Comment by Someone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Someone | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

“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.

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.

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