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Mac OS, operating system (OS) developed by the American computer company Apple Inc. The OS was introduced in 1984 to run the company's Macintosh line of personal computers (PCs). The Macintosh heralded the era of graphical user interface (GUI) systems, and it inspired Microsoft Corporation to develop its own GUI, the Windows OS. Mac OS X's Spaces (part of Mission Control since OS X 10.7 'Lion') is a feature that allows you to spread your programs across up to 16 separate desktop areas. These spaces will help you to organize your activities, since they provide you with far more 'space' to work with than is available on your physical display (s).

The Finder

Despite the window resizing performance improvements discussed earlier, I found the Finder to be the most disappointing new application in Mac OS X 10.1. I'm disappointed because, performance improvements aside, the 10.1 Finder still does not allow me to work the way I want to. Many of the 10.0.x bugs remain as well.

There are some interface improvements, however. I'll list them first.

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Finder Improvements

• The state of disclosure triangles in list-view windows is now retained. Combined with the improved resize performance, list view windows are finally useful again.
• Icons on the desktop no longer jump into seemingly random positions across logins and reboots.
• The truncation algorithm used to display long file names is improved.
• Typing the first few letters of a file or folder name now causes list-view windows to scroll to the new selection.
• There is a new preference to always open folders in a new window.
• The warning before emptying the trash is now optional.
• Command-drag now toggles the grid snap on a per-drag basis. (Although this feature is of questionable use since command-click is now the multiple selection keyboard combination in the Finder. Just try command-dragging several icons in succession and you'll see what I mean.)
• Disk icons are now customizable.
• Column widths in column view are now adjustable, both together and independently.

Finder Bugs

Now, a tour of some of the bugs.

• Mounting your iDisk causes the entire Finder application to become unresponsive while the volume is mounted. Further navigation within the iDisk suffers form the same problem.
• The insertion point disappears while it's being moved left or right when editing a file name. (Actually, this seems to affect almost all text entry fields in OS X.) Can you guess where the insertion point will land?
• Window sizes and positions are sporadically forgotten, or depend on the particular location from which a folder was opened.
• List view windows sometimes forget their customized column order and widths.
• Windows sometimes get stuck in positions that do not show any white space on one side of the icons near the edge, and do not offer scroll bars to correct the situation.
• The zoom widget can cause Finder windows to position themselves behind the Dock.
• The Finder window toolbar sporadically reappears, despite any number attempts to keep it turned off for a particular window.
• When the Finder window toolbar does appear spontaneously, it does so by 'stealing pixels' from the window's former size. When the toolbar is dismissed (again), the window size is smaller than before the toolbar made its unscheduled appearance.
• The 'shrink-to-fit' behavior of the zoom widget sometimes sizes the window to a seemingly arbitrary size that may include extraneous (or not enough) white space on one or more sides.
• Dragging a set of icons into an icon-view window causes them to move to seemingly random positions in the destination window, rather than retaining their former arrangement.

Missing Features

• Finder labels do not exist in 10.1, but are still rumored to be on the long list of things Apple plans to add in the future.
• There is still no adequate replacement for pop-up folders or spring-loaded folders. There are many alternatives, but none of them reproduce all of the functional merits of these missing features.
• The Finder's context menus remain very sparsely populated. There's not even an option to change a window's view type, or to change the desktop background.
• Font sizes and grid spacing are not adjustable. (Just had to mention that one more time.)

Dubious Features

The 10.1 Finder allows files to be copied and pasted. Or, more precisely, it allows a copy of a file to be placed in a new location, and uses the 'Copy' and 'Paste' commands in the Finder's 'Edit' menu to do so. It does not, however, behave like Copy and Paste in any other context. For example, the data that is 'Pasted' is not guaranteed to be the data as it existed at the time of the 'Copy' operation. Instead, it is the data as it exists at the time of the 'Paste' operation. 'Pasted' files also do not replace the current selection.

Unfortunately, most users do not seem to know or care that the Copy/Paste semantics that have not changed for seventeen years on the Mac platform are being violated by this new feature. I find this extremely troubling on several fronts.

First, the fact that Apple itself is doing this is upsetting (but, at this point, not that surprising). I know Apple is trying to define a new user experience for the Mac with Mac OS X, but I don't think the Copy/Paste interface benefits at all from this new exception to its long-standing interface rules.

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Second, on a much more pragmatic front, I see no reason that the same exact file copy functionality couldn't be added through a different menu (say, I don't know, how about the File menu) and implemented independent of the clipboard and the Copy/Paste interface.

The behavior presented by this feature in 10.1 makes sense, given its purpose as a method for command-driven deferred file copying. But the fact that it differs from the behavior of Copy/Paste in all other contexts is a clear sign that it deserves to be its own distinct set of commands in the Finder. Overloading Copy/Paste for this purpose makes about as much sense and using 'Save' and 'Print'.

I'm not sure if these issues were discussed and dismissed at Apple, or if they never came up at all. But the feature in its current form in 10.1 is a disappointing sign that priorities have shifted at Apple. Yes, perhaps the interface inconsistency created by this implementation will go unnoticed by the average user. But the measure of good interface design should not be based on which gaffes can be sneaked past the casual user. It's Apple's job to create an interface that's better than what the average user might create. Apple is supposed to be the faithful keeper of the interface—the expert creator and the watchdog for consistency. Instead, they've violated the semantics of perhaps the oldest single interface on the Mac platform, either unknowingly, or in a misguided effort to duplicate Windows.

I know I'm probably in the minority with my concern over this implementation (and, more importantly, the change in thinking that it represents). But I also know that I was in the minority when I chose the Macintosh platform, with its 'funny rules' about how the interface should behave, over a decade ago. I hope Apple at least considers divorcing this new feature from the clipboard and Copy/Paste.

I'm not sure if this next feature belongs here, or in the missing features section above. The 10.1 Finder claims to support SMB file sharing with Windows hosts. And it does..sort of. The user must select the 'Connect To Server..' item in the 'Go' menu and then type a URL in the form of 'smb://servername/sharename'. There is no GUI interface for browsing servers or shares (as this page might lead you to believe after a quick glance). If you get any part of the URL wrong, you are given the same generic error. It looks like this feature was rushed out the door in order to maintain a bullet point on the marketing literature. If you're looking for fully integrated Windows networking, you'll have to wait a bit longer.

(There's one more 'dubious feature', but it affects more than just the Finder. It will have a section of its own a bit later.)

More Problems

While the 10.1 Finder's icon grid scales with the icon size, it is still much too wide, and remains unadjustable. This makes it less useful for arranging anything other than the icons with very long names.

Sorry, that's as close as they'll get

(Changing icon sizes also causes the icons to move, which I consider a bug rather than a feature.)

The grid problem is slightly worse than it was in 10.0.x due to the new technique used to display long file names in the limited space beneath each icon. In 10.1, long names are wrapped to two lines. This solves the earlier problem of file names with '..' in the middle of them in icon view (the problem remains in list and column view), but introduces yet more white space beneath each icon on the grid. In a window arranged according to the 10.0.x icon grid, the new double-line names overlap. But when arranged according to the 10.1 grid, the overlap is eliminated.

Morgue street mutants mac os. The 10.1 icon grid includes less horizontal space (but is still wastefully wide, in my opinion), but more vertical space (to allow for the two-line names) than the 10.0.4 icon grid.

The entire grid width issue might not be such a problem if the font used to display file names was customizable. The current font is extremely wide compared to the classic Mac OS default, and is partially to blame for both the excessively wide grid spacing and the common appearance of ellipses in file and folder names. Compare the width of the same folder name in list and icon view in Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X:

File names on the desktop are constrained to even narrower dimensions than in Finder windows. This, in combination with the new two-line name wrapping, leads to the strange sight shown on the right.

Column view does not escape unscathed either. For example, the adjustable column widths in column view are great until you try to resize a column after independently resizing another one. The independently resized column instantly returns to the same size as the other columns.

Double-clicking on an icon in the far-right pane is still a game of speedy reflexes, as the icon you want to double-click slides out from under your cursor the second you make the first click (in order to make room for the preview pane).

The sort order of each column remains unadjustable.

What Problems?

I'll stop now, because I think you get the picture. But you may think 'the picture' is that of a pedant determined to find every little thing wrong with the Mac OS X finder, so let me explain.

Taken individually, the bugs and problems listed above may not seem that bad (although some are pretty troubling on their own). But they combine to thwart any attempt to recreate the interface that has defined the Mac user experience since 1984: the spatial Finder.

I've covered all of this at length before, so I won't rehash it all now. But I do find it troubling that the seemingly simple and obvious things that would finally give Mac OS X a true spatial Finder experience—things that have seemed as easy as breathing to Apple for the previous seventeen years and have never wavered in any prior version of Mac OS—seem so unattainable in the Mac OS X Finder, even after years of development and six months on the market.

Mac OS X needs a spatial Finder, and it needs it yesterday. It is second only to performance in the list of areas where OS X fails to live up to its classic Mac OS predecessors. Performance got a substantial boost in 10.1. When will a proper Finder return?

Finder Summary

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The 10.1 Finder is an improvement over the 10.0.x version, but most of the gains are a result of performance improvements, not feature enhancements. The 10.1 Finder still suffers from annoying 'lock-outs' during some network activities. Many long-requested features remain unimplemented: labels, better context-menus, pop-up folders, spring-loaded folders, truly integrated Windows networking, etc. Font sizes and grid spacing remain unadjustable. Only a handful of the countless bugs that plagued the 10.0.x Finder have been fixed, and some new ones have been added.

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Although the 10.1 Finder provides a better overall user experience than the 10.0.x Finder, it will still frustrate users who want to use more than just the browser-style interface. The 10.1 Finder is still not able to function properly as the consistent, predictable, spatial interface to files and folders that has carried the name 'Finder' for the life of the Mac platform.