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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Tuesday, June 12, 2007
18:04 - Let's not go overboard here
http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/features/finder.html

(top)
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that it may be not quite the best thing ever for the Finder to morph into a simulacrum of iTunes.

It's well and good to have similar metaphors across applications, and iTunes is undeniably a good set of metaphors to emulate. But do we really want to have Finder windows that you have to peer at really carefully before you can tell if they're Finder windows or iTunes windows?

I mean, hell, one of the biggest gripes I have about Windows apps is their tendency to be designed around the "navigation tree in the left pane, icon-and-items view in the right pane" template. The iTunes template differs from it only in a few minutiae such as to what degree you can redundantly replicate the container-tree view in the left pane in the right one (in iTunes, thankfully, very limited—but the Finder sports the same potential pitfalls as the Windows Explorer does in that regard). I find myself worrying that the Steve might be so smitten with his beloved Cover Flow—first in iTunes, then in the iPhone, now in the Finder too—that he's starting to bend existing applications' metaphors in order to accommodate it, rather than allowing them to be true to themselves and present their contents based on their own most natural metadata, which was the whole basis of what made iTunes and iPhoto cool in the first place. Has Apple started to lose the plot?

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© Brian Tiemann