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Comment by etatoby | Hacker News Reader

One of the (many, many) reasons I ditched OS X after more than 10 years and went back to Linux and Windows, depending on the task at hand, is the removal of the colored Finder labels.

What an inane reason, you may say.

But IMHO it was one of the best features ever introduced into desktop computing. Simple, easy to see colored backgrounds that you could assign to files to organize or tag them as you saw fit. (seen/not seen, reviewed/not reviewed, good/bad/meh, and so on)

Maybe Mac users are less vocal about the removal of features (or they are simply fewer) but this kind of blatant disregard for the needs and established workflows of your customers has a long term effect on a company's image.

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Wasn't removed, just tweaked. It shows a colored dot now instead of a background.

Finder still has colored labels. It's just now a dot of color next to the name instead of a background. I think they made this change because you can now apply multiple colors to the same file at the same time (and you can search your entire filesystem for tagged files too).

http://i.imgur.com/mO32PGQ.png

Sigh. My client's file server at the time was full of PSD files that designers colour-coded based on how urgent/finished something was. It was the best Finder feature ever.

It's a good example of how Apple's stubbornness can ruin software: some designers had a misguided idea about the cloud ("file systems are bad, people are too dumb for folders"), so they tried to build iCloud around isolated app silos. Then they realised that it gets messy once you have lots of files, and instead of admitting their mistake, they doubled down on not having folders and replaced colour labels by tags (which require more clicks than labels, and are much harder to see).

Of course, one version later they did give up on app-based silos, and introduced iCloud Drive. But what a stupid journey that was, and you can still see the scars in Apple's UI (app-based folders cluttering iCloud Drive, dedicated "tags" input field in every Save File dialog).

That system is still there, and at the time you thought it was removed actually got some pretty nice usability and searchability upgrades. I use tags extensively to this day. They just have a slightly different appearance in the UI.

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