FTFF
When the “new” Finder was unveiled by Steve Jobs at WWDC 2007, the Apple blogosphere was in a state of conflict. While some people welcomed the change with open arms and optimistically hoped that this would finally be the magical solution to all their woes, others were not quite so convinced by what they thought was only a new pretty face that would probably just introduce of slew of new bugs, leaving the existing ones in their place.
Leopard is here and after having used it for the past twenty days, I think that both the opinions were partly correct. While the new Finder does take care of most of the problems with the pre-Leopard Finder, the frequent appearance of the spinning beach ball being one of them, it does introduce a set of new bugs for us to contend with. Here’s a list of the few bugs that I have noticed to date and am pretty annoyed with.
Cover Flow
When you are in the Cover Flow view and are in the process of renaming an item, if you press and hold the left/right direction key, the Finder scrolls on to the other items, leaving the file half renamed. So now, while renaming, you have to hit the direction keys repeatedly in either direction to move the cursor. This is by far the most annoying bug in the Leopard Finder and it completely drives me up the wall.
Another little bug associated with the Cover Flow (and List) view is that when you create a new folder (⇧⌘N), it is created, but not set to be renamed by default like it should and does in other views. So you have to hit that extra Return key. Yeah, I know I’m picky but you can blame that on Apple’s perfectionism, not my own whims of fancy. When you set the bar so high for yourself, you have got to take the flak when you slip up.
Window Behavior
Finder windows have always behaved oddly on Mac OS X and Leopard does not seem to have fixed anything. The first problem is the size. Whenever you hit ⌘N while using the Finder, you can never be quite sure what size the new window will be. Sometimes it will be a tiny little window that only displays a handful of your fifteen hundred files, and on other occasions it will be a huge window that occupies the whole screen. It is completely unpredictable and, as far as I can tell, quite illogical.
Then there is the behavior of the spring loaded folders. Why do spring loaded folders open in a new window in the List and Cover Flow views? What is wrong with opening them in the same folder, like it does when you are in the Icon view? On a related note, it would be really awesome if we could have an integration of Cover Flow with the Column view and if there was a keyboard shortcut to show or hide Cover Flow. On second thought, I think it would make a lot of sense to eliminate the Cover Flow view altogether and instead have a universal keyboard shortcut that you could press while you are in any view to invoke Cover Flow. Any thoughts?
Path Bar
If Microsoft were like Apple, they would be screaming murder right now. Apple clearly stripped off the breadcrumb bar feature of Windows Explorer, decreased its functionality to the point of rendering it almost vestigial and moved it from the top of the window to the bottom to make it seem less like a copy. In other words, they pulled a Microsoft.
Unlike the breadcrumb bar in Vista, you cannot click on the names in the path bar in the Finder to jump up the file hierarchy. (It turns out that you can double-click on the names in the path bar to go to the folders directly. I’m sorry for the mistake!) You cannot click on the little arrows to see a drop down list of or navigate to the other folders at any level in the hierarchy. You cannot copy the path itself. All you can do is look at the path bar and determine where you are if you are feeling a little lost. Fat lot of help that is! The only time I find it useful is when I’m browsing through a list of search results and it lets me know where the selected file is at a glance. It could have been so much more…
Spotlight
This isn’t directly related to the Finder but I feel obligated to mention it nonetheless. Every single review or opinion column I’ve read so far has praised Apple’s decision to eliminate the Spotlight search results window from Leopard and have the Finder window take over the task instead. I, however, am not quite sure that I like this move. In Tiger, when I ran a search for a word and the list of results had only two movies, I could just hit “Show All” and be taken to a window that neatly showed me all the movies related to the keyword. All I had to do was double click on the movie I wanted to watch.
In Leopard, hitting “Show All” takes you to a Finder window with a thousand odd results for your query with the movie you wanted somewhere in between and completely indistinguishable from all the other files. Now, you either sort them by Kind and scroll down to the list of movies and select the one you want, or you hit the little ‘+’ button in the top right hand corner and further refine your search to only show you the movies. In either case, it is a step back from the previous approach of showing you the neatly categorized list of the top five results of each kind in a separate window.
Leopard assumes that you want to create a new smart folder every time you search for a file and throws in the more advanced options, when all you needed was that one other movie that got excluded from the Spotlight list. This flies in the face of Apple’s philosophy of keeping things simple. I’m trying to counter this by being more specific with my search strings so that the results appear in the Spotlight list itself. I hope Apple does something to simplify this.
Miscellaneous
Quick Look is one of the best new features of Leopard and is near perfect in its implementation. I only wish it allowed you to quickly copy text from the document you were viewing and maybe even drag images out of webpages, etc. Allowing basic interaction wouldn’t hurt. It does allow you to click on hyperlinks though.
Then there is the Desktop. Sometimes the Desktop stops responding—new files don’t show up, Quick Look stops working, and you cannot rename stuff. You can, however, select and launch the files that are there. This was a bug with Tiger and I’m saddened to see that it persists in Leopard too. In Tiger though, you generally needed to restart your Mac or relaunch the Finder to fix this bug, but in Leopard it is short lived and completely random. It stops working on its own and then regains consciousness whenever it wishes to.
One thing that surprises me no end about the Finder on Mac OS X is why the “Cut” option is disabled in the “Edit” menu. It is such a basic non-feature that its omission by Apple just cannot be explained rationally. You can copy and paste files but you cannot cut and paste them, even though you can achieve the same functionality with drag and drop. Switchers to the Mac are bamboozled that their Mac, which they revere in most cases, does not allow them to use ⌘X when they are browsing through files in the Finder. If anyone knows any logical reason for the exclusion of this feature, please enlighten me.
So there you have it, a list of the glitches I’ve experienced with the Leopard Finder. It has definitely been improved in Leopard—it is more responsive, networking is now fixed and surprisingly easy, and Quick Look is a boon—but it still needs some more work. Apple still needs to FTFF.
This is by no means complete so please feel free to sound off in the comments. If I’ve missed any glaring bugs, I’ll be happy to append them to this list.
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actually, you can use the path bar in the finder to jump to a specific folder; double-click the item, and voila.
One feature about the path bar that really perplexes me is that you cannot drag the icon from the path bar, like you can from the title-bar of any window. that would be quite useful.
Perhaps you should check your facts better, since a quick google search would have shown that the breadcrumbs actually work. Just double-click them.
Thanks to both of you for the little tip. I’ve updated the article to include that little snipped of essential information.
I’ll try to be more thorough in future.
I’m with you on the Spotlight search window. I used to find it very helpful and spent ages trying to find it in Leopard only to realise it was gone. Hopefully some clever programmers out there will write a plugin of application that does the same thing. I can’t believe Apple killed something so useful!
The Finder has been the bane of my existence the past few months. I’ve basically taken it to its limits and beyond on my last project.
Now that the project is done, I’ve upgraded to Leopard. I haven’t had a chance to really push it yet. I do like the cosmetic changes so far but I’m hoping they are more than cosmetic.
The Finder, like some other OS X apps such as Mail, Transmit, Safari and FireFox, creates new windows the same size as the last sized window. I consider this a feature when a program respects my window sizing preference.
There is a logic to how spring loaded folders work in List and Cover Flow
views, as it is clearer to the user that you can escape the drop by moving outside the target folder window. This is equally true in icon view (by dragging the item outside the window), but it’s less obvious.
Interesting idea about Cover Flow being a mode of the other views, though the current implementation seems a simpler solution.
The path bar is more then just a path view and navigation aid. You can also drop an object on any folder in the path to move or copy it there.
Tiger nicely groups items by type, but you can do the same in a Finder window by clicking the + button and choosing the file type you want to focus on. Arguably, the unique Spotlight window in Tiger is harder to grasp, as you lose the familiarity of the Finder interface that you gain in Leopard. Tiger is weird in that there are three Spotlight interfaces. At least Leopard cuts it down to just two.
Unlike “Copy”, “Cut” is a destructive operation that is extremely prone to causing data loss. I suspect that Apple has rejected implementing cut for that reason. I’ll have to experiment with my XP machine to see what happens to a cut file when I perform another edit action which overwrites the previous action. Multiple undo?
I like the breadcrumbs bar. You can drag and drop from within the breakcrumb bar so it has it’s functionality. But I’m sure it was copied from M$...
@Chilstorm: The cut action deletes the previous file only after the new file is created. So there shouldn’t be any data loss..
I do miss the Spotlight window change though. That one looked so neat and non messy. If I wanted to search in Finder, I could very well just launch finder and search…
If you don’t use the “Paste” action elsewhere in the file system, nothing happens to the file. In this instance, all “Cut” does is mark the file for a pending action (either move when you select “Paste” or a creation of a shortcut if you select “Paste as Shortcut”). If you place something else in the clipboard, the first file is simply unmarked and unaltered. So you can’t accidently delete a file by cutting it from the Windows desktop and then cutting or copying text from a document into a clipboard.
(I should post this in this old thread as well, since a lot of people used this incorrect assumption to explain why Cut&Paste;Move should not be implemented in OS X.)
Yes, but it creates a lot of useless windows if you are trying to delve deep into the hierarchy. I don’t know about you but it seems like a very ugly design decision to me.
Oh no! I knew that but have no idea why I forgot to mention it. :(
Like goobimama said, you can always search from within the Finder itself if that’s your thing. The three interfaces only seem to be too many when you count them on your fingers but the three served completely different purposes and did not get in the way of each other. I, for one, don’t see anything wrong with the way things were in Tiger.
Unlike “Copy”, “Cut” is a destructive operation that is extremely prone to causing data loss.
Utter and complete nonsense. I cut and paste files in Windows all the time and have never, not once, lost data. If it were “extremely prone” to it, then you’d figure it would have happened to me at least once. Just another apologist excuse to cover up an egregious lack of a basic (and very useful) feature that Apple has neglected to implement.
The thing that surprises me most is that there is a ‘Cut’ option in the ‘Edit’ menu and it also has the ⌘X shortcut assigned to it but is permanently disabled. How much effort would it take to just make it available, when you can already drag and drop files all around the system, which does the same thing as ‘Cut’ and ‘Paste’ would do?
You know, since I mentioned the ancient “What OS X Could Learn from Windows” thread here, I decided to reread the comments, paying particular attention to the back and forth between Beeblebrox and Scott over Cut/Paste Move and Copy. In that long back and forth over potential data loss, I’m surprised no one ever mentioned the fact that when you move files across volumes (between two separate disks, between two separate partitions, across a network, etc.) what the operating system actually does is a copy and then a delete. (If moving files leave it on the same partition, the file is essentially renamed in the file system.) To prevent data loss, in a cross-volume move most operating systems will check to make sure the copy portion of the operation was completely successful before deleting the originals. If a network connection goes down during a move/cut&paste;/call-it-whatever-you-want utilizing it, the original files do not get deleted as Scott speculated. The only major exception to that was Mac OS X 10.5.0, which that bug was discovered after the OS had been released for a week or so.
Apple needs to fix up the whole annoying quirks of drag and drop.
#1 Navigation keys while dragging and dropping. This is most needed in Icon View. How annoying is it to drag and drop to the parent folder?! Apple apologists always argue that if you do drag and drop in list view it eliminates this issue. Sorry, but I often prefer to work in Icon View, especially in folders full of images.
#2 While dragging, if I accidentally go outside of the current springloaded folder, I lose all my spring loads and have to start again. Arrgh!
BTW There is a hack to show the full path in the title bar like Windows does. Display full paths as Finder window titles
And you can drag and copy it.
Also, even tho Stacks is a part of the Dock, not Finder, I’d like to add I’d like to be able to control the opacity of the bevel.
when you can already drag and drop files all around the system, which does the same thing as ‘Cut’ and ‘Paste’ would do?
You can move (cut and paste) across folders on the same volume but not across different volumes (the cut and paste becomes copy and paste when transferring to a different volume - how’s that for consistency or intuitiveness?).
I’m surprised no one ever mentioned the fact that when you move files across volumes what the operating system actually does is a copy and then a delete.
I could have sworn you or I mentioned that at least once - to Scott’s deaf ears. In any case, I think we argued quite factually and logically that data loss from a move command is exceedingly unlikely if not impossible for the reason you mention. But Apple didn’t include it, so in Scott’s world any logic and facts go out the window - what Apple did must be right and what must be right is what Apple did.
Yes, but it performs a move operation if you hold down the Command key before you drop the file at the destination.