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Comment by orhmeh09 | Hacker News Reader

What made spatial finder good stuff, to you?

Spatial Finder was the ultimate example of "It just works" from Macs in the past. Unless you knew what it was doing (always opening folders in the same place), it was something that would be hard to articulate as an advantage over other operating systems.

The tradeoff against that of course was that you could not open the same folder in two different windows. With OS X, Finder implemented Miller Columns[0] (as taken from NextStep), so that ended spatial Finder, since windows could no longer be associated with particular folders.

Personally, I'm a huge fan of Miller Columns as I find the easy hierarchy great as part of the "operating system is the dev environment" approach, but if I worked on more chaotic art projects perhaps I'd like spatial finder more. Either way I use Windows now and most of the alternative file managers don't seem to integrate into the OS well, so I get neither lol

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns

It presents the contents of your disk in a manner congruent to how the human brain deals with physical objects: each file or folder can be found in exactly one place, and its on-screen location remains the same unless changed, just like real objects.

Apple was the only computer company taking advantage of human psychology in such a deep way to make computers easier to use. To some extent they still are, but for decades the Macintosh was pretty much the only computer truly approachable by normies. Mac OS X compromises that approachability in a few fundamental ways (and it's getting worse with the iOS-ization of everything).

iOS did something a little similar through iOS6, with folders having a kind of visual physicality—tapping a folder would "slide" the screen "apart" to reveal it underneath, leaving a clear way out (tap any part of the outer Home Screen, which is still visible at the top and bottom) and making the folders feel like a place, with dimension and location. The down-side was that they were limited to only a few content apps, since scrolling would have ruined the whole effect. Then, iOS7 ditched the whole thing for more-traditional folders (if you've watched the quite-computer-"illiterate" use computers, you know this means they're always gonna feel lost when using folders, now—iOS6 and earlier was the only OS+platform I've ever seen that I'd enthusiastically recommend to my approaching-100 grandma, and expect that she'd do kinda OK at using it unassisted, maybe after some light config of the a11y features).

7 broke a bunch of other excellently-discoverable stuff. The replacement for the unlock slider was especially far into obviously-a-large-step-backwards territory.

Lots of true-blue Mac partisans were crazy salty about the loss of the spatial finder, but I never gave a damn.

I want my file-browsing window to maintain a consistent presentation as I navigate. I don’t need each folder to open another window; that makes me crazy, and was one of the things I hated about OS 9 when I moved to the Mac in the late 90s. To me, the shifts under OS X — mostly, the unixy (BSD-y) underpinnings but also changes like the abandonment of the spatial Finder — made it WAY better.

Yeah - that was the thing. To traditional mac users, the finder wasn't a file-browser, full stop. It was a document viewer. Each folder was a document.

What would have been really nice would have been to get a clear, visually-distinct instance of both; to get a really clear "this is a file browser" tool in the finder, and a really clear "this is a folder" tool in the finder.

They're both really useful tools to have - what was awful wasn't gaining a file browser, but was how they mixed file browsing and folder viewing into this awful pea-soup thing that damaged a bunch of the value points of both tools.

I really like having a file browser, but there's a LOT of value to having something that treats folders as individual, stateful documents.

It's an interface wrought in the era of 720K floppies where there was a limit to how much hierarchy you would need to plow through to get somewhere.

This is an oversimplification. Unix trains people to think in terms of requiring deep directory hierarchies because the Unix implementation cannot exist without them (I'd argue some of this is due to historical cruft becoming enshrined over the decades). The OS X Finder never managed to bridge the gap between the elegance of the old Finder and the raw utility of the NeXT browser interface.

Something else, anecdotally: NeXT people never used the workspace to actually do anything. They always went to the command line to copy/move files and do other file management things. My takeaway was that the workspace was mainly a proof of concept.

The spatial finder was really 2-3 promises: • Every time you opened a given folder, it always opened in the same, physical place on the screen. Same size, same spot, same view options. Always.

• Only one instance of a folder could be open at once. If you tried to open more than one copy, it would bring the previous one to the front, instead.

• the act of opening a folder would always consistently draw an animation zooming from the icon you'd double-clicked on, to the final open copy of the folder.

Of these 3 promises, the first one was the insanely-great, "magical" one. It ends up tapping into a really powerful aspect of human memory. It has to be absolutely consistent on the OSes part to work (nobody can EVER move your cheese), but if it is consistent like that, then it feels like it unlocks a weird superpower, because you can always find things instantly based on where they are, physically. It's like going from O(log(n)) to find something to just O(1).

It's like having a "cluttered" (but personal) toolshed, where nobody else would have moved anything around. If you have that guarantee, you don't need to waste time "searching" for something, because you know exactly where you put it when you left it there.

Humans for some reason all have extremely good memories on this front; some are better than others, and there's probably some "learning differences" science on this, but as far as I can tell the floor for this capability is really, really high. Even those of us who are "bad" at this are really, really good.

The second item, "only one instance open" is the one that had genuine downsides. Opening multiple views of the same document is a very useful paradigm, which I do all the time in code editors, and in photoshop.

Something that could have been a great compromise, which I think apple really dropped the ball on, would have been having a much stronger separation between two concepts, that in OS X are (practically speaking) really blurry/similar: a "folder view", and a "file browser".

A folder view would have retained all the "spatial finder" behaviors, but a file browser would have looked dramatically different, and allowed you to have all the benefits of opening multiple document views, without the confusion.

The problem with multiple "actual folder view"s being open is you never can tell which one is the master copy for setting the position/view-settings/size. One of them is, but the OS doesn't give an indication. So it really screws with that positional memory thing - you'll have one on the right side of the screen, and have another on the left side, and your brain will "pin" both of those in your memory, but when you go looking for the one that was ephemeral, you can't find it, because the one that got stored was the other one.

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