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Comment by Kwpolska | Hacker News Reader

There are also some amusing writings not included here about modern macOS changing things in a way Siracusa dislikes. For example, mandatory file extensions (written in 2001, when the Internet was a thing and file extensions were required for all file exchanges) [0] or the Spatial Finder saga [1] about missing an antiquated way to make a mess on your screen and pretend to be managing folders.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2001/10/macosx-10-1/12/

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/#prev-article...

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He’s right about the spatial Finder. The Mac OS 9 Finder is still a better user experience. The OS X Finder only become marginally usable when they added the sidebar so that you had some starting reference points; it was much improved with Spotlight because you could then find things without spatial reference points.

But I still maintain that adding the NeXT browser view to the OS 9 Finder would be the perfect experience. The OS X Finder went down this awful .DS_Store-strewn half-assed path and it’s still just the weirdest set of choices imaginable.

I think modern "kids" (who now are in their early 40s perhaps!) don't quite get how useful the spacial finder was to non-technically aligned people. "I left it right here" is a huge piece of memory that our brains have developed over millennia, and the spacial finder played right into that.

The "it's in the directory listing in terminal" or "spotlight will find it" or "what is a file" don't really compare, even if they can be made usable.

Funnily enough, learning how to computer from Chromebooks and tablets have made modern kids incapable of understanding the spacial metaphor at all. Their navigation is entirely search-centric.

These are great :) I'd like to do without file extensions again, but internet URL norms have now made that decision for all operating systems. But I'm still kicking Finder windows back into spatial mode three times a day.

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