Path Finder is a full-featured application, but it doesn't come without its problems.
Problems include the inability to Undo a move or copy you just made via drag-n-drop, while the kind of labeling PF does is downright ugly. It applies a color to the icon itself (rather than to the filename), making the icon look very alien and unattractive.
A small feature missing is also when using the PF desktop and the Dock is docked on the sides. I can't place my desktop icons on the same vertical row where the Dock lives. Also, when in icon mode, I would like to have the total sum of bytes for the selected items in the status bar.
Performance is fine for all operations except when opening a new PF window, it takes about 1 second on my Cube G4, while Finder on Panther is instant.
Another small gripe is when you are moving down a file list with the arrow keys and you happen to select an image, PF will try to create a thumbnail for its preview window and that will resort to about 0.5-1 second of application unresponsiveness. This is of course normal, but the application should have the ability to measure how much time a file stays selected (that's in milliseconds) and only then decide to preview it or not.
But the above problems are not really as important as the following one: Contextual Menu Bloat. Unfortunately, a lot of smaller important options have made it to the main contextual menu and this is PF's biggest problem. The user has to roll his/her attention through a large number of options when right-clicking a file or folder, which makes using it at all an ordeal. For example, I would personally declare inappropriate for the general context menu --for my day-to-day basis work-- 8 items out of the default... 24. Twenty four menu items is just too many for a menu that is accessed all the time. Usability experts advocate that the average human mind can not "process" more than 12 menu items instantly, and anything that is not instant on such generic operations is not well-designed. Options like the "Reports", Open with Text Editor, Open in Terminal, Copy Path, Email, Compress and Email, Decompress, Compress, Volume Listing, Directory Listing, New HTML file, New Text File and Secure Delete should all move to the Plugins and/or on the menu's Command sub-menu. While these options are not using the plugin API (so from the developer's point of view they don't belong there), from the user's point of view, these are just extra options that complement the file manager and not part of the core daily usage for most people.
Conclusion
I truly like Path Finder. It has some very good ideas in it. I encourage all Mac users to download and try it, and developers to start developing small plugins for it (get ideas for plugins here). If just not for the Path Navigator feature, I find PF not only innovative, but a joy to use.
File managers should be simple, and as it stands right now, I find Apple's Finder simpler to use and more inviting than PF's for new users, but PF gains usage points with advanced users. If PF's developers cut some of the bloat and move a few options around by "grouping similar items by usage patterns", I believe that PF can appeal to all users, not just advanced and unix users. When this happens, Finder will have to face much stiffer competition and Path Finder can gain even more prestige and recognition. But even as it stands today, PF is one of the best applications on the Mac OS X platform.
Good points: Path Navigation very clever, Plugin API, terminal integration, many advanced features.
Bad points: Some operations slower than in Finder, UI-loaded default interface, bloated contextual menus.
Overall: 8/10
- "Description and features"
- "Problems and Conclusion"
