g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Friday, January 27, 2006
14:46 - F'ing The F'ing F
http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits.ars/2006/1/27/2673#fnr2

(top) link
There goes Siracusa again, harping on his stupid Finder issues. Give it up! The Finder is fine now.

Now I know what some of you are thinking. "There goes Siracusa again, harping on his stupid Finder issues. Give it up! The Finder is fine now." Yes, the Mac OS X Finder has gotten better over the years. But (to paraphrase a recent Mac Ach post) while I'd much rather be stabbed in the eye than shot in the head, they both still suck.

Yeah, I'm being facetious; I don't think the Finder is great. And I have nothing but respect for John Siracusa, as he's one of the prime examples of how Apple has fostered a culture of vision not just within its own walls, but among the users of its products (some would argue, more so outside than inside, these days). But that doesn't mean I'm all that completely gung-ho about his Spatial Finder ideas, which he outlined back in the Jaguar era.

It's interesting reading, in retrospect. Apple has in fact implemented a lot of the stuff that Siracusa spent significant time stumping for. Spotlight provides exactly the "saved queries"-driven folder views that he asked for, even if its implementation is on the clumsy side in Tiger's 1.0 iteration. The Sidebar (introduced in Panther) is what he wanted in a Shelf, though it too gets only a lukewarm endorsement in its current implementation.

I'd be on board with his complaints about the Finder as far as fixing those things goes. I'd be interested to see what new kinds of directions they might be willing to take the Finder's interface under the guidance of the new hire they're soliciting (whether it ends up looking like Aperture, as Siracusa suggests, or what). But where my eyelid starts twitching is when I start trying to make myself believe that the Spatial Finder, and the functionally separate Finder Browser he proposes, are crucial elements to a well-thought-out user experience.

Sure, there's merit to the idea (key to the Spatial Finder) of having each folder open a single window, and each window apply to a single folder, and each folder window appear exactly where and how you last saw it. There's merit to the idea of ensuring that the user can't find himself in the confusing situation of having two identical windows side-by-side on the screen that both show the same contents, the same location.

But is that really the end of the world?

As best I can tell, the Mac OS X Finder is still the old spatial Mac OS 8/9 Finder—except with a couple of features added to it that broke the spatial metaphor. These features are:

1) The ability to keep drilling down within the same window in Icon View without opening separate windows; and

2) Column View.

Are we trying to convince ourselves that these features are bad things? That the utility they give us isn't worth the compromises they cause in the Finder's spatiality?

Yes, it's true that in the Mac OS X Finder, you can double-click an icon for, say, your Pictures folder; double-click on the Yosemite folder inside it, so that window now shows the contents of Yosemite; and then double-click the original Pictures folder to open a second window for Pictures, cascaded down from the first window by a little bit (because as soon as the first window changes to showing a different folder, the original folder is no longer open, and the Finder is free to create a new window for it when you go to open it again). You can even then use the Back arrow in the first window to arrive at the result where you have two windows on your screen that both show the contents of the Pictures folder. And now you have to think in terms of "a window representing the contents of the folder" rather than simply "the folder", as he says. But are people really left that far out in the cold by the concept of two identical windows showing the same folder contents? Does it really cause that big a hit to people's workflow efficiency? It takes a fairly convoluted set of steps to even reach this use case; and even when you're there, changes you make in one window show up immediately in the other window. Yeah, it's unclear which one's position on the screen will dominate the next time you open the Pictures folder, but—really, who cares? Is it really that big a deal? And what's the alternative? I only see two choices: 1) make it so you can't use the Back/Forward buttons or any other method to make a window show the contents of a folder that already happens to be open in any other window; or 2) remove the navigate-within-a-single-window feature. Which of those sounds reasonable? I don't like either one, do you?

The same thing goes for Column View. Adding Column View as a third view mode along with Icon View and List View breaks the metaphor in which the existing two views were consistent (in Icon or List View, each window represented a folder, and List View merely gave you the ability to see into the contents of the contents). When you switch to Column View, your Finder window no longer shows you a single folder, but shows you a fluid visual path through your folders, and the more you scroll left and right the less attachment the window has to any single folder in the system. It's the "browser" view that Siracusa aims to address by moving it out into a dedicated view mode, the Finder Browser, which (alone among the Finder views) would feature things like Back/Forward buttons, bookmarks, and other "browser"-type features. Because Column View behaves so fundamentally differently from Icon and List Views, he contends, it deserves to be made an entirely different metaphor with an entirely different interface within the Finder. Doing so would allow the regular Finder windows to go back to the good old days of Icon and List Views, where a window represented a folder and all was right with the world.

But I'm afraid I don't buy it. I don't see that it's a help to the user to try to separate out "file browsing" from "folder viewing", or to force him to go to a whole different kind of Finder interface if he wants to browse into the folder tree in Column View. I happen to like the fact that I can switch at any time from Icon View to Column View and shift immediately from the spatial metaphors to the navigating/browsing metaphors, no matter where I am in the filesystem. I like the fact that I can barely tell the difference between those metaphors anyway. I like the fact that the browser-style buttons (Back/Forward, etc.) are available in all three view modes, even if it doesn't make sense in the Spatial Finder's worldview, especially when it comes to List View folders. If you want to talk about efficiency of workflow, I'd find it far less efficient to have to think about whether I'm "opening folders" or "browsing files" when I go into the Finder to grab a file I need. I think there's great fundamental utility in being able to pop open a window in Icon View, realize that I want to dig down into it several levels without opening up a window for every level, flip over to Column View, click a few times to reach the file I want, preview it, and open it. And then when I want to go back to that last folder I was in, I find it suits my efficiency just fine to be able to have that folder retain the fact that I prefer to view it in Column View, rather than to have it stick with some default Icon or List View parameters that would never have been overridden by anything in the Finder Browser if I'd decided to use that instead.

Icon View, List View, and Column View are three different ways of looking at your folders, and each has its merits and its drawbacks:

Icon View is great for spatial presentation of icons, with custom backgrounds and labels and layouts, such as in an installation folder or disk image; but it's miserable for navigation or for viewing details about files.

List View is great for showing you the details on files, and adequate for navigation, but it's very limited in presentation options (except for customizing which columns to see and how to sort the items).

Column View is all about navigation, but extremely sparse on file information (except in the preview pane for a single selected file) and even more austere than List View in presentation (the files are listed alphabetically only).

Just because two of these view modes, Icon and List View, can be classified as "spatial" doesn't mean there's anything particularly magical about them as far as the user is concerned. I think the average user really does see the Finder as a means of, well, finding files—and adding Column View to the family, even if it breaks the spatiality of the other two views, adds so much functionality when it comes to ease of navigation through the filesystem that a user isn't going to miss the ideological purity of the two spatial views. He doesn't have to think about "file browsing" or "folder viewing" or any of that stuff; the very fact that these concepts have to be explained by Siracusa before they make sense tells us right there that the distinction is not that central a concept to the casual or even expert user. When we open a folder, we just have to think about which of the three views makes the most sense for our needs right now, switch to it, and go. That's as far as our head-scratching and bandying about of of terminology goes.

I don't know if this would mortify Siracusa or what, but what he's really asking for is the "Explore" view in Windows. Isn't he? A dedicated "browser" view for drilling down through hierarchical paths, independent from the view mode that's attached to an individual folder? Personally, I don't think this would be much of an improvement; on Windows, I never use the Explore view because I never remember it's there, and it's a pain to get to when I do. I always find myself flicking dolefully between Icon, List, Details, and the various other one-folder-per-window views, trundling up and down the folder tree and wishing I could just have my damn Column View.

I'm totally on board with F'ing the F'ing F; you won't hear any disagreement from me over whether the Finder could stand to be made faster, especially when browsing network shares, and the whole Network subtree makes my eyes bug out just trying to figure out what the hell it's trying to communicate to me. But banishing Column View for daring to breach the walls of the Spatial Finder's golden city doesn't seem like it would do users any favors. It'd certainly piss me off.

As an exercise: go find a Mac OS 9 computer and play around with its Finder for a bit. After realizing just how much you miss Column View, ask yourself: would you like to have a separate Finder function called "Finder Browser" (or hey, maybe "Mac Explorer"), hidden away as an option in some menu, that let you browse your disks, while keeping your Finder windows conceptually unsullied in their spatiality? Or would you rather just have Column View back?


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© Brian Tiemann