From: Michael G Schwern Date: 01:28 on 03 Jan 2004 Subject: OS X Finder In the OS 9 Finder one could quickly navigate to a folder in an open window by typing the first few letters of it and then correcting with the arrow keys. If you wanted to drill down into it, either cmd-o or cmd-downarrow, but this opened a new window. No problem, hold down shift to avoid this. cmd-uparrow to move up a folder. This made navigating a directory tree nearly as fast as a command line. Enter the OS X Finder. Everything works the same, but they changed the default. Now the default is to open a folder in the same window. Great! Except that they took away a hotkey to open in a seperate window. shift-cmd-downarrow still opens in the same window. shift-cmd-o opens in a different window but using this rediculously slow zoom animation that I can't figure how to turn off. cmd-doubleclick will do what I want, but that means I have to use the mouse. Three ways to open a folder, three different behaviors. Argh.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 01:50 on 03 Jan 2004 Subject: Re: OS X Finder > Enter the OS X Finder. Everything works the same, but they changed the > default. Now the default is to open a folder in the same window. Great! If you click the oval in the upper right corner of the window, it should switch to opening it in the same window. This is one of the two things I think they really screwed up on OS X. They should have just Carbonised the existing Finder and LEFT IT ALONE, and then started over with the OpenStep file browser as the, and let you pick which one gets used when a program opens a file dialog. The other thing is that I think they should have gone to a two button mouse, and put all the control-command-shift-option-corner-click crap in a contextual menu, ALONG WITH any relevant Services entries, with the shorthands presented as accelerators the way key combos are in the main menus... because I *still* can't remember all the stupid bloody shorthands and options are, and I'm damned if I should need to. I know where to find Emacs, thank you very much, and I'm standing well clear. HEY, APPLE, RECOGNITION IS EASIER THAN RECALL, REMEMBER? Bastards.
From: Michael G Schwern Date: 06:35 on 03 Jan 2004 Subject: Re: OS X Finder On Fri, Jan 02, 2004 at 07:50:18PM -0600, Peter da Silva wrote: > > Enter the OS X Finder. Everything works the same, but they changed the > > default. Now the default is to open a folder in the same window. Great! > > If you click the oval in the upper right corner of the window, it should > switch to opening it in the same window. Yes, that turns the toolbar on and off which for some bizarre reason changes the default open behavior. Why they tied the two together, I have no idea. Why they decided this was important enough to put a dedicated button on the window bar I also have no idea. But that changes the default behavior to be the way I *don't* want. I want the default to be to open a folder in the same window, I just want a hotkey to open in a different window. > The other thing is that I think they should have gone to a two button > mouse, and put all the control-command-shift-option-corner-click crap in > a contextual menu, ALONG WITH any relevant Services entries, with the > shorthands presented as accelerators the way key combos are in the main > menus... because I *still* can't remember all the stupid bloody shorthands > and options are, and I'm damned if I should need to. I know where to find > Emacs, thank you very much, and I'm standing well clear. Eh. You can get a N button mouse and set it up to do all that.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 16:46 on 03 Jan 2004 Subject: Re: OS X Finder > Yes, that turns the toolbar on and off which for some bizarre reason > changes the default open behavior. Why they tied the two together, I > have no idea. Why they decided this was important enough to put a dedicated > button on the window bar I also have no idea. I'm in full agreement. It's bizarre. It's like it's switching it between a bad emulation of the old Finder and a bad emulation of the NeXT file browser. It's a lose-lose situation. > > because I *still* can't remember all the stupid bloody shorthands > > and options are, and I'm damned if I should need to. I know where to find > > Emacs, thank you very much, and I'm standing well clear. > Eh. You can get a N button mouse and set it up to do all that. You mean, you can get an N button mouse and set it up so now you've got N-2 more magic combinations you need to keep track of. I really want a three button mouse that works like the old Sun (Select/Extend/Menu) or Xerox (Select/Action/Menu) models. CONSISTENTLY. Whatever studies led to the single button mouse and all the resulting layers of magic combos were horribly horribly flawed. So long as you only do one thing, a single button is fine. As soon as you need to add options, a context menu beats the pants off any metakey/multibutton combos.
From: Michael G Schwern Date: 05:58 on 14 Jan 2004 Subject: Re: OS X Finder On Sat, Jan 03, 2004 at 10:46:31AM -0600, Peter da Silva wrote: > Whatever studies led to the single button mouse and all the resulting layers > of magic combos were horribly horribly flawed. So long as you only do one > thing, a single button is fine. As soon as you need to add options, a context > menu beats the pants off any metakey/multibutton combos. That's the thing. Back when they did the studies (early 80s) there was just click, double click and that's it. The magic key combos came waaaaaaay later. Like > ten years later. I don't think contextual menus were added until OS 9. So when the studies were done it made sense. Now, though, it smacks a little of slavish devotion.
From: David Cantrell Date: 12:01 on 14 Jan 2004 Subject: Re: OS X Finder On Tue, Jan 13, 2004 at 09:58:58PM -0800, Michael G Schwern wrote: > That's the thing. Back when they did the studies (early 80s) there was just > click, double click and that's it. The magic key combos came waaaaaaay > later. Like > ten years later. I don't think contextual menus were added > until OS 9. Naw, PARC used three buttons before Jobs nicked their ideas.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 12:45 on 14 Jan 2004 Subject: Re: OS X Finder > That's the thing. Back when they did the studies (early 80s) there was just > click, double click and that's it. The magic key combos came waaaaaaay > later. Like > ten years later. I don't think contextual menus were added > until OS 9. I'm pretty sure shift-click and command-click were there pretty much from the start. > So when the studies were done it made sense. Now, though, it smacks a little > of slavish devotion. Xerox had three buttons: select, action, and menu. Sun had three buttons: select, extend-select, and menu, plus double-click for action. Apple had three "buttons": select, extend-select and append-select, plus double-click. Then they added option-click for a fifth button, so some objects that used "select" for their "action" operation could have a selection operation. But different applications did different things for command-click and option-click and sometimes even shift-click, because there were so many alternatives that a single "action" didn't cover. So finally in OS 8 they started trying to clean things up with contextual menus. Too little too late. So, no, it never made sense except through a very specialised viewpoint that said "this GUI needs to be easy to demonstrate". They used to say as much: that having multiple buttons confused people who had never used any kind of GUI before so they had to stop and explain how the multiple buttons worked. That could take several minutes with some people. A few minutes isn't a lot of time compared to how long you're going to be using the interface, so I never understood why that was such a big deal. Then I realised that it's an awfully long time to expect people walking by in a computer store to pay attention. As a marketing tool it makes sense.
From: Simon Wistow Date: 09:19 on 14 Jan 2004 Subject: Re: OS X Finder On Sat, Jan 03, 2004 at 10:46:31AM -0600, Peter da Silva said: > Whatever studies led to the single button mouse I can't remember what book it was I read it in, possibly Insanely Great by Steven Levy, where it was indictaed the the reasoning was that whilst there was a strong metaphor for the one button mouse (i.e pointing with your index finger) there was nothing for a second mouse button.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 13:12 on 14 Jan 2004 Subject: Re: OS X Finder > I can't remember what book it was I read it in, possibly Insanely Great > by Steven Levy, where it was indictaed the the reasoning was that whilst > there was a strong metaphor for the one button mouse (i.e pointing with > your index finger) there was nothing for a second mouse button. Sure there is. How many things in the real world respond to pointing? Well, there's buttons. And... there's buttons. Here's a doorknob, what do you do with it? You can lock it, you can open it, you can take it apart and fix it, you can oil it. Here's an icon, a file, what do you do with it? You can open it, you can delete it, you can look at its properties, you can do all kinds of things. I have four reasonably dextrous fingers, and a prehensile thumb. I can point and I can grab and I can twist and turn and pull and push and tweak and rub and poke and scratch and ... you get the picture. There's a whole menu of actions I can perform with my hand! Similarly, on the screen, you have an object metaphor. If the object is fixed in place and only has two states, then you only need one button to operate on it. But most of the objects on the screen aren't like that: they can be dragged, opened, examined (different operation), duplicated, collected with other similar objects, and so on. In Apple's model, that button is your index funger when you're using a menu, or clicking a button, but it's your prehensile thumb when you're selecting or grabbing an icon and you have to double-click to just 'press' it. And if you want to use the rest of your fingers, you go all the way to the top of the screen and point at these *other* objects. It's a marketing metaphor, that's all. "We need to explain this in a 30 second TV commercial, who cares if it's still a good idea after a couple of hours".
From: David Champion Date: 16:46 on 14 Jan 2004 Subject: Stupid metaphors [Re: OS X Finder] * On 2004.01.14, in <20040114091916.GI22103@xxxxxxxxxx.xxx>, * "Simon Wistow" <simon@xxxxxxxxxx.xxx> wrote: > > I can't remember what book it was I read it in, possibly Insanely Great > by Steven Levy, where it was indictaed the the reasoning was that whilst > there was a strong metaphor for the one button mouse (i.e pointing with > your index finger) there was nothing for a second mouse button. The trouble, of course, being that this is the sort of thinking that gives us desktop CD player programs with half-bright faux green LEDs and brushed-metal knobs that you have to mouse-drag in a semicircle to adjust volume, and librarian software that displays titles vertically along little book bindings that you have to click on to see in full. The "natural" metaphor is far too central in software. A volume knob works well for the human hand, but it's lousy for a mouse or a tablet, and completely absurd for a trackball. (Who drags their stereo knobs around by the finger, like a telephone dial, anyway?) We need new models that aren't rooted in the real-world behaviors that we design software to exceed, but rather in the functions and modes that computers actually work with well. Simple is good, but "natural" does not imply simple. If I could get my stereo to tell me the track name, author, and playtime of a tune in 14-point Futura Grande, at 70% black on an off-white background, or if I could display my bookshelf horizontally and remove volumes without collapse, or if I could wave my left hand to context-menu the sandwich in my right into a gin and tonic, I'd be all over that. But I'll thank my software not to limit me the same way my living room does. What sort of primitivity would we constrain ourselves to if all our everyday interfaces were modelled on pointing with one finger, grunting, and scratching ourselves? If lack of a corresponding metaphor for a second mouse button is what held them back, they were looking at the wrong metaphors.
From: Paul Mison
Date: 12:04 on 03 Jan 2004
Subject: Re: OS X Finder
On 02/01/2004 at 19:50 -0600, Peter da Silva wrote:
>On 02/01/2004 at 17:28 -0800, Michael G Schwern wrote:
>> Enter the OS X Finder. Everything works the same, but they changed the
>> default. Now the default is to open a folder in the same window. Great!
Adding option seemed to work in my quick poke at the Finder, but it
also makes the parent of the new window close. (If you're in the
other Finder mode, where it always opens new windows, this is the
only reason to use it.)
>If you click the oval in the upper right corner of the window, it should
>switch to opening it in the same window.
The Finder doesn't remember toolbar state as often as it should (ie
always). In particular, my Trash folder *always* comes back after a
reboot with toolbar visibility set to 'on' (and, incidentally, the
two list view settings ('Show relative dates' and 'calculate folder
sizes') switched on and off respectively, although I prefer them off
and on).
This isn't too much of a problem under 10.2, because it just moves
the window down a bit. Under 10.3, of course, this means that there's
half a ton of metallised junk and a crappy sidebar too, which
completly fucks over my window positioning (bottom right hand
corner). This is one of the main reasons that I'm still on 10.2 on my
main machine.
>This is one of the two things I think they really screwed up on OS X. They
>should have just Carbonised the existing Finder and LEFT IT ALONE, and then
>started over with the OpenStep file browser as the, and let you pick which
>one gets used when a program opens a file dialog.
John Siracusa has been saying something like this for a long time, as
well as (sagely) pointing out that the 10.3 Finder isn't 'all new',
it's just the 10.2 one with some extra crap shat all over it.
>The other thing is that I think they should have gone to a two button
>mouse
What's wrong with click and hold? Omniweb does it, Finderpop let you
do it (globally!) in Mac OS 8-9, and Fruitmenu and Ittec let you add
it in the Mac OS X Finder. Shame there's no global solution. (That
get-out clause of the 'cog' menu in 10.3 hardly counts).
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 17:01 on 03 Jan 2004 Subject: Re: OS X Finder > >This is one of the two things I think they really screwed up on OS X. They > >should have just Carbonised the existing Finder and LEFT IT ALONE, and then > >started over with the OpenStep file browser as the, and let you pick which > >one gets used when a program opens a file dialog. > John Siracusa has been saying something like this for a long time, as > well as (sagely) pointing out that the 10.3 Finder isn't 'all new', > it's just the 10.2 one with some extra crap shat all over it. Well, he wants to redesign it from scratch. I'm a lot less enthusiastic about that. > What's wrong with click and hold? I have two answers to this. First: I don't care for timing-dependent interfaces. Click-and-hold, double-click, tap-and-hold on the Pocket PC, mouse acceleration, they bother me. I don't think we'll ever get rid of doubleclick (on the original Xerox UI, the middle mouse button was the action button and did what doubleclick does, but Apple torpedoed any chance of going back to that), but the rest can be avoided. Second: OK, make it tap-and-hold. The point is not the mechanism used to bring up the context menu, but that the context menu be the *primary* meta-click mechanism, with all the rest as optional accelerators (the way combos like Cmd-Q or Cmd-A are for Quit and Select All). The point, again, is that the UI should have a couple of simple mechanisms that always work reliably and consistently, rather than a lot of special cases that are different for every application. That is, after all, why I'm using a Mac instead of my FreeBSD box for my main desktop... because it's consistent. Windows, and this is scary but true, Windows actually does this part of the user interface much better than the Mac.
From: Michael G Schwern Date: 05:56 on 14 Jan 2004 Subject: Re: OS X Finder On Sat, Jan 03, 2004 at 12:04:21PM +0000, Paul Mison wrote: > What's wrong with click and hold? Takes too damn long.
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