Hacker News Reader

Comment by alextingle | Hacker News Reader

This is only because the Finder/Explorer has been made harder and harder to use. Apple's OSX Finder is a shocking UI abomination.

Their old MacOS Finder was clear and simple - my wife would spend hours arranging her work in coloured folders, each of which opened in a window whose shape and position she had chosen, and was meaningful to her. It was a powerful tool that enabled her to arrange and group her work.

Now, both Apple and Microsoft compete with each other over how bad they can make their file system interface. Microsoft wanted to do away with the filesystem in Longhorn, and Apple have actually done so in iOS.

Is this progress??

View on HN

Are you talking about spatial mode? That still exists in Finder. Just hit Cmd+Opt+T or select "Hide Toolbars" from the View menu.

You're absolutely right. I don't have the citation on me right now, but spatial mode has been found to be easier to grasp for new users in every single test ever. The only reason it was dropped was because (1) Windows Explorer, (2) power users whined about too many open windows and (3) a lot of people got used to URLs opening in the same window thanks to web browsers, so people sought to apply the same principles to file browsers.

Spatial mode used to be default on GNOME for a long time. There, too, it was dropped because of the same reasons.

> Just hit Cmd+Opt+T or select "Hide Toolbars" from the View menu

The problem is that there's no global switch to force Finder in spatial mode coming from anywhere, anytime. This results in a messy affair when suddenly a non-spatial Finder pops up because you never opened that folder directly and previously put it in spatial mode.

I don't know about Windows but on the Mac it's not spatial mode (and hasn't been since OS9) - it's just a poor imitation.

You can easily have two Finder windows open on the same folder, meaning you lose the immediate recognition that spatial mode gives you. My personal take - they should have two types of Finder window - a spatial "folder contents" window and a folder-browser (probably in column-view) that only shows folders and maybe a preview of the files within.

So you can navigate quickly/enter file-paths in the browser, but to actually use a folder, you enter spatial mode, so you have the instant recognition of where you are.

There is a crusade against the filesystem in general. We should probably go all the way and design an OS that absolutely does not need the concept of files, extensions and directory trees, even for programmers, else we'll have to deal with this UI debate for god knows how long.

Disclaimer: I believe the best UI for a filesystem manager was Windows Explorer 98, the last iteration with perpetual, irrevocable and non exclusive root access, with Norton Commander as its only rival.

From the moment we cared about maintaining our system's safety from the user's "big fingers syndrome", it all went down (starting with hiding file extensions) to the atrocities we now have to deal with. And yes, I put Seven's Explorer in the same basket as Finder and the likes of Nautilus, mostly due to /that/ horrible folder scrolling bug that MS refuses to hotfix.

I don't know spatial mode was default in Gnome for a while and I think most users disliked it.

Gnome's (and OSX's) spacial mode was rubbish. The whole philosophy of MacOS's Finder ("spacial mode") is to hide applications from the user, and make the whole user experience document-centric. The user opens documents and manipulates them without having to worry about what program they are using to do it.

Wonderful though Linux is, it's applications are not consistent or mature enough to support a totally document-centric UI. Microsoft could achieve that with Office, but they would probably be accused of over-integration, and hit with the anti-trust stick.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com