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I've read whole articles dedicated to how bad Finder is, but I just don't see it. Sure, I prefer Thunar to anything else, but to me, a file manager needs to (A) remember my last-used view mode, and (B) provide instant access to my most-used folders. Anything else, Terminal is one click away.

Would you really want something as complicated as Midnight Commander just to open a Word doc? If I need to view two folders, I open a second window. If I need to view three folders...I can do that too! What do you MC buffs do?

For those that want a much more advanced "finder" there are replacements out there. Adding something more complicated or wildly different would be a bad thing for the majority of the users. For the most part I am quite pleased with it and couldn't imagine using neither a commander clone nor some spatial madness.

Rewriting finder in cocoa is a good thing™, plain and simple. Carbon is outdated and needs to go. So from a purely technical perspective it's time for Apple to eat its own dog food and use their first class frameworks.

Adding something more complicated or wildly different would be a bad thing for the majority of the users

Then how about adding some basic stuff? How about an option to show folders first? How about an option to create a new file on right click? How about an option to show/hide hidden files? How about native support for SFTP? How about decent archive handling (like mounting an archive, or browsing it like a folder)? How about an UP button (to take you to the parent folder)? How about an easy way to send a file by email or make a shortcut of it on the desktop? How about a way to replace it completely with another more competent file manager (like Path Finder) without it popping all the time? How about a way to remove it from the Dock or change its position?

Edited 2008-10-17 22:01 UTC

If you customize the Finder toolbar, there is already a button available to allow you to go to a parent directory (or any other directory in the path). You can also Cmd-click on the title of the Finder window.

How about an option to show folders first

Hear, Hear!

Finder is like trying to drive a ferrari with square wheels...

You listed a lot of useful features there, but at least in response to your desire for an "up" button: you can either add the "path" item too the toolbar (go to View -> Customize Toolbar) or simply right click on the folder name in the titlebar. (Previously, you had to command-click. I'm not sure when right clicking started to do the same thing.) This trick works in any window which has a miniature icon (document icon) in the titlebar, as well as working in Safari. I'll take the opportunity to mention here as well that if you click and hold, and then drag the mini-icon, whatever you do with the icon is treated as acting upon the file itself. You can do the whole bevy of operations available when dragging a file (move, copy, make alias, etc.)

Hope that helps.

Some of them already exists : right(ctrl+click) in the middle of the window bar to navigate the whole path. You can also show hidden files using Finder settings. Should one need tinker with Finder that's what you should use : Tinker Tools. But as I said, some of them already exist. Of course, they will not work as they work in Windows/Linux but hey, we are talking Finder here.

How do you get multithreading for "free"? You will always have to worry about shared access to data and you will need to split tasks down into tasks that can be threaded.

Unless Cocoa does some real magic under the hood, nothing is going to be "free".

It's no magic that Apple rewrote the Cocoa frameworks that ship with Mac OS X for Leopard to do multi-threading.

Yes it would.

If you find the ability to move data seamlessly between devices appealing, and you wish for more transparency and interoperability between your iP[hone/od], iTV, iBook and things like MobileMe, calendaring, etc., a Cocoa Finder is your ticket.

Look at the APIs: Carbon is an extended legacy framework, with a history going back to 1982. There are some seriously hairy, seriously inefficient workarounds lurking in there.

Cocoa, while arguably a "legacy" framework in its own right, being an extension of code dating back to 1987-88.

The difference here is that the NeXT APIs were new - from scratch, while Carbon goes back to the time when Macintosh Toolbox (ROM) calls were the order of the day.

The move from Carbon to Cocoa for a central application such as the Finder is long overdue in my opinion.

Does this mean that people are ready to grasp the awesomeness of "Services"? I don't know about you, but a "Services" menu in the Finder, allowing you instant access to things like background processing, shoving things through Automator, or interacting directly with other applications without launching them or switching into them is appealing to me, and would signal the intent of apple to move beyond manual, action-driven interfaces, and into a mode where a "Web 2.0" style paradigm shift can occur in the MacOS.

'Bout time.

Have a look at the iTunes on Windows installation folders—the DLLs have some very familiar (if you've done any Mac OS X development) names.

iTunes and QuickTime are Carbon apps, not Cocoa (at least until today).
Apple has a Carbon compatibility layer for Windows, but it's not available to the general public.
There's also a very limited Cocoa compatibility layer for Safari on Windows. That one isn't freely available as well and even if it was, it would be of no big use for cross-platform developers (too limited).

There is, however, GNUstep. It's an independent implementation of OPENSTEP (old name of Cocoa) for Windows and other OSes.

Check out ForkLift. See if that helps.

http://www.binarynights.com/

(I have no association with the company apart from having used its products.)

It's peculiar that Apple doesn't have a real Cocoa framework for Windows now that their apps are probably more popular in the wintel world than ever.

13 years ago, Steve Jobs demonstrated OPENSTEP on NT, clearly seeing it as an important strategic product.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=openstep+day+1995

You could also have a look at Cocotron, which looks like it's shaping up to be a nice project.

Please no.

Let it become Workspace Manager.app again and you can have your Multiple Panels, Multiple Shelfs and more with drag n' drop ala Openstep and not have that butt ugly split panel view.