanism underneath, known as "message passing" -- more or less the analogy to C++'s virtual member functions. But it is the only compiled language I know where you can actually call functions by name, like construct a string dynamically and call, and you get those dynamic calls at the same speed as compiled code (minus a fast function lookup you can usually do once). I used that mechanism in some games to build a nice state machine class for actor behavior. I did the same in C++, and the Objective-C code was way nicer & easier to use.
- seanp2k2 10y ago
  I remember trying to do the "construct a function name as a string and call it" thing in VB6 many years ago before I "knew better". Any idea what that functionality is called? I always wondered why languages wouldn't let you do that.
  - chaosite 10y ago
    You usually get that through either reflection or an "eval" command.
  - akiselev 10y ago
    I don't think there's another widely used name for it except dynamic or virtual dispatching (with inline caching of the lookup table). C is too low level and simple a language to have it in the string lookup form and in C++/Rust name mangling, symbol stripping from binaries, and generics would make the feature very difficult to implement and rather unergonomic. C#/F# and CLR C++/VB probably already have this in the form of the reflection/.Net runtime APIs (including JIT for generics) but implementing it in C++ or Rust would be very complex and it would be yet another feature that bifurcates the language ecosystem (like heap allocation for embedded). Python and Javascript do have this feature but you still have to have access to the scope to do it (self['fn_name'] or this['fn_name']) and this implementation exists in one way or another in most dynamic languages. You can do this as a hack in most compiled languages by exporting symbols from a shared library and just using the OS specific dynamic linker but this is ugly, slow, and pointless in a static language.
mustacheemperor 10y ago
Finder is absolutely boggling to me. I've considered switching to Mac as a mobile development platform a few times, but every time I sit down to actually USE one I realize I'd rather just put Ubuntu on a windows laptop or something. >I don't know why people seem to think Apple is some sort of UI god when they can't even make a usable file manager. I know! I ask myself how this is possible every time.

DonHopkins 10y ago

From day one, they should have called it the "Loser" instead of the "Finder".

seanp2k2 10y ago
for anyone unaware, mdfind foo on Mac does the same as locate foo on Linux. CLI spotlight search. Also, open bar will open a thing (file, folder, application, whatever) in the associated application. I typically do open . to pop a finder if I want a GUI to mess with files in the current dir.

rileymat2 10y ago

I completely agree with you, the "All My Files" view that it defaults to seems to not fit me very well. The nice thing is that it is configurable.

dahart 10y ago

The finder is a wart. Apple does have a lot of good UI elsewhere, but the finder needs an overhaul so bad it hurts. Know what drives me the most nuts? That there's a single default key (Enter) to rename a folder, while you have to use a key chord (Command-O) to enter a folder. It's so backwards, renaming is not something I spend even remotely as much time doing as moving around. That's not to mention the so completely obvious missed opportunity to let the Enter key do what it says and Enter the folder.

cmrdporcupine 10y ago
What's ridiculously annoying is how good the Finder was under classic Mac OS compared to what exists now. The new Finder is a bad translation of some of the classic functionality overtop of the NeXT workspace manager. And it's a bad fusion of the two, in my opinion.
derefr 10y ago
> (Command-O) to enter a folder. I use Command+Down, which opens Finder shell-objects generally. It's the "descend" to Command+Up's "ascend."
- dahart 10y ago
  Not sure why I haven't been using that, but that is better than Command+O for sure, thanks! Still, all navigating should be single-key-able, right? I guess it is technically, with left & right arrow keys in the List & Columns views, but I don't use those or like those as much, for whatever reason.

dahart 10y ago

> Objective-C looks like a clusterfuck and I never want to touch it. This is pretty much moot now, the Apple world is abandoning Obj-C, but AFAIK it's just old, not bad. Like, came out at the same time as C++ old, and has seen fewer changes to the language than C++ has. It's a compiled, C-like language, so yeah, hard to use and very easy to crash, just like C & C++. Interested to hear your point of view on what makes it seem like a cluster, if you want to share. (And I'm only interested in hearing and understanding your opinion, not on debating or contradicting your experience.) Obj-C had a pretty cool calling mechanism underneath, known as "message passing" -- more or less the analogy to C++'s virtual member functions. But it is the only compiled language I know where you can actually call functions by name, like construct a string dynamically and call, and you get those dynamic calls at the same speed as compiled code (minus a fast function lookup you can usually do once). I used that mechanism in some games to build a nice state machine class for actor behavior. I did the same in C++, and the Objective-C code was way nicer & easier to use.

seanp2k2 10y ago
I remember trying to do the "construct a function name as a string and call it" thing in VB6 many years ago before I "knew better". Any idea what that functionality is called? I always wondered why languages wouldn't let you do that.
- chaosite 10y ago
  You usually get that through either reflection or an "eval" command.
- akiselev 10y ago
  I don't think there's another widely used name for it except dynamic or virtual dispatching (with inline caching of the lookup table). C is too low level and simple a language to have it in the string lookup form and in C++/Rust name mangling, symbol stripping from binaries, and generics would make the feature very difficult to implement and rather unergonomic. C#/F# and CLR C++/VB probably already have this in the form of the reflection/.Net runtime APIs (including JIT for generics) but implementing it in C++ or Rust would be very complex and it would be yet another feature that bifurcates the language ecosystem (like heap allocation for embedded). Python and Javascript do have this feature but you still have to have access to the scope to do it (self['fn_name'] or this['fn_name']) and this implementation exists in one way or another in most dynamic languages. You can do this as a hack in most compiled languages by exporting symbols from a shared library and just using the OS specific dynamic linker but this is ugly, slow, and pointless in a static language.

mustacheemperor 10y ago

Finder is absolutely boggling to me. I've considered switching to Mac as a mobile development platform a few times, but every time I sit down to actually USE one I realize I'd rather just put Ubuntu on a windows laptop or something. >I don't know why people seem to think Apple is some sort of UI god when they can't even make a usable file manager. I know! I ask myself how this is possible every time.