DrunkenBlog

 Posted by: Ken at January 26, 2006 09:39 PM

Holy Effin' Smokes!

Freudian Slip? Grounds for Termination? Both?

K

 Posted by: Carl at January 26, 2006 09:44 PM

If someone gets fired, they'll be fired for tellin' the truth.

Avoid the Finder like a swarm of bees, yo!

 Posted by: at January 26, 2006 09:52 PM

way to get an engineer fired, drunken batman. do you ever consider the repurcussions of your actions?

 Posted by: Guy English at January 26, 2006 09:54 PM

5+ years of experience developing software.
Experienced in using STL, Boost.
Shipped shrink-wrapped products.
Knowlege of Core Graphics, HIView and Carbon, Core Foundation.
Experience developing file browser, graphics, productivity or creativity desktop applications a plus.

It doesn't look like it's for a re-write though ... certainly not a Cocoa one.

 Posted by: Neil at January 26, 2006 09:59 PM

I certainly hope they've already hired someone to take on the usability issues and now they're simply looking for help to build the redesign.

Okay, you can stop laughing now, I was just making sure you were still reading.

 Posted by: Stephen Deken at January 26, 2006 10:13 PM

way to get an engineer fired, drunken batman. do you ever consider the repurcussions of your actions?

1. Engineers don't write job descriptions. That's an HR job.
2. It's not as though whoever originally wrote the job description was the one responsible for putting it online. More than one Apple person looked at this before it got onto the web, I can virtually guarantee it.
3. It's not as though DB is the only one talking about this. John Gruber and other macheads are all over it.
4. DB, as much as I love him, doesn't have as much pull as you'd like to ascribe to him. Something published here does not a front-page story in the NYT make.

Carry on.

--sjd;

 Posted by: mindflayer at January 26, 2006 10:19 PM

At long last. Perhaps the recompiles for Intel made them realize how painful it is, and it's time to drop the NeXT?

As a side note, the position was posted by Apple, and it was their choice of syntax. There are no repercussions from the post. Sigh - DB, your comments better not start looking like /. :)

 Posted by: Jack Meijer at January 26, 2006 10:32 PM

3. It's not as though DB is the only one talking about this. John Gruber and other macheads are all over it.

Sadly I stopped reading Gruber when it was clear he would post the popular opinion or what he was paid to [BareBones, et al]. The problem with DB is no regular posting schedule, so it cannot be where you get news. Sometimes he is first, others stories you would never see. Almost a week since the last large article. And he hates Jesus. The NYT should hire him, he would fit right in!

 Posted by: Zach Heaton at January 26, 2006 11:19 PM

It gets even better if you read further on:

In this position you will be expected to: ...

- Work on performance and responsiveness of the Finder, making it feel lightweight, fast, snappy and pleasant to use.

 Posted by: DuMaurier at January 27, 2006 12:05 AM

Great. So Apple will have the Finder fixed for 10.6. Or maybe they'll save it got OS XI.

 Posted by: drunkenbatman at January 27, 2006 12:30 AM

Jack,

Two quick things:

1. I really appreciate the sentiments, or at least most of them.

2. I'm not going to go into any of your specifics points, but while you are entitled to your opinions and I won't delete them because I don't generally do that, it's probably not relevant to the topic whatsoever, and is the last thing I want to be devoting headspace to right now.

Basically, I have neither the inclination nor the free cycles to devote headspace to this type of a thing or the stupid snaggle it could turn into, and something like this could randomly turn into a pile of crap I had to deal with over the weekend... If this happens, I may well stab a reader.

If it's what you really want to talk about it's not going to be something I'll be putting my foot down on in a hard-ass way -- I'd just consider it a personal favor if you could chill out on it and keep it towards the topic for now.

Cool?

 Posted by: at January 27, 2006 01:51 AM

Effective post there. Luckily for Apple it was posted at 9:50PM instead of 7:50am.

 Posted by: javaholic at January 27, 2006 02:26 AM

I'd just hire the guys from Cocoatech.

From a users point of view, I think Path Finder 4s shaped up really well. But then they actually got people like John Gruber to help beta test it - something Apple would never do.

 Posted by: sundoggy at January 27, 2006 03:08 AM

Yo javaholic!

Agreed on Path Finder. I was just waiting to get all over that same point and came to your post, the last one. I have been getting deep into PF 4, and Apple could learn a few things here (like if they don't adopt the tab thing, they are crazy--it's the coolest application of tabs ever). Or maybe they should buy out Coocoatech.

It's got a few "gotchas" like no smart folder support and other things related to Spotlight integration (which the developer says they're working on for future release). I've checked this out from the snax days, through the last version looking for a Finder replacement, and now it looks like it's finally here. I'm about to hand over my $30 bucks to them because it's that cool. Plus, I'm going to do all those extra steps to make this the default file manager so I don't even launch Finder (random things will launch Finder like disk images, dock folders, etc.). So far it's been very stable (though I have had one PF crash, so it's not as stable as the woeful Finder). The only other complaint I have is that maybe, just maybe it's a little feature bloated--and a lot of what it does, I do with QuickSilver. In fact, when testing, I realized that I use Quicksilver so much I have almost already replaced the Finder. However, a good file manager is good to have, and this one rocks. I'm doing an extensive test and will probably post something about it soon. Maybe I'll come back here and drop the link. If you've been looking for a Finder alternative, you really should check out Path Finder 4. It is light years ahead of its predecessors, not to mention the real Finder.

 Posted by: MJ at January 27, 2006 06:00 AM

I don't think there will be repercussions. Previous official posts (see "Like a Swarm of Bees") have had the same conversational tone and I much prefer that to the normal quasi-legalese we get from big computer companies. Look at Microsoft, there's a fine example of technical writers paid to fill white space.

As for the content. Finder needs work. Pathfinder is not an option.

 Posted by: Jesper at January 27, 2006 09:56 AM

"way to get an engineer fired, drunken batman. do you ever consider the repurcussions of your actions?"

Way to shoot the messenger. Or, as others have pointed out, messengerS, of whom DB is not the most powerful.

 Posted by: Jon at January 27, 2006 09:57 AM

The word notorious comes from the Latin "notus" which means known. That's not necessarily Apple saying that the Finder is a bad thing, just that it is the "well-known" file browser for OS X.

 Posted by: Latin2006 at January 27, 2006 10:36 AM

Umm... We're not speaking Latin.

If you are still having trouble you could even try looking in the OS X dictionary - just an option click away!

"famous or well known,
__typically for some bad quality or deed__"

 Posted by: Vanapagan at January 27, 2006 10:37 AM

Well, well, DB - didn't think you were into this kind of thing:

"Your comment submission failed for the following reasons:
Your comment could not be submitted due to questionable content: Oxfor(d) Com
Please correct the error in the form below, then press Post to post your comment."

I wonder what's questionable about Oxf. Compact... My edited post follows:

From the Oxf. Compact English Dictionary:

notorious

• adjective famous for some bad quality or deed.

— DERIVATIVES notoriety noun notoriously adverb.

— ORIGIN Latin notorius, from notus ‘known’.

I wonder whether it's the Finder's bad qualities or bad deeds...

 Posted by: Ben at January 27, 2006 10:51 AM

I feel as though I may be in for some flames for this one...

Besides unpredictable finder views, finder hangs during network-related activity, and my own personal vendetta with finder's method of highlighting selected files, what are your biggest gripes about finder?

I switched from Windows a few years back, and I was delighted with finder's layout and performance for the most part. Certainly, tabs would be nice, but the finder is an almost transparent aspect of my OS X experience. Expose is mapped to my middle mouse button, and I use it constantly while navigating, dragging and dropping, etc. I like it.

Programs like Pathfinder and Quicksilver may certainly fill a niche need for some users, but after a personal review of those products, I found that I didn't need them.

My point is this: The comments posted regarding this subject seem to come from a very specialised user-base that does not necessarily want/need the same things out of an OS as most other Apple customers. I for one would rather have PF and QS be separate programs to be used by people who want them; I would rather have the choice than be locked in to a suite of functions that use cycles and memory when they are features I don't use. Right? I can't imagine that most users would save a lot of time with these features, as I know many people who already ignore most of the little things that Apple has implemented to make our lives easier (expose, apple-tab, folders in the dock, etc.)

The one complaint that I heartily agree with concerns finder's tendency to hang/SBBOD anytime I use it to connect with a network share or iDisk. That really is annoying.

I hope someone out there can 'show me the light' and tell me what specific beef they have with finder.

-ben

 Posted by: junkiesxl at January 27, 2006 12:51 PM

Notus means known, but over the years, notorious has gotten the connotation of being bad. And know the two are permanently linked.

On to discuss PF4, I like it a lot but i don't like the clutter that comes with it. It makes my screen too "busy".

The one thing that I'm most happy aboutt in Path Finder is that they use "Find By name" in every window, instead of forcing us to use spotlight (which isn't as fast, and works counterproductive)

Ah well you can't have it all

 Posted by: Peter da Silva at January 27, 2006 01:45 PM

I had some problems with Finder and didn't have time to trace them down, because I was on a schedule, so I ordered a copy of PathFinder and used it for a while.

Went back to Finder as soon as I could.

What I'd really like would be for Apple to pull out the NeXT file manager, give it a minor grooming to make it fit the Aqua style, if just relinking with Cocoa doesn't do the trick, and ship it as "Flashlight" or something.

Then take the Carbonised Finder from 10.2 or so, before they went over the top with it, and pull the bits of the NeXT file manager back out (or start over again with the OS 9 Finder), and ship it as "Finder".

And put all the logic for discovering drives and alerting the file manager and stuff in a separate program, one that's JUST for managing mounts, with a control panel that lets you do stuff like "always mount Peter Home as /Users/peter". I've managed to convince the automounter to do stuff like this, but Finder went totally postal.

 Posted by: Peter da Silva at January 27, 2006 01:47 PM

Oh, yeh, give me a flag/button/pulldown to select "search by name" instead of "search by hope^Wspotlight".

 Posted by: Matt Bland at January 27, 2006 03:46 PM

Please, please, please, please - make the Finder multi-threaded so that network stuff doesn't make it hang for ages. Update the free/used space on drives in (near) realtime and add a 'rename' to the context senstive menu for files and folders.

There's about a hundred other things I could put, but these come to mind first.

 Posted by: eff at January 27, 2006 04:16 PM

"... I'd just hire the guys from Cocoatech. ..."

I for one am going to light a candle in church that this will never happen. Not because I harbor any kind of resentment against the good folks at Cocoatech - but if there ever was an overcrowded, convoluted and hyper-complicated user interface that only a mother could love, it's that of Path Finder.

 Posted by: Pontus Ilbring at January 27, 2006 04:19 PM

Ben,

I want a way to turn the browser windows, those metal things with toolbars off for good, and just use the slimmer, normal Finder windows. Everything the browser windows provide is redundant except the ability to open folders in the same window instead of a new one, and I hate that feature anyway.

I don't need the buttons in the toolbar, or the aliases in the sidebar -- the sidebar is useful in save dialogs though, but for some reason you can only add items to it in the Finder. The search field would have been useful if it filtered the contents of the window, but it doesn't, so it's not. But the Finder does not let me turn the browser window mode off completely. Rather, I have to do it on a folder-per-folder basis.

Most people seem to like browser windows, and most people don't encounter the bugs in the Finder that I stumble over daily, but that doesn't help me.

 Posted by: Rosyna at January 27, 2006 06:43 PM

Remember, the far, far majority of the problems (like the networking thing) that people blame on the finder have nothing at all to do with the Finder. Their other components in the system that the finder happens to be using (like DiskArbitration... grrr) that have these problems.

That said, working on the Finder is my dream job. I never figured a place would ever open up on the team.

 Posted by: Jason Young at January 28, 2006 12:42 PM

So is it bad that the the first thing I thought about while reading the job post was a 90's rap star?