8 ms·

A Clone of the Classic Mac OS Finder in Modern Cocoa and Objective-C

172 points by dannyow 8y ago

rbanffy 8y ago
What I would love to see on a Mac (or Linux, I don't mind) would be Eric Traut's "Out of Context Menus" extension for MacOS 9. https://tidbits.com/1999/07/12/the-machack-hack-contest-1999/ https://tidbits.com/1999/07/12/the-machack-hack-contest-1999...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
johnzim 8y ago
What a great project!
- golem14 8y ago
  Made me wish for my trusty Atari ST GEM TOS again. And the excellent SM124 monitor. Probably pure nostalgia, but I did like the simpler and more monochrome UI back in the days...
  - golem14 8y ago
    Alas, does not play nice with the tiling window manager I use (https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst) - highly recommended to those who seek tiling WMs.
munificent 8y ago
It's crazy how deeply embedded the old Finder is in my subconscious. I opened the app and instantly noticed several differences from the original, even though I haven't run the old System 7 Finder in, what, twenty years? Things I noticed: - Command-W doesn't close a window. - No animation when opening windows. - Dragging outside of the close button while still holding the mouse button (uh, trackpad button) down should revert it to the non-pushed state until the cursor re-enters it. - Obviously, the fonts shouldn't be anti-aliased. The metrics on Chicago look weird too. I am so filled with nostalgia right now I don't know what to do with myself. I loved the System 7 Finder. It's one of the things that got me into UI design and pixel art.
- toufka 8y ago
  Yep. Weirdly, felt the same. I immediately tried to resize the window from bottom corner, use arrow keys to select, and then command arrow-down to open the file, and command-I to get-info. They didn't work, but that's okay. It's weird, the window was close enough in my memory to invoke those old navigation mechanisms and expect them to work even though I haven't used a classic MacOS in a very long time.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- mjcl 8y ago
  I really miss the System 7 Finder, the 'spatial' nature[1] really clicked with me and other file browsers still sort of bug me because of that. [1] http://archive.arstechnica.com/paedia/f/finder/finder-3.htm http://archive.arstechnica.com/paedia/f/finder/finder-3.htm
  - snuxoll 8y ago
    Nautilus (GNOME Files) used to have a spatial mode, I was rather perturbed when they didn't bring it forward for GNOME 3. Obviously Apple killed the spatial finder with OS X, though it's always had the quasi-spatial mode with the pill button (remember that? I'm a little miffed about that one too, especially now that they've gotten rid of the dedicated full screen button that gave it the boot to make me hold Option every time I want to zoom a window instead of full screening it).
    - TheCoreh 8y ago
      You can still enable the spatial mode by hiding the toolbar via the "View" menu
      - Doctor_Fegg 8y ago
etaioinshrdlu 8y ago
Awesome. The author should make it such a great general purpose file manager that we all switch to it. That would be awesome :)
- randcraw 8y ago
  Especially if it let you change the sort order of files. Apple's goofy nonstandard ordering drives me nuts.
GeekyBear 8y ago
One of the things that I missed for quite some time from the classic Finder was the ability to drag Finder windows to the edge of the screen where they would shrink down to a tab you could click to instantly access that folder or hover over while dragging objects so the folder would expand and allow you to drop objects into that folder. However, the sidebar and spring loaded folders now offer functionality that is largely the same.
inspector-g 8y ago
> A smaller, more secondary reason for creating this was to sort of observe how a Classic-era app might run on today’s hardware. As our hardware gets beefier, it seems like our software gets chunkier. If we could port yesterday’s software to run natively on today’s hardware, how might it perform? Very fast, I’d imagine. This reminds me of a small personal project I decided to take on a couple years ago. I did it both as an experiment in performance and for nostalgia's sake. I bought as pristine an example as possible of Apple's last machine that could run Mac OS 9 natively, a PowerMac G4 (the 2003 MDD vintage). I upgraded the CPU and RAM as much as possible (dual 1.25 GHz G4, 2GB RAM), and replaced the hard drive with as fast an SSD as the system could handle (don't recall which SSD model at the moment). In short, I was astonished at the "snappiness" of the system. Boot time took no more than 15 seconds. Shutting down took only about one second. The system entered sleep mode near-instantly. Opening and closing windows within an app happened as fast (or faster) than I could react to it. Opening and closing classic apps themselves was at least an order of magnitude faster than what I would consider reasonable analogs from today. I already had a decent amount of disdain for how much time I spend on a modern Mac/iOS device waiting for the system to catch up to my inputs, but it got worse after having done this experiment. A simple example, but which pains me near-daily, is the creation of folders in the modern Finder. After typing cmd+shift+N, I often must wait an amount of time that must be on the order of several hundred milliseconds before typing the name of the folder (if I don't wait, the first couple characters I type will be missing from the folder's name, which is yet another time-sink to go back and fix the missing characters). And this is on an iMac Pro! I tried this exact test on my old-but-quick PowerMac G4, and I never had to wait nor lost any chars no matter how quickly I attempted to type the command and the subsequent folder name.
- 1996 8y ago
  Some of us run an old OS on old machines because it just works. I got an old Thinkpad for an experiment with coreboot. I found it sexy, so I upgraded it like you did. It feels "snappier" than anything else I have tried. All I need is SSH, and a confortable keyboard, so has become my work computer! No maintenance, no distractions. Just ssh. I highly encourage everyone to do the same experiment you did, to realize how poorly we are served by current offerings. (or maybe I am just in retrocomputing. I don't know. I just like it)
1996 8y ago
I absolutely love the idea (fitting more data on the screen, ala Tufte), the execution (brings back memories of trying MacOS on an emulator) and the design (flat!! yes!!) I don't understand why flat design gets such a bad press. One of the best thing I have ever used was a classic windows phone. Efficient, organized, straight to the point. Maybe it is just part of a retrocomputing trend, but I really like that.
- sjwright 8y ago
  > I don't understand why flat design gets such a bad press. Classic MacOS isn't flat design, there are hard borders all over the place and (by today's standards) subtle cues of dimension throughout. Flat design gets bad press because when it is done poorly, usability suffers greatly. I love the iPhone—and I like many aspects of its current UI aesthetic—but the UX design is woeful in many places, with countless problems that arose when the dumped the "classic iOS" appearance. Most critically is that unless you're an experienced user of iOS, it is no longer obvious what (or where) is tappable. Buttons used to be obvious through design, now they are just text on the screen, sometimes in a different colour. Sometimes they're on the bottom, sometimes they're top-left, sometimes top-right. This all used to make sense when there were title bars and arrow-shaped back buttons that visually reacted when touched; now it is an ambiguous mess.
  - 1996 8y ago
    I fully agree on how UI have become "harder to guess" Most of the current interfaces require too much learning. It seems to come with a cognitive load. Fun thought: I can still use a windows phone after a few drinks. With an android device, not so, while I have used androids for a longer time. I don't know what causes it, but usability seems to suffer inded.
    - rogual 8y ago
      I wonder if they do it on purpose to create a “moat”. The more time you've invested learning what's clickable, where to force-touch, etc., the more resistant you'll be to leaving the platform.
jinonoel 8y ago
I really miss the top-right button in classic Finder windows, the one that resizes the window to just the right size to show all it's contents.
- JonathonW 8y ago
  The zoom button (option-click the green traffic light button, or double-click the title bar) in the (current) macOS finder is still supposed to do that, if Finder's in its "spatial" mode (turn off the toolbar and, optionally, switch to view "as Icons"-- back in the day, there was a window control that did this in one step). It's actually broken in current macOS, though-- using the zoom button on a Finder window ends up forcing some of the content underneath the title bar where you can't reach it. Guess that shows how much attention Apple's putting into the "little details" of their operating systems these days (very little, it seems).
  - donbright 8y ago
    i find that fascinating... this is the kind of thing certain builder philosophy would say "no user would ever notice", but users do notice and it bugs them. meanwhile, we can also get an insight into the internal social dynamics of a corporation by looking at it's products. the people who cared about this type of 'little detail' have lost influence inside the organization - they are not being hired, not being promoted, not being retained, and not being listened to. but those kind of people did used to be there. so what happened to them? its kind of fascinating, like some kind of corporate sociology based solely on research of artefacts left behind by the corporate culture.
  - ken 8y ago
    It's been broken since at least 10.9.2, in early 2014, as that's when I reported it to Apple (#16701760), and probably a lot longer than that, as it was duped to a much lower numbered bug (#10295866).
- city41 8y ago
  I also miss the destructive button being on the opposite side of the window from the non destructive button. In many ways, classic Mac OS was more thoughtful and usable than OSX.
ChristianGeek 8y ago
Meh...if it doesn’t involve constantly swapping floppy disks while you’re launching an app then it’s not a true emulation.
extc 8y ago
Your site is down
pseingatl 8y ago
It looks like the link is undergoing some problems: RuntimeException (500) Failed to read /var/www/bszyman-dc/user/pages/07.feed/listing.md: Unexpected characters near ": '/blog'" at line 3 (near "items: 'page.descendants': '/blog'").
- djsumdog 8y ago
  Seems weird to run a React app for a static content blog. (I think this is React?) and also to run it in development mode in production.
  - guessmyname 8y ago
    > Seems weird to run a React app for a static content blog. > (I think this is React?) and also to run it in development mode in production. They are using PHP — https://i.imgur.com/vy5Q2bq.png https://i.imgur.com/vy5Q2bq.png
nvahalik 8y ago
This appears to be a link to the source: https://bitbucket.org/bszyman/classic-finder-app/ https://bitbucket.org/bszyman/classic-finder-app/ And a link to the "main site" which has a download: https://classicmacfinder.com https://classicmacfinder.com
jackvalentine 8y ago
Cached link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://bszyman.com/blog/classic-finder http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dreamcompiler 8y ago
> It will really (probably poorly) perform Finder operations on your computer’s file system. Ha! Given how horrifically bad the OSX Finder has always been at file management (not to mention its numerous unfixed bugs), I can't imagine how it could be much worse.
Joeri 8y ago
I’ve learned many things throughout this journey. One of them is that modern user interfaces are absolutely gigantic compared to the user interfaces of the earlier days. I mean, I guess it kind of has to be that way, in the age of high DPI monitors and bad eye sight, but WOW. Run Classic Finder just once and you’ll see what I mean. Classic mac os ran at 72 dpi, compared to the modern 1x dpi of 96 to 110, so those controls were actually much bigger on screens of the day.
fit2rule 8y ago
I believe that the abandonment of the Finder interface by Apple (both old and new) is having a devolutionary effect on computing. Generations of people are learning to use computers without understanding the differences between a folder and a file system, with little skill in maintaining a hierarchical system for organising their material, and so on. Also, the fact that, today, you can't open a folder full of files and have the Finder window auto-size to fit the content (in list view, for example) is an indicator that Apple just doesn't seem to care about keeping this paradigm. And thats a pity, in my opinion, because it makes stupid users. Being able to fundamentally organize ones cache of documents on filesystem is a key first step in gaining computer literacy, since very few computer systems out there achieve anything without a folder and a few files in it. So, I'm quite encouraged by the effort to rebuild Finder - if we had an open source Finder alternative out there, which works to exceed the features of the built-in Finder, I'm quite sure I'd contribute to it. The devolution of Finder, and of filesystems in general, is personally a pet peeve of mine - there is nothing more frustrating than having to explain the concept of organising ones data to a user who really should know these things already - but don't, because Apple (and others) have decided the user doesn't need to have control over the fundamental building blocks of their system. This deleterious effect, devolutionary in nature, of 'technologically refined simplicity for the sake of the user' is a real issue. I expect to see more examples of its negative effect in the coming decade ..
apple4ever 8y ago
This is really cool. I'd love to contribute, but it doesn't seem that easy with the way he has BitBucket setup.

172 points by dannyow 8y ago

What I would love to see on a Mac (or Linux, I don't mind) would be Eric Traut's "Out of Context Menus" extension for MacOS 9. https://tidbits.com/1999/07/12/the-machack-hack-contest-1999/ https://tidbits.com/1999/07/12/the-machack-hack-contest-1999...

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

johnzim 8y ago

What a great project!

golem14 8y ago
Made me wish for my trusty Atari ST GEM TOS again. And the excellent SM124 monitor. Probably pure nostalgia, but I did like the simpler and more monochrome UI back in the days...
- golem14 8y ago
  Alas, does not play nice with the tiling window manager I use (https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst) - highly recommended to those who seek tiling WMs.

munificent 8y ago

It's crazy how deeply embedded the old Finder is in my subconscious. I opened the app and instantly noticed several differences from the original, even though I haven't run the old System 7 Finder in, what, twenty years? Things I noticed: - Command-W doesn't close a window. - No animation when opening windows. - Dragging outside of the close button while still holding the mouse button (uh, trackpad button) down should revert it to the non-pushed state until the cursor re-enters it. - Obviously, the fonts shouldn't be anti-aliased. The metrics on Chicago look weird too. I am so filled with nostalgia right now I don't know what to do with myself. I loved the System 7 Finder. It's one of the things that got me into UI design and pixel art.

toufka 8y ago
Yep. Weirdly, felt the same. I immediately tried to resize the window from bottom corner, use arrow keys to select, and then command arrow-down to open the file, and command-I to get-info. They didn't work, but that's okay. It's weird, the window was close enough in my memory to invoke those old navigation mechanisms and expect them to work even though I haven't used a classic MacOS in a very long time.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mjcl 8y ago
I really miss the System 7 Finder, the 'spatial' nature[1] really clicked with me and other file browsers still sort of bug me because of that. [1] http://archive.arstechnica.com/paedia/f/finder/finder-3.htm http://archive.arstechnica.com/paedia/f/finder/finder-3.htm
- snuxoll 8y ago
  Nautilus (GNOME Files) used to have a spatial mode, I was rather perturbed when they didn't bring it forward for GNOME 3. Obviously Apple killed the spatial finder with OS X, though it's always had the quasi-spatial mode with the pill button (remember that? I'm a little miffed about that one too, especially now that they've gotten rid of the dedicated full screen button that gave it the boot to make me hold Option every time I want to zoom a window instead of full screening it).
  - TheCoreh 8y ago
    You can still enable the spatial mode by hiding the toolbar via the "View" menu
    - Doctor_Fegg 8y ago

etaioinshrdlu 8y ago

Awesome. The author should make it such a great general purpose file manager that we all switch to it. That would be awesome :)

randcraw 8y ago
Especially if it let you change the sort order of files. Apple's goofy nonstandard ordering drives me nuts.

GeekyBear 8y ago

One of the things that I missed for quite some time from the classic Finder was the ability to drag Finder windows to the edge of the screen where they would shrink down to a tab you could click to instantly access that folder or hover over while dragging objects so the folder would expand and allow you to drop objects into that folder. However, the sidebar and spring loaded folders now offer functionality that is largely the same.

inspector-g 8y ago

> A smaller, more secondary reason for creating this was to sort of observe how a Classic-era app might run on today’s hardware. As our hardware gets beefier, it seems like our software gets chunkier. If we could port yesterday’s software to run natively on today’s hardware, how might it perform? Very fast, I’d imagine. This reminds me of a small personal project I decided to take on a couple years ago. I did it both as an experiment in performance and for nostalgia's sake. I bought as pristine an example as possible of Apple's last machine that could run Mac OS 9 natively, a PowerMac G4 (the 2003 MDD vintage). I upgraded the CPU and RAM as much as possible (dual 1.25 GHz G4, 2GB RAM), and replaced the hard drive with as fast an SSD as the system could handle (don't recall which SSD model at the moment). In short, I was astonished at the "snappiness" of the system. Boot time took no more than 15 seconds. Shutting down took only about one second. The system entered sleep mode near-instantly. Opening and closing windows within an app happened as fast (or faster) than I could react to it. Opening and closing classic apps themselves was at least an order of magnitude faster than what I would consider reasonable analogs from today. I already had a decent amount of disdain for how much time I spend on a modern Mac/iOS device waiting for the system to catch up to my inputs, but it got worse after having done this experiment. A simple example, but which pains me near-daily, is the creation of folders in the modern Finder. After typing cmd+shift+N, I often must wait an amount of time that must be on the order of several hundred milliseconds before typing the name of the folder (if I don't wait, the first couple characters I type will be missing from the folder's name, which is yet another time-sink to go back and fix the missing characters). And this is on an iMac Pro! I tried this exact test on my old-but-quick PowerMac G4, and I never had to wait nor lost any chars no matter how quickly I attempted to type the command and the subsequent folder name.

1996 8y ago
Some of us run an old OS on old machines because it just works. I got an old Thinkpad for an experiment with coreboot. I found it sexy, so I upgraded it like you did. It feels "snappier" than anything else I have tried. All I need is SSH, and a confortable keyboard, so has become my work computer! No maintenance, no distractions. Just ssh. I highly encourage everyone to do the same experiment you did, to realize how poorly we are served by current offerings. (or maybe I am just in retrocomputing. I don't know. I just like it)

1996 8y ago

I absolutely love the idea (fitting more data on the screen, ala Tufte), the execution (brings back memories of trying MacOS on an emulator) and the design (flat!! yes!!) I don't understand why flat design gets such a bad press. One of the best thing I have ever used was a classic windows phone. Efficient, organized, straight to the point. Maybe it is just part of a retrocomputing trend, but I really like that.

sjwright 8y ago
> I don't understand why flat design gets such a bad press. Classic MacOS isn't flat design, there are hard borders all over the place and (by today's standards) subtle cues of dimension throughout. Flat design gets bad press because when it is done poorly, usability suffers greatly. I love the iPhone—and I like many aspects of its current UI aesthetic—but the UX design is woeful in many places, with countless problems that arose when the dumped the "classic iOS" appearance. Most critically is that unless you're an experienced user of iOS, it is no longer obvious what (or where) is tappable. Buttons used to be obvious through design, now they are just text on the screen, sometimes in a different colour. Sometimes they're on the bottom, sometimes they're top-left, sometimes top-right. This all used to make sense when there were title bars and arrow-shaped back buttons that visually reacted when touched; now it is an ambiguous mess.
- 1996 8y ago
  I fully agree on how UI have become "harder to guess" Most of the current interfaces require too much learning. It seems to come with a cognitive load. Fun thought: I can still use a windows phone after a few drinks. With an android device, not so, while I have used androids for a longer time. I don't know what causes it, but usability seems to suffer inded.
  - rogual 8y ago
    I wonder if they do it on purpose to create a “moat”. The more time you've invested learning what's clickable, where to force-touch, etc., the more resistant you'll be to leaving the platform.

jinonoel 8y ago

I really miss the top-right button in classic Finder windows, the one that resizes the window to just the right size to show all it's contents.

JonathonW 8y ago
The zoom button (option-click the green traffic light button, or double-click the title bar) in the (current) macOS finder is still supposed to do that, if Finder's in its "spatial" mode (turn off the toolbar and, optionally, switch to view "as Icons"-- back in the day, there was a window control that did this in one step). It's actually broken in current macOS, though-- using the zoom button on a Finder window ends up forcing some of the content underneath the title bar where you can't reach it. Guess that shows how much attention Apple's putting into the "little details" of their operating systems these days (very little, it seems).
- donbright 8y ago
  i find that fascinating... this is the kind of thing certain builder philosophy would say "no user would ever notice", but users do notice and it bugs them. meanwhile, we can also get an insight into the internal social dynamics of a corporation by looking at it's products. the people who cared about this type of 'little detail' have lost influence inside the organization - they are not being hired, not being promoted, not being retained, and not being listened to. but those kind of people did used to be there. so what happened to them? its kind of fascinating, like some kind of corporate sociology based solely on research of artefacts left behind by the corporate culture.
- ken 8y ago
  It's been broken since at least 10.9.2, in early 2014, as that's when I reported it to Apple (#16701760), and probably a lot longer than that, as it was duped to a much lower numbered bug (#10295866).
city41 8y ago
I also miss the destructive button being on the opposite side of the window from the non destructive button. In many ways, classic Mac OS was more thoughtful and usable than OSX.

ChristianGeek 8y ago

Meh...if it doesn’t involve constantly swapping floppy disks while you’re launching an app then it’s not a true emulation.

extc 8y ago

Your site is down

pseingatl 8y ago

It looks like the link is undergoing some problems: RuntimeException (500) Failed to read /var/www/bszyman-dc/user/pages/07.feed/listing.md: Unexpected characters near ": '/blog'" at line 3 (near "items: 'page.descendants': '/blog'").

djsumdog 8y ago
Seems weird to run a React app for a static content blog. (I think this is React?) and also to run it in development mode in production.
- guessmyname 8y ago
  > Seems weird to run a React app for a static content blog. > (I think this is React?) and also to run it in development mode in production. They are using PHP — https://i.imgur.com/vy5Q2bq.png https://i.imgur.com/vy5Q2bq.png

nvahalik 8y ago

This appears to be a link to the source: https://bitbucket.org/bszyman/classic-finder-app/ https://bitbucket.org/bszyman/classic-finder-app/ And a link to the "main site" which has a download: https://classicmacfinder.com https://classicmacfinder.com

jackvalentine 8y ago

Cached link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://bszyman.com/blog/classic-finder http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

dreamcompiler 8y ago

> It will really (probably poorly) perform Finder operations on your computer’s file system. Ha! Given how horrifically bad the OSX Finder has always been at file management (not to mention its numerous unfixed bugs), I can't imagine how it could be much worse.

Joeri 8y ago

I’ve learned many things throughout this journey. One of them is that modern user interfaces are absolutely gigantic compared to the user interfaces of the earlier days. I mean, I guess it kind of has to be that way, in the age of high DPI monitors and bad eye sight, but WOW. Run Classic Finder just once and you’ll see what I mean. Classic mac os ran at 72 dpi, compared to the modern 1x dpi of 96 to 110, so those controls were actually much bigger on screens of the day.

fit2rule 8y ago

I believe that the abandonment of the Finder interface by Apple (both old and new) is having a devolutionary effect on computing. Generations of people are learning to use computers without understanding the differences between a folder and a file system, with little skill in maintaining a hierarchical system for organising their material, and so on. Also, the fact that, today, you can't open a folder full of files and have the Finder window auto-size to fit the content (in list view, for example) is an indicator that Apple just doesn't seem to care about keeping this paradigm. And thats a pity, in my opinion, because it makes stupid users. Being able to fundamentally organize ones cache of documents on filesystem is a key first step in gaining computer literacy, since very few computer systems out there achieve anything without a folder and a few files in it. So, I'm quite encouraged by the effort to rebuild Finder - if we had an open source Finder alternative out there, which works to exceed the features of the built-in Finder, I'm quite sure I'd contribute to it. The devolution of Finder, and of filesystems in general, is personally a pet peeve of mine - there is nothing more frustrating than having to explain the concept of organising ones data to a user who really should know these things already - but don't, because Apple (and others) have decided the user doesn't need to have control over the fundamental building blocks of their system. This deleterious effect, devolutionary in nature, of 'technologically refined simplicity for the sake of the user' is a real issue. I expect to see more examples of its negative effect in the coming decade ..

apple4ever 8y ago

This is really cool. I'd love to contribute, but it doesn't seem that easy with the way he has BitBucket setup.