The History of Cover Flow | Hacker News Reader

The History of Cover Flow

512pixels.net

97 pointsingve35 comments

I also miss the icons for drives showing up in the finder window sidebar. Now, all drives' icons are ignored and replaced by generic, OS-assigned icons. Rather than having a visual cue of what to click on, one must read the name. Seems trivial, but it sucks and I hate it.

A couple projects tried to keep the sidebar icons alive using mySIMBL (1) and later MacForge (2) but they've sadly all been abandoned. (I think.) They never really worked all that well, requiring finder-rebooting and various shenanigans to get them to run (if memory serves.)

(1) https://github.com/w0lfschild/mySIMBL (2) https://github.com/MacEnhance/MacForge

Give TotalFinder a go. Works on latest macOS on M1 chips. You do need to change the SIP policy to get it working, but you can fine tune it so that TotalFinder has the permissions it needs while preserving security elsewhere in the system.

Other than that initial setup quirk, it’s been flawless for me and even enables some extra customisation capabilities.

It’s a bit rough around the edges, but I implemented my own for the web in JS:

https://yklcs.com/coverflow

Mine’s a bit different from the actual one as I had to reverse engineer the animation. It’s more complex to implement than I imagined, it’s hard to get the motions to feel “right”. I used a logistic function where the inflection point is at the middle of the screen to calculate the amount of translation/rotation.

I’d love to see a breakdown of the actual animations used.

That's a very nice implementation, not even janky on my old Mac. Great.

I recently found out that the web is in the process of getting Scroll-Driven-Animations, which enabled a CSS-only CoverFlow, among other things. Here is an example:

https://scroll-driven-animations.style/demos/cover-flow/css/

Seeing Mezzanine then flipping through I thought somehow it’s reading my actual music library on my phone and was both impressed and worried at once. Good job.

Hah! I was like, "This guy has all the best albums of all time..."

I thought a big reason for the removal of Cover Flow from iTunes was troubles with patent troll companies in 2008:

https://www.macobserver.com/news/apple-settles-coverflow-pat...

https://www.spazcosoft.com/blog-cover-flow.md.html

The article says Apple won though?

I miss those early days when Apple was announcing new features for OS X. Now, macOS gets iOS’s hand-me-downs.

Or things nobody asked for like Stage Manager

Funnily enough (re GP), apparently Stage Manager was actually originally prototyped in the OS X days (2006). https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/stage-manager-was-a-thi...

iPadOS’s hand-me-downs

I ought to mention, I really expected that Stage Manager on iPad would turn out to have been mirroring the VR headset's window management, but that doesn't seem to be the case

FWIW, after using it for a few months I like it more than I thought I would. I decided to try it after my Average User sister said she liked it, and I wondered what I was missing. As context, I’ve used Mac OS since the late 80s and have permanently (to the degree possible) disabled the dock.

Or the new Preferences.app.

Why is it so slow? Opening proxy settings can take 5+ seconds

SwiftUI

Stage Manager is surprisingly great, IMO. Frustrating at times, but mostly great.

As if anybody asked for Cover Flow, one of the most useless features in the history of OS X?

It was really useful for quickly scrolling through a folder of images. As it relates to music it wasn't very useful - but it was fun. Not everything has to be useful.

I don’t get it on the Mac (mind I also need to use 3rd party window management / snapping tools here), but it seems to work well now the iPad has really good extended display support.

Or features removed a decade ago are now back, but this time they're much more locked down (widgets)

I still miss the old dashboard view so badly. It was awesome having multiple calculators and sticky notes one button press away without cluttering my desktop. They really botched it by letting it rot and not integrating it with the App Store.

The latest implementation with the desktop is... okay, but unnecessarily messy imo — I'm unclear why they can't do both kinds of views on macOS (On the desktop + full screen view like the classic dashboard), akin to a dedicated view on the left side of the Home Screen + Home Screen widgets on iOS.

I had a wonderful little widget that gave me the snow report for my local ski hill. Have yet to find anything that just worked that well. Current solution is a homemade telegram bot that messages me the report every morning.

Also, fwiw, there were always ways to break a dashboard widget out of dashboard and onto the desktop. And dashboard's precursor, konfabulator, had that from the beginning

>full screen view like the classic dashboard

They'd be admitting they shouldn't have killed Dashboard if they did this.

This was a really nice way of browsing someone's music at a house party. This was largely pre-streaming, and during those days a MacBook hooked up to a stereo was a common fixture at after-hours get togethers. Flipping through Cover Flow was like flipping through someone's records – you got a sense about a person by flipping through their music collection.

Yeap. Source: my ~2014 MBA sat in a box in the garage with a dead top row of keys from a vodka coke spill of a friend.

The great flattening basically took away some of the best UI apple had.

Fully agree. I miss the colorfulness and to a degree also the playfulness.

I don’t want to lick it anymore.

I miss Coverflow on the Mac. The "gallery view" is a poor substitute.

One of many reasons to keep using Pathfinder. Has it built in still

I need to replace my 2012 Macbook Pro one of these days[0] and I'll look into a Pathfinder license when I do.

[0] Still a superb machine but no one does battery replacements anymore due to Apple declaring it obsolete and I don't trust myself to do it.

Save a wee bit of money and get the SetApp license. Most of the stuff there is of varying quality, but between cleanshotx, pathfinder, tableplus, dash, and bartender, it pays for itself

Made it in SwiftUI, without reflection: https://youtube.com/shorts/zHeoSsFO9RQ?feature=share

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