Talk:Macintosh Finder

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I figure since I did such an extensive rewrite of this page I might as well start a Talk page to keep track of what else should be changed here. I'd love to add some screenshots of current and older versions of the Finder here, highlighting some of the mentioned features. Is that possible? Legal?

Screenshots are definitely legal under "Fair Use" guidelines, as far as I know. I've just added a screenshot of the Finder in OS X 10.3. I'll go back and add one of OS 9, but it's a pain to reboot so I won't do it right now. ;-) -- Dan Carlson 01:03, Feb 16, 2004 (UTC)

I removed the paragraph that discussed the "spatial mode" of the 10.3 Finder. I can find no reference to this either within the 10.3 Finder itself, nor anywhere within Apple's documentation on their website. If it exists at all, maybe it's something that requires a command line or plist hack to enable, since there certainly isn't any obvious user interface to the feature. Or maybe it was a beta option that was removed from the final build? Also, column view has been available in the OS X Finder since the DP1 release, so that's not new in 10.3 either. Graham 04:21, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Perhaps the "spatial mode" is referring to the ability to add "aliases" to the sidebar? That's sort of a spatial mode, in that it provides quick shortcuts to various areas of your hard drive. However, since Apple doesn't refer to it in that way, and there's no definitive way of referring to it in those terms, I agree that it doesn't really belong. -- Dan Carlson 23:04, Feb 17, 2004 (UTC)
It's a reference to the 10.3 Finder's behavior when you push the little white pill in the top-right corner of the window. Not only does the brushed-metal appearance go away, but the Finder's behavior changes to something that is consistent neither with the NeXT-file-browser behavior of the normal windows nor the classic Finder behavior. It's a total mess. Those who never liked or "got" the classic Mac finder claim that the OS X finder now has the best of both worlds. (These are the same people who seem to think that the classic "Label" feature has been "restored" in 10.3, or who think the Dock is the greatest thing since Microsoft Bob). One exposition of this is here in macobserver. I provide this only so you can understand what the people who talk about the "spatial mode" are talking about. Dpbsmith 23:57, 17 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Well, according to the deleted text, "spatial mode" effectively emulates the OS 9.x Finder, using plain Aqua windows (not metal, and with no sidebar) and opening a new window for each opened folder. I know that you can open a new window for a folder by command-double-clicking it, but the resulting window is no different in appearance. From this description, I'd expect to see something in the Finder preferences, but there isn't anything there relating to this. A search of Apple's knowledge base turns up nothing, neither does any of the read-me's. I even have access to some of the beta versions, and they don't mention it either. Seems to be a figment of the poster's imagination! Graham 23:42, 17 Feb 2004 (UTC)
The pill, Graham, the pill. That idiotic little white pill in the top right corner. When you see a little white pill, doesn't it make you think "Gee, I'll bet if I pressed this, it would change the window appearance away from brushed metal, and change all sorts of random window behavior?" Of course it does. Dpbsmith 00:00, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)
My god, you're right!!!! I never even noticed it, let alone tried to click it. In previous versions, this just hid the toolbar, and since I find the toolbar quite useful, I never had any desire to click it. OK, well, I stand humbly corrected and I learned something! To me though, this is terrible interface, simply because it's the ONLY method (it seems) to bring about this way of operation. As a shortcut, then fine, but it should be explicitly spelt out in the prefs or maybe the view options. I'll put something back in the article. Graham 10:55, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Now I come to play with it a little more, it still means "Show/Hide toolbar", since the similarly named menu command also has the same effect. However, the command is now completely misnamed, because not only does it hide the toolbar, it hides the sidebar, the search box and also completely changes the behaviour and appearance of the Finder! Seems to me like a rush job. I hope they will polish this somewhat in future versions - I still find weird bugs in 10.3 Finder (like the wrong icons suddenly attaching themselves to files), and glaring interface anomalies like this don't help either. Graham 11:04, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)
The article is incorrect, spatial mode is not new in 10.3, the pill did the same thing in 10.2 Edward 21:10, 24 May 2004 (UTC)
Fixed it now. Edward 12:18, 2005 Jan 1 (UTC)

I am 99.8% certain that Finder 1.0 did, indeed, allow folders inside folders. It looked and felt like a hierarchical file system. The file system on the MFS diskette itself was flat, and consequently no two files could have duplicate names even if they were inside different folders. I'm frustrated to find no specific reference to this in my 1984 vintage Macintosh manual or MacWorld volume 1 number 1, so I don't think I'm prepared to say anything about it in the article... yet. The references to the hierarchy being "an illusion maintained by the Finder at great cost" referred to whatever it did to simulate a hierarchical view of a flat file system.

Another little historical tidbit. From the very first--or at least, from whatever version of the Finder and OS were current when CE Software's MockWrite desk accessory first appeared, which I believe was late 1984 or early 1985--files that were created by any application would appear automatically in the Finder view within a few seconds of creation, with no special effort needed on the part of the application. This is notable because it was ages and ages and ages before any Windows system did this--I you need to hit F5-refresh in Windows NT, don't know whether this has changed in Win2K or XP. It's also notable because OS X 10.0 through 10.2 did NOT do this; applications were required to send some special notification to the Finder when they created a file, if the appearance was to be updated. This seems to be fixed in 10.3. But for at least three years of OS X, it lacked a fundamental feature that the classic OS had possessed from 1985 or thereabouts. Dpbsmith 23:57, 17 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I only used the MFS system for a short time, so you may be right. I'll see if I can dig up some old documentation, I think I have some somewhere that goes back that far. The Finder update did occur eventually under the older systems, it just would take forever, since the Finder polled for mod date changes once every 10 seconds or so, but would only look at one file at a time, in alphabetical order. So if your open window had 100 files and your file was named "zebedee", it would be over 16 minutes before it refreshed. The active notification (via Applescript) was there to make it hurry up. Bloody silly, and something that Copland (ahem!) promised would fix - there, each file system event was supposed to send messages that other processes (e.g Finder) could hook into to make the interface completely responsive and match the true state of the file system at all times. I still don't find 10.3 all that fast, but it is a lot better than it was before. Graham 10:55, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Oh, well, don't get me started... On the whole, overall, on a one-to-five mouse scale, or whatever, I like OS X 10.3 about as well as OS 9, but for different reasons. And I very much mourn what I think are all the babies that were unnecessarily thrown out with the bathwater. The OS X Finder feels to me as if it was designed by someone who just didn't "get it," and was working from some marketer's feature list... it feels very left-brained, as if the person who did it really likes emacs. But it's better than Windows and I can live with it.
And extensions instead of type/creator. Don't get me started on that. They don't work. I knew they wouldn't, and despite the long and detailed explanation of how they were going to make it work, they don't. It's a mess. Plus, I've repeatedly asked extensions advocate to explain how they could associate proper file types with the various C++ header files which are required by the C++ standard to have names without any period in them--vector, etc.
Fortunately, the Mac heritage seems to me to live on in the increasing number of very-well-designed Apple applications, iTunes, etc. I see much less visual thinking in the Mac environment than when it was new. It's been a long time since I laughed out loud, as I did the first time I ran an early music-composition program--I think it might have been MusicWorks?--in which for some reason they disabled the volume control in the Control Panel (remember when there was only one Control Panel?) The way they chose to represent this was by (somehow) altering the Control Panel's screen picture so that the portion that had been the volume control was now replaced by a sort of photorealistic picture of a hole in a plaster wall containing an electrical junction box with a couple of bare wires hanging out. Dpbsmith 18:37, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Totally agree about extensions - we are supposed to be moving forwards, not backwards. Extensions are possibly one of the worst ideas ever perpetrated. Surely a mor elegant solution could have been found - in fact, I thought they already had one. Ho hum, you're right that somebody somewhere doesn't get it. MusicWorks was a cool program - there, I've added a potential link to an article about it ;-) It did however, play very fast and loose with the OS, so much so that while it would run on a Mac Plus most of the time, it was a dead duck on anything later, and didn't survive system revs beyond 4.1 or so. Pity, because otherwise I could run it under vMac and take some screen shots. Remember the about box, with the singing notes? This is getting seriously off-topic. Maybe we should take this discussion to one of our user talk pages? Graham 22:17, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)

For ease of finding, should the redirect to the McNeill comic be at the top (in italics) rather than at the bottom? Since it's all the way at the bottom, and doesn't appear on the table of contents, many people who are looking for the comic may not see it, and think that there is no entry. -FZ 21:47, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] OS9 screenshot

Image:Mac_OS_9_screenshot_2.jpg seems to be downscaled, making the screenshot blurry and of lesser quality. Maybe someone could make a new screenshot for it? --Michiel Sikma 20:55, 5 January 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Correct version number?

There seems to be some dispute over the correct Finder version for Mac OS X 10.4.6. I am on an Intel Mac, and mine says Finder version 10.4.3, not 10.4.4 like everyone else is saying. Is it because the Intel builds are slightly ahead or behind in their build numbers than the PPC builds? — Wackymacs 19:38, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Criticism of the Macintosh Finder - reference

Since this is just evidence that the users themselves are critical of the Finder would something like this work well?

[edit] Put Away was in System 6, and Eject is there since 1.0.

The Put Away command was in System 6, doing exactly what was described as a System 7 first feature. So I moved the paragraph to the System 6 section and changed another reference in the System 7 section so that it points out that using Put Away to eject/unmount a disk was a new thing in Finder 7.

The article was saying that Finder 5.0 introduced the Eject menu command. Considering that Mac floppy drives didn't have an eject button, how did you expect people in 1984 to eject their disk? With a paper clip? Now seriously, the Eject command was first found in System 1.0, not 5.0!

I removed something about the Finder ejecting the disk only by dragging to the trash which is not true. The whole dragging the disk to the trash should be explained here once and for all.

To eject disks in the original Finder users had to use the Eject command found in the File menu. Doing so would leave grayed out icons for the disk and its files. That enabled users to copy files between multiple disks using a single disk drive. The system software would eject the current disk and ask for another if needed.

To get rid of the grayed out disk icons you had to drag them to the trash can, or restart. Since Finder 1.x didn't let users drag currently inserted disks to the trash, a complete ejection was a two step process:

First select the Eject menu command. That will physically eject the disk, leaving a ghost image. Then, drag the ghost icon to the trash.

More recent versions of the Finder (System 4.1 and up?) combined both actions and enabled dragging a mounted disk to the trash directly to both eject the disk and its virtual representation. Command-shift-1 and command-shift-2 were added in early versions to directly eject disk in drive 1 or 2, but these would still leave a ghost volume.

It wasn't until System 7 with the modified Put Away command that you could do the equivalent of dragging a disk to the trash with a menu command or command key.

The ghosted icon feature doesn't exist in OS X, and completely ejecting and unmounting a disk doesn't require dragging to the trash or using a cryptic command (Put Away). You can either eject via contextual menus, an eject button at the right of the volume icon in the sidebar of a finder window, the eject menu command or the eject key on the keyboard.

There was a "Put back" menu command in System 1 that seems to have identical functionality to the "Put away" command in later systems. Theshibboleth 17:20, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Finder replacements and MiniFinder

What does everyone think about making a reference to shareware Finder replacements such as PathFinder and Macintosh Explorer ? Also I think the MiniFinder, being so totally different in user interface ought to have its own article. It was in fact possible to have a bootable floppy that only had the MiniFinder and no regular Finder. Connectionfailure 00:34, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

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