Of stumbling full circle
You might be surprised how many random instant messages I get that lead with "You bastard," such as...
An amusing aspect to this is I distinctly remember having a conversation with Siracusa ages ago where he pinged me about my going on about Finder.app, and that he'd basically just given up. I told him to suck it up and keep plugging at it, and now the situation has rounded the horn to where he's doing the same to me. Some inherently depressing quality in the situation surrounding the Finder in Mac OS X seems to grind the hope out of people regardless of their starting passion.
As promised, linkage to his writing about it again. With that, I go to find a pillow, hopefully dreaming of a "Rock-solid Unix-based Operating System" that can handle a server disconnecting without going wonky. Well, one from Apple that is, as that actually already exists.
Posted by drunkenbatmanJanuary 28, 2006, at 09:54 AM
Comments (12)
Posted by: Jesper at January 28, 2006 10:52 AM
Rewritten maybe, reworked quite possibly, in Cocoa not. The recent job listing at the crux of DB's previous post and Siracusa's linked post explicitly mentions Carbon - which is not the important part, because even if it was rewritten in Cocoa they'd need to work with Carbon - but explicitly does not mention Cocoa or Objective-C in the slightest.
Posted by: Mindflayer at January 28, 2006 01:20 PM
As promised, linkage to his writing about it again. With that, I go to find a pillow, hopefully dreaming of a "Rock-solid Unix-based Operating System" that can handle a server disconnecting without going wonky. Well, one from Apple that is, as that actually already exists
And what OS would this be? HP-UX? Nope. Solaris? Gah. Linux? NFS... shiver.
;)
Posted by: Wes McG at January 28, 2006 04:23 PM
Well, if it is any consolation to John, I suck at weblogging too, and for exactly the same reasons... events pass me up and all my posts wind up in the historical dump pile. Though he's better at blogging since he is actually smart, and I'm actually just a one of an infinite set of monkeys typing on an infinite set of typewriters.
Posted by: Evan Schoenberg at January 28, 2006 04:39 PM
I was worried our conversation (2 for 2) from a couple days ago was going to be your example...
Posted by: Peter da Silva at January 30, 2006 02:17 PM
FreeBSD is about as rock-solid as any UNIX operating system I know of. Pity Apple didn't use more of it in OS X.
But that's not important now.
What's important is, why the hell does Apple need to rewrite Finder? Finder was a pretty good file manager... not one I'm fond of, really, but pretty good never the less. And they already had another pretty good file manager written in Objective C that would have taken them all of a month to touch up for Cocoa, in the NeXT file manager.
Why not just leave Finder alone, as the desktop, and for people who like the Finder's odd behaviours comforting... drop all the metal and column view and make it work like it used to... except consistently.
And restart the development of the NeXT file manager as the basis for the new Finder.
It seems like such an obvious idea. What's wrong with it?
Posted by: Matt Bland at January 30, 2006 03:39 PM
Peter: Drop the column view? I don't think so. I use that more than any other, especially for previewing audio and movies. I'd love to be able to view the preview pane in the list and icon views as well.
I have a gripe about the Finder. I prefer the columns to be in a different order than the default when in list mode. I prefer 'name', 'size', 'type', 'date modified'. But when you swap these around and close a window and re-open it they've gone back to the default. It drives me crazy.
Posted by: Antidragon at January 31, 2006 05:14 AM
Peter:
I think what you're suggesting would require a rewrite anyway. Since Finders a core app and probably optimised to the point of obscurity I wouldn't be suprised that if Apple wanted to improve/correct it to such a degree (oh please let it be so) that a rewrite would be far more cost effective than hacking away at the existing codebase.
That was one long run-on sentence...meh..
I may be alone but when I see "rewrite" I envisage a re-creation of Finder (same name, same overall feel) with improvements added and bugs/UI wonkiness removed.
Posted by: Retard at January 31, 2006 05:39 AM
Just come across this -
http://daringfireball.net/2006/01/smart_crash_reports
thought you guys might be interested if you hadn't already seen it!
Posted by: Nabil at January 31, 2006 11:05 AM
Oliver: I'm boggled that anyone likes Windows Explorer, let alone more than the (admittedly wonky as well) Finder. I'm praying to Deity™ that the rewrite doesn't make it more like that. To each their own, I guess.
Really, the things I'd like out of a rewrite mostly come down to more consistent and configurable behavior. (Of course, I don't organize my comp like anyone else I know... for one, I NEVER use the desktop.)
Posted by: Peter da Silva at January 31, 2006 12:44 PM
Oh, I'm not suggesting that the column view be done away with. Just that Finder not be the program that provides it... the column view comes from the NeXT file manager, and it should have stayed there. Trying to merge the two programs just messed both of them up.
Posted by: bootlicker at February 1, 2006 10:12 AM
Hey, what about Konqueror, nice concept, crossing the border between Finder and WinExplorer. Qt is the NeXT best thing on OS X and I'd love to see some more synergy, beyond Gecko. I'd trash Finder for a Quartz-Konqueror.
Rumour has it, Finder is being completely re-written (this time in cocoa). Hopefully it will be done in time for 10.5.
Honestly, the Finder versus Windows Explorer is the one area where I actually find myself favouring M$. That's not to say Explorer is ideal and enjoyable to use, but it's not as miserable as Finder.app right now.