News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

January 28, 2006

software

Finding obsession

Posted Jan. 28, ’06, 6:52 PM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Software

Finder When I moved Mac OS X, I discovered something. Apparently, I don’t use the Finder much. Perhaps the biggest complain for users moving from OS 9 to OS X was that they didn’t like the Finder. I’ll admit, the disappearance of spring loaded folders was frustrating for me, but beyond that, I didn’t have any real complaints. In fact, I liked it better. Column view is the best thing since sliced bread. I’m not representative though, and the recent Finder team position listing has proven that.

Such mundane events would go overlooked in any other company. Imagine if Microsoft listed an opening for their Internet Explorer team. We wouldn’t get millions of responses like we have for this.

Examples: * Daring Fireball * Drunkenblog * Fat Bits * TUAW

I’d list more, but it’s barely worth it. Do a search on Technorati and then enjoy wading through the results. You’ll get more than your fair share of “the next Finder should be Cocoa.” Nevermind the fact that there is no intrinsic performance or functionality improvement by changing API.

Instead, Apple’s attempt to staff their software engineering for a product causes wild rampant speculation about improvements and sweeping changes overnight. It’s time for a reality check. Apple putting up an ad for engineer is just that. It’s not the second coming. One engineer isn’t going to turn things around 180 degrees.

What is slightly noteworthy is the verbiage of the ad.

The Finder team is seeking an energetic, motivated software engineer to help develop next generation versions of the Finder, the notorious file browser for Mac OS X. You will be responsible for developing new features of an application that is often perceived by our users as the “face of the system”. You will be working on user interfaces spanning various browser views, new advanced search features, navigation and data presentation as well as many other parts of the application.

It’s slightly amusing that the Finder is referred to as “notorious”. One chuckle escaped my lips. What I find more compelling is the other way that it’s characterized: an application that is often perceived by our users as the “face of the system”. It’s sad but true. File management is “the system” to most users. That’s why it’s so important, but it underlines that Apple is going to need to do a lot of work if they want users to adopt their vision of a metadata driven data system.

I’d like to think we can all move away from maintaining a hierarchal file system and instead simply use our data in our applications. In fact, that’s one of the things that the Palm OS got right. Users don’t think in terms of files. They think about data. Maybe this new engineer will help migrate the OS in this direction, but I don’t think they’ll singlehandedly make users happy. I’m looking forward to what changes Leopard will bring.


1 Comments

Oliver said:

I've been thinking recently about how I hardly ever interact with my photos and music files within the finder (or, outside iTunes and iPhoto). Assuming iTunes' movies capabilities becomes usable (or a new movie management app is released) the I could add my movie files to the list.

So what's left? Documents (M$ Office files, PDFs, some website work). I could see the Finder being re-written to be an 'iTunes-for-documents' type app. When you receive/create a new document just drop it into/save it to the main document library. Spotlight-powered smart folders/playlists can then organise the documents according to project or date etc..

Of course, the hierarchical system will still need to be accessible somehow, but it seems only logical to do this given how little use the current finder gets in my workflow.

January 29, 2006 1:49 AM

Leave a comment

 



Visit other IDG sites: