Even though Snow Leopard is supposed to be all about tweaking and performance, AppleInsider claims to have some information regarding new features coming in Snow Leopard. They claim Apple is working on bringing Exchange support to iCal, Address Book, and Mail, a feature called ImageBoot, and – insert drum roll – a new Finder written in Cocoa. Testers also claim that other bundled applications are written in Cocoa. This isn’t all that weird seeing Carbon doesn’t come in a 64bit flavour.
Rewriting Finder in Cocoa isn’t going to automagically make it better, like some people keep insisting. The only benefit from rewriting it would be the 64 bit support.
Let’s hope they learn from their past mistakes and bring Finder into the 21st century.
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 Carbon is outdated and needs to go.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.
Yes, but you can’t drag files onto it.
Wow, I didn’t know that. I’ve been missing that functionality and I never would’ve guessed that it was available – but not by default (boooh!)
Thanks!
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.
Yes, I know. There are three workarounds for the UP button issue:
– right click on title bar
– path toolbar button
– and showing the path bar
The first two require two clicks and making sense of a list, while the last one is more easy to use. There are, though, two annoying things about the Path Bar – it cannot be moved to the top of the window and you have to double click to go to a parent folder instead of just clicking like you do on all the other interface elements.
I guess I could let it go, but how hard would it actually be to make an optional UP button to put on the toolbar like all normal file managers?
Oh, and I just remembered another two things that drive me crazy:
– Cut is disabled. You can activate it using defaults write com.apple.finder AllowCutForItems 1 but all it does is move the file to Trash. WTF? Sure, you can drag files around, but what if you are a keyboard person, or what if you don’t feel like doing mouse-aerobics around your filesystem just to cut a god damned file. Or you could install something like this: http://ilari.scheinin.fidisk.fi/findercutandpaste/ but then again … WTF?
– Pressing Enter renames a file instead of opening it and you have to press Cmd+Down to open it. Again – WTF? Shouldn’t it be easier to open a file since you do that all the time?
Sometimes I’m getting sick of the way Apple does some things differently just for the sake of it. Sure there is a lot of innovation and there are lots of good things, but Finder ain’t one of them. It’s a stinking pile of garbage, a half-baked sorry excuse of a file manager. It’s my biggest source of frustration since moving to Mac.
Edited 2008-10-18 12:47 UTC
Here here on allowing cut to work in Finder. As a very heavy keyboard user this is something I find to be very annoying indeed. It’s actually one of the few things about finder that really does irritate me.
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.
Most of the criticism of the Finder that I’ve read doesn’t come from people who would prefer a more advanced/complex finding, it comes from those who wish it was closer to the “classic” MacOS Finder (like John Siracusa).
Cocoa Finder + Cocoa Services, system wide without the incumberance of Carbon will bring it that much closer to Openstep.
Yes, it does. Multi-threading comes “for free” with Cocoa since Leopard. Currently there are some occasions that a Finder window locks when doing certain tasks. Multi-threading is possible with Carbon as well, but it requires more work. Rewriting an app with Cocoa may be the easier solution for the long term.
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.
Does Apple use some kind of cross-platform Cocoa API to write its cross platform software like iTunes, Safari, and Quicktime?
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.
Exchange support in Snow Leopard was announced at the WWDC; it’s not at all news, surely?
Does Finder support tabs like Gnome 2.24.0 now does?
Edited 2008-10-17 23:48 UTC
please let finder become a twin panel file manager, it sucks right now. i prefer midnight commander to finder, thats really telling a lot.
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.
Uh, just to let you know Thom, Carbon is 64-bit in Snow Leopard too. It’s just not *allowed* for third party devs to use it.