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I was part of the team that "ported" the classic Finder to OS X. I left Apple in 2006, but was there at the time of the NeXT acquisition. Trying to appease the
by diskzero 5y ago
I was part of the team that "ported" the classic Finder to OS X. I left Apple in 2006, but was there at the time of the NeXT acquisition. Trying to appease the spatial Finder advocates and at the same time trying to appease Steve's desire to never have to know where a file existed in the filesystem was a constant source of grief.
The seeming utopia of the System 7/8/9 Finder was possible because the job of the Finder, and the system itself, was relatively simple. The current Finder is managing a ton of features that are quite complex. If you were to say that many of these features are not needed, or detract from some pure vision of the Finder, I would probably agree with you.
It is always interesting to get feedback, positive or negative, on the Finder. In general, most users seem to interact with it in a shallow way, using the Desktop as a giant catch all storage location.
We were always aware of the various bugs involving the loss of layout preferences and fixes ended up being fragile and exposing confusing bits of UI. The team tried (tries) hard to balance all of the competing requests for Finder functionality. Working on the Finder team could be joyous and miserable at the same time.
- chess_buster 5y agoFor me, the best feature of the old finder was, you could take a file or folder from somethere, drag it to the desktop. Use it from there. Then, once you had finished your project you could tell the finder to move the folder from the desktop back to where it belongs.
- TYPE_FASTER 5y ago> Trying to appease the spatial Finder advocates and at the same time trying to appease Steve's desire to never have to know where a file existed in the filesystem was a constant source of grief. This is explains so much, thanks for commenting.
- js2 5y agoOver Thanksgiving, my aunt asked for help with her Mac. At some point, she must have enabled iCloud Drive including Documents and Desktop, then disabled it and I suppose checked the “keep copy on Mac” when disabling. So she had both local and iCloud versions of the Documents and Desktop folders, with documents in both locations. De-duping these and moving everything back to her Mac was such a gargantuan task it will have to wait for another day. Try as I might, I was unable to explain to her how Documents/Desktop folders on her Mac and the Documents/Desktop folders in iCloud differed. Compounding the situation, some of the files in the iCloud folders had local copies on the Mac and some were only in iCloud since the “Optimize Mac Storage” option was enabled. Separately, I had trouble explaining to her how opening the Desktop folder in a window and her actual Desktop were different views of the same folder. On top of that, with iCloud, there are application specific folders for those apps documents which I think predate Apple adding the Files app to iOS. So for example, by default Numbers will prompt you to save a new document in its Numbers folder and not in the Documents folder. She also didn’t understand why iCloud Drive included just the Documents and Desktop folders and not, say, the Downloads folder. Or how “iCloud Drive” differed from iCloud itself. It’s all become a terrible confusing mess.
- kingcharles 5y agoThis duplication issue between local and remote is going to continue to be a constant source of misery until most users' data is stored only remotely. The local+remote seems like a half-way solution until everyone has fast enough connections and online storage costs are low enough. I know this issue kicks me in the balls regularly. Suddenly my PC will warn me I'm out of disk space, only to find out that some of my online files, set to "cloud only", have decided they also wanted to live on my harddrive and downloaded themselves when I wasn't looking.