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Comment by marcellus23 | Hacker News Reader

> The modern Macintosh Finder is a usability disaster compared to the original Macintosh Finder.

Can you expound on this or link to someone who does? I've read this many times, along with comparisons to some sort of utopic "spatial Finder", but I've never seen it explained. As someone who only started using Macs around Tiger I'd be curious to hear what was so good about the old Finder. (I don't find the modern one to be that bad, especially in comparison to Windows Explorer, although admittedly that's a very low bar)

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When Apple ported the classic Finder to OS X they added a NeXT-style "browser" mode (browse between folders inside of a single window) in addition to the Classic MacOS mode (each folder is its own window).

Unfortunately, they did a very poor job of trying to blend the two modes into a single user interface, to the point that ruined both modes.

A signature feature of the classic mode is that each folder window saves its own customizable view state. Whenever you return to a folder is looks exactly the way you left it.

Unfortunately, browser mode clobbers the classic view state of any folder you visit. There's no way to customize the look of a specific folder (like /Applications) and have it stick, because the settings are always getting rewritten by the last browser window to visit the folder.

Similarly, there's no way to set a preferred browser window size or style. Instead, it always adopts the classic view state of the first folder you open. And as you browse around the view state of that first folder spreads to all other folders you visit.

If you open a folder that has no classic view state, you get a hard-coded default browser window. You see this tiny hard-coded default browser whenever you create a new folder on your desktop and open it.

I was part of the team that "ported" the classic Finder to OS X. I left Apple in 2006, but was there at the time of the NeXT acquisition. Trying to appease the spatial Finder advocates and at the same time trying to appease Steve's desire to never have to know where a file existed in the filesystem was a constant source of grief.

The seeming utopia of the System 7/8/9 Finder was possible because the job of the Finder, and the system itself, was relatively simple. The current Finder is managing a ton of features that are quite complex. If you were to say that many of these features are not needed, or detract from some pure vision of the Finder, I would probably agree with you.

It is always interesting to get feedback, positive or negative, on the Finder. In general, most users seem to interact with it in a shallow way, using the Desktop as a giant catch all storage location.

We were always aware of the various bugs involving the loss of layout preferences and fixes ended up being fragile and exposing confusing bits of UI. The team tried (tries) hard to balance all of the competing requests for Finder functionality. Working on the Finder team could be joyous and miserable at the same time.

For me, the best feature of the old finder was, you could take a file or folder from somethere, drag it to the desktop. Use it from there. Then, once you had finished your project you could tell the finder to move the folder from the desktop back to where it belongs.

Oh yeah! The "Put Away" command. That was indeed a cool feature.

I never knew this but this makes the Desktop concept so much more intuitive.

Over Thanksgiving, my aunt asked for help with her Mac.

At some point, she must have enabled iCloud Drive including Documents and Desktop, then disabled it and I suppose checked the “keep copy on Mac” when disabling.

So she had both local and iCloud versions of the Documents and Desktop folders, with documents in both locations. De-duping these and moving everything back to her Mac was such a gargantuan task it will have to wait for another day.

Try as I might, I was unable to explain to her how Documents/Desktop folders on her Mac and the Documents/Desktop folders in iCloud differed. Compounding the situation, some of the files in the iCloud folders had local copies on the Mac and some were only in iCloud since the “Optimize Mac Storage” option was enabled.

Separately, I had trouble explaining to her how opening the Desktop folder in a window and her actual Desktop were different views of the same folder.

On top of that, with iCloud, there are application specific folders for those apps documents which I think predate Apple adding the Files app to iOS. So for example, by default Numbers will prompt you to save a new document in its Numbers folder and not in the Documents folder.

She also didn’t understand why iCloud Drive included just the Documents and Desktop folders and not, say, the Downloads folder. Or how “iCloud Drive” differed from iCloud itself.

It’s all become a terrible confusing mess.

This duplication issue between local and remote is going to continue to be a constant source of misery until most users' data is stored only remotely. The local+remote seems like a half-way solution until everyone has fast enough connections and online storage costs are low enough.

I know this issue kicks me in the balls regularly. Suddenly my PC will warn me I'm out of disk space, only to find out that some of my online files, set to "cloud only", have decided they also wanted to live on my harddrive and downloaded themselves when I wasn't looking.

> Trying to appease the spatial Finder advocates and at the same time trying to appease Steve's desire to never have to know where a file existed in the filesystem was a constant source of grief.

This is explains so much, thanks for commenting.

I guess I’m just not fussy enough about some of these things. I’m more focused on the task and less on whether the appearance is fixed or dynamic. I’d much rather have the current finder with tabs than the old single window interface. I keep a consistent set of tabs open to folders that I interact with frequently. Each one can have it’s own view style, so maybe that is how I deal with the difference.

The spatial Finder treated files and folders like physical objects. There was only one window on the screen for a given folder because a physical folder can only be at one place at a time. The location of each file and folder on the desktop or in a window was saved, as is the size and location of each open window, because objects remain where you left them unless moved.

It's not something that surfaces in conscious memory, but subconsciously this takes advantage of millions of years of evolution of the human brain to cope with and manipulate objecrs in the physical world, something other file managers don't do. Apple invested millions of dollars and thousands of user-hours of experimentation into making the OS take advantage of innate human psychology like this, something NO other computer manufacturer (including Xerox) had done at the time. It's a big part of why the original Mac OS was, objectively, the easiest operating system to use in the world (and far easier than many operating systems that postdate it including modern macOS).

I’m conflicted about this spatial interface thing (alternatively known as the “object-oriented user interface”). On one hand, for file managers it sounds like it should make sense, even if the overwhelming majority of file managers I’ve used (from Norton Commander to Windows 98+ Explorer to Far Manager to mc to Nautilus) don’t follow it. Even in general I’d very much like it to work, if nothing else because it pleasantly constrains the design space for GUIs.

On the other, for text editors and similar apps not following it (i.e. being capable of displaying multiple views of a single buffer) is a killer feature; people rave about split editing every time it is first implemented in a given app category (text editors, word processors, spreadsheets, online spreadsheets, you name it). I’d also probably be less than enthused about a web browser that could only open a single view of a given URL. Now that I’m thinking about it, “Open a Copy” is perhaps my favourite feature in Evince and the main think I miss in other PDF viewers.

The problem is, to some extent you want the view to be a separate “thing”, for example so that it can serve as a conceptual host for navigation history. Maybe the responsibility of maintaining said history could be hoisted onto the window manager, but I can’t say I’ve heard anyone mention this option, even if only to say it’s dumb and won’t work for such-and-such simple reason.

I’d very much this to work, it’s just that all the gravestones (CUA, Cairo, etc.) make me wary and half the questions (that now seem obvious) don’t appear to even have been asked (many years ago, when people actually tried making this).

It’s really quite simple. Spatial memory is a viable system when you have tens of folders and hundreds of files. Once you have thousands of folders and millions of files, the metaphor rapidly becomes a hinderance.

By analogy, think of the contents of your pantry versus the contents of your local supermarket. You can comprehend the former spatially, whereas the latter is mostly navigated hierarchically. Sure, you can usually remember where the bread aisle is — and then someone updates the operating system and bread gets moved to the other side of the store.

You bring up the example of a supermarket and another comment brought up a public library as examples of buildings with much larger collections that can’t be relied on for spatial navigation. I think both of these examples show exactly the opposite. Ask any librarian or supermarket shelf stocker how they locate things in the building: the answer is spatial! They have an intuitive picture in their mind of where everything is located, not only in terms of which shelf the object is on but how those shelves actually look based on the relative positions of everything on them.

then someone updates the operating system and bread gets moved to the other side of the store

This never happened in the classic Mac Finder and it certainly doesn’t happen in a supermarket or library. The fact that modern computers do this is another strike against them and in favour of the old spatial Finder.

It’s the principle of least surprise. The more your computer works to keep everything exactly the way you left it the more comfortable you’ll feel as a user, confident that nothing will move around when you’re not looking. The fact that today’s operating systems are so much more jam packed with extra features — and that this may complicate the task of preserving user’s spatial memory — is not a point in their favour.

The library example is spatial in the sense that results being returned in alphabetical order is spatial. You will intuitively expect "Yellow" to be towards the bottom. But that's not really spatial memory, even though it has superficial similarities.

Between 1985 and 1995 I was almost exclusively using the Macintosh platform. The spatial memory of Finder is a native concept for me.

> The fact that today’s operating systems are so much more jam packed with extra features — and that this may complicate the task of preserving user’s spatial memory — is not a point in their favour.

Nonsense, it's entirely a point in their favour. As much as we might have nostalgia for simpler computers of our youth, our expectation of what functions are included within a consumer-facing operating system have dramatically and permanently expanded. From Bluetooth to Unicode, modern operating systems are devilishly complicated—and we rarely stop to see just how far we've come.

I mean a real library, not an abstract one. If you work in a real library every day you don’t need to scan the titles or author names alphabetically, you can see and remember spatially where everything is, at a glance. This means you can walk directly to the book you’re looking for without even glancing at the the other titles!

From Bluetooth to Unicode, modern operating systems are devilishly complicated—and we rarely stop to see just how far we've come.

These are foundational technologies that definitely make life better for users but there is no reason this needs to be reflected in dramatically greater interface complexity and reduced usability. Most of this complexity can and should be made invisible to the user. The fact that we haven’t succeeded at that is a reflection of the tradeoffs required to compete in the modern industry. But that is not to say we couldn’t do a whole lot better. I think modern operating systems have left whole classes of users behind due to their obtuseness.

I’m sorry, my language was unclear. When I said it was equivalent to results been returned in alphabetical order, I was referring to the library being ordered by the Dewey Decimal system. In this respect the librarian is acting as an L2 data cache and benefiting from the relatively static nature of the content in order to map spatial memory onto the corpus.

In reality, the computer files which you care to organise and access frequently are changing often, whereas the need to physically shuffle major sections of a library would happen perhaps once or twice every decade.

As for the increasing complexity of operating systems, I simply outright reject the claim that macOS Monterey is more complex of a user experience than, say, Snow Leopard from over a decade ago. What the operating system does and the features it contains a massively greater, but the experience exposed to the user is incredibly similar.

Nah. I definitely don't rave about split views. Don't like them at all.

> There was only one window on the screen for a given folder because a physical folder can only be at one place at a time. The location of each file and folder on the desktop or in a window was saved, as is the size and location of each open window, because objects remain where you left them unless moved.

You could just live update icon positions in both windows, particularly on modern machines. Just like how if you rename a file in one window, it appears renamed in the other window.

The problem with updating icon positions in both windows (to preserve the spatial metaphor) is that doing so also breaks the spatial metaphor. You switch to the second window and suddenly something that you thought was in one place suddenly isn't, and you're not sure why for a second or two.

Eastgate Tinderbox is an example of software that actually implements this behavior, and it ends up being more frustrating than it seems, to the point where most users seem to only keep one spatial view open at any one time. Which seems to be where the original Mac UI settled too. I'm not sure why Tinderbox never moved to a model where a complete set of spatial positions are maintained per spatial view, so users could have two windows open with the same object in different positions, but presumably that would also have the potential for user confusion.

Those things are still possible in the current Mac OS. Is there some important characteristics that were lost in Mac OS X ?

It's not just that a new window is opened each time, it's that the interface actually remembers where you positioned the window for that item the last time you opened it. So in theory you could develop a muscle memory around it.

This might make even more sense now with our very large monitors. But we also deal with a lot more files now.

I'm frankly not sure that spatial organization is really the reason the classic Mac Finder is superior. I also think the placement of window gadgets and other details is key. It was just very coherent.

The Lisa Office System' desktop was also excellent, and potentially superior as well. As was the Xerox Star, which at least partially inspired it. But many of theses things (which focus on documents and office tasks and metaphors around them) make a lot less sense now that most people mostly just use their computer through a web browser and little else.

Our computers are less and less "office automation systems" and more just an end in themselves.

In the classic spatial Finder, every folder always opened in a new window. I'm not sure if it's possible to force that behavior under the current Finder.

The current Finder does that thing sometimes, and other times it doesn't. I'm not sure what the rule is, it might be related to whether it's a folder you double-click directly from the desktop.

It does it on read only filesystems. So you’ll see it if you plug in an ntfs drive, for example (unless you’ve installed third party ntfs drivers).

which has never made any sense to me - what's different about a read-only FS that would make me want every single navigation action to open a new window?

I think the closest you can get is holding down CMD when you open a folder. There doesn't seem to be a way to get that to be the default.

Seems there is an option?

https://www.igeeksblog.com/open-folders-in-new-windows-inste...

That seems to just control whether holding down CMD and opening a folder will open in a tab or a window. Even with that unchecked, folders still open in-place by default.

I would argue iOS is the easiest operating system. Toddlers are often very good at it.

That only means that iOS is easy for toddler use-cases. ;)

(iOS user here)

Yes, it was great, but that feature doesn’t work with multi-user systems or network storage.

Say user 1 has a large screen, and sizes the window of a folder accordingly, keeping spacing of icons in it large. Next, user 2 opens the folder on their desktop. Firstly, should it disappear from user 1’s screen, as it would if it were a physical object?

That probably is undesirable.

Also, if the window doesn’t fit on user 2’s screen, what should the UI do? Resize the window? On user 2’s screen or on both screens? If user 2 changes the looks of the window, and user 1 opens it again, should user 1 see it the way user 2 left it behind?

Access rights introduce other problems with this metaphor. What should happen if user 2 doesn’t have write rights to a networked folder? Should they be allowed to move icons within a folder? Change window sizes? If so, where should the information about icon layout be stored?

Those physical folders also don’t work well with disks with millions of files.

I wonder how many users of MacBooks and even iMacs and Mac Pros actually set up multiple user accounts on their machines? I would conjecture that the number is pretty low, perhaps below 10%. Furthermore, I think the majority of home users (the bulk of Apple users) have no network storage at all. Why go to the trouble of setting up and maintaining a file server at home when your files get backed up to iCloud and you can AirDrop anything you want to your friends? Traditional file sharing is more of a power user feature.

But besides that, there is a solution to the problem you described: make the spatial information local. Each user gets a different view of the world.

As for dealing with millions of files, the classic Mac Finder had list view with disclosure triangles on the folders. If you added a modern indexing search to that it would be better than anything we have today.

“Each user gets a different view” is breaking the resemblance with reality. I can’t have a file folder (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_folder#Tabbed_file_fold...) that has items sorted by name that, to you, sorts them by age, for example.

I also think disclosure triangles were (¿one of?) the first thing(s) that broke the spatial finder.

At least, I don’t remember ever such a triangle being disabled because a window on the folder already was open, or having one or more windows for a folder close automatically when opening up a disclosure triangle.

They were extremely nice, but IMO also indicators that the spatial Finder doesn’t work well with the deep hierarchies you get when you have millions of files (but to be honest, the current system doesn’t work well, either)

“Each user gets a different view” is breaking the resemblance with reality.

I think you can have a compromise here. Let the settings within a window (sort by date/name, icon/list view) be shared among the users but keep the window's spatial information itself local. That way when each user opens a folder the window always appears in the same location they're used to. If one user has a much larger display than everyone else there won't be any issues with that user leaving windows off the screen of other users.

I also think disclosure triangles were (¿one of?) the first thing(s) that broke the spatial finder.

You're right in that they allowed users to peek at a folder's contents without opening the folder and to see the contents in list view. However, they didn't break that folder's spatial information and so if you double-clicked on that folder's icon while in list view it would open just as normal with whatever view (list/icon) and window size/shape/position it previously had. Having said that, based on my memory of using classic Mac OS, when I chose to put a folder into list view and use the disclosure triangles it was because it contained a lot of files (usually similar in purpose) and I wanted to keep them sorted and grouped together so they were easy to find. If I was working on a project with a smaller number of major files, I'd use icon view for those.

This was not at all like the fundamental damage Mac OS X's Finder did to spatial orientation with its introduction of browser windows.

List view remains available in the modern macOS Finder.

Yes it does, but spatial orientation does not. The modern Finder uses browser windows that allow me to look at the same folder in multiple windows at the same time. It also constantly forgets what a folder looked like the last time I opened it.

This means I can no longer rely on my spatial memory to navigate my computer. I am reduced to navigating entirely by abstract hierarchy plus search. If you’ve ever tried cooking in someone else’s kitchen you’ve experienced first hand the huge decline in productivity that comes from not knowing where everything is. Compared to cooking in your own kitchen, the experience can be quite jarring and uncomfortable. The modern macOS Finder forces everyone to cook in someone else’s kitchen.

There's no reason a spatial layout shouldn't be remembered (by default) per-user on a multiuser system.

No, but then, you loose the ‘physical’ layout. My “that word icon with a blue label in the top row” would be your “last document in the list”.

That’s not how real world objects behave.

John Siracusa wrote the definitive posting about the spatial Finder back in 2003. He returned to this issue many times in his annual macOS reviews

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/

Although I am something of a "fan" of Siracusa (enjoyed his MacOS reviews for years, and still listen to a couple of his podcasts), I think he's just dead wrong about this Finder thing.

The spatial Finder was a great idea when someone's collection of files was, say, the size of the contents of a set of desk drawers or a small filing cabinet. We busted through that limit over a decade ago. The typical computer user now has file collections the size of a municipal library.

I don't think anyone would agree that a city library could be organized "spatially," where one librarian remembered where they left that copy of Twilight: New Moon. Libraries need a dewey decimal system. Likewise, modern file systems are best searched via keyword search (Spotlight), and organized via a file browser. And it appears that the contemporary evolution of all this is iOS and ChromeOS, which throw in the towel on organization altogether.

I personally arrived at this conclusion all the way back with the release of Windows 95, where I decided that Windows Explorer, warts and all, just worked better for a big file collection than OS 7 Finder, and only came back to Mac with the advent of OS X. I certainly appreciate the beauty and psychological theory of the spatial Finder, but it just doesn't scale.

>I don't think anyone would agree that a city library could be organized "spatially,"

Of course they can. The scales are larger than a desk, but spatial arrangement is crucial to a librarian. You don't know exactly where Twilight: New Moon is, but Literature -> Fiction is the second shelf near the door.

>And it appears that the contemporary evolution of all this is iOS and ChromeOS, which throw in the towel on organization altogether.

And it's a disaster.

Thank you! I was thinking of John's reviews when I wrote that comment actually, I wasn't aware he wrote a whole article on it.

The “spatial finder” is a thankfully long dead idea that your file system is a series of places you want to revisit, instead of just another component in whatever task you’re performing. It survives in your desktop and nowhere else, and despite the hushed, reverent tones in which it’s discussed in some circles, would be the first thing any user switched off in their preferences on any modern machine.

iOS home screen is spatial.

You know the App you want is on 3rd page at the top and you expect and rely on your OS never to change that. The position is extremely imporant.

It also a huge success, since it's been copied everywhere, by Android, macOS and Windows.

  > It also a huge success, since it's been copied everywhere, by Android, macOS and Windows.

maybe so, but personally i get tired of swiping through pages and pages of icons that look nearly identical... i don't know if its an issue of flat design or something else, but i think "wall of icons" paradigm is a bit limiting compared to something a bit more spacial (icon sizes, layout, swipe up/down etc)

Yes, that’s the iOS desktop and the one place it makes some vague sense (although I search just as often and recent versions have added features to help people who clearly don’t know where half their apps are).

What doesn’t make sense is persisting this spatial info _everywhere_ and launching obnoxious amounts of new windows every time you go back.

It's easy to mess up the home screen by deleting an app, or by dragging one back through the pages and accidentally letting go early. I also think search is pretty common these days.

Usability suffers for a clean looking UI. Copying a path is much harder in Finder. You need to just know to right click on a plain text element to even see the breadcrumb. You need to google the hotkey to show hidden items, its not in the menu AFAICT, you can't search for it anyway.

There's a long list of common features that have become power tools you need to already know about.

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