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created 3 Dec. 2002

I was listening to an interview of John Gruber of DaringFireball.net by Shawn King, on Shawn's "Your Mac Life Extended" segment this week. The interview was about a post Gruber had put on his site about perceived deficiencies in the Mac OS X Finder, and I felt that while Gruber has some good comments, he kind of hit a lot of button issues that I think need to be commented on. Gruber articulated a lot of things that a lot of people believe, but they may not be as right as they think.

I'll say right off that I think he's having a severe attack of "The Good Old Days". Don't get me wrong, the Mac OS 9 Finder is a good piece of work, and after 17-18 years of optimization, you'd expect it to be. If you view Jaguar as version 2 of Mac OS X, then compare what would be System 2 to Jaguar. I'd expect that in 15 years or so, the Finder in Mac OS X will be a much nicer piece of work.

But he also makes some statements in the interview that made me wonder. For example, he essentially say that no one designing UI at Apple understands UI design. From where I sit, this is nonsense. Mac OS X is a different UI, and some of the decisions in that UI, like Mac OS 9's have been bad, some have been good. But, if you never make a mistake, you are not trying. Getting too locked into a UI design, and refusing to try something new because "We don't do it that way" is a trap, and that attitude hurt the Mac more than it helped it.

Now, this is not to say that you change things for the sake of change. But if there is a good reason for a change, even if people don't agree with it, then try. Stretch your wings. The Mac OS 9 Finder was a static thing. It was as done as it was ever going to be, and it was never going to grow in any new direction. That's a sure sign that it's a dead thing too. If you are afraid to try something new because you might make someone upset, you stagnate and die.

Remember, Copland didn't die because Apple couldn't write an OS. It died, because every time the MacMacs complained about something, Apple caved, and added yet another feature, changed the target, and bloated the code a bit more. Copland went from a PPC/PCI - only OS to running on everything that Apple made with a hard disk. Copland couldn't even achieve a code freeze state, much less getting to the shrink wrap stage, so the only sensible choice was to kill it.

I'd also say that this idea that Mac OS 9 is so easy to use, it's as if you were born with the ability to use the Mac OS 9 Finder like you use a pacifier is tripe. There is no computer UI that is inherently easy enough to use as to not have a learning curve. It is a non-physical, two dimensional representation of magnetic impulses on magnetic media, transistor states in memory or pits in an optical disk. It is how we manipulate 1's and 0's. There is nothing in human instinct that deals with that. Maybe in a couple of thousand years, but not now.

So we have to learn how to use any OS, including (Heresy!), Mac OS 9. I've found that if student and teacher have an open mind and a proper attitude, Mac OS 9 is no harder or easier to learn or teach than Mac OS X, and I've taught both to all skill levels. But when you've used a thing for many, many years, you "forget" all the learning you had to do to get to the unconscious ease of use you now have, which is where most Mac 'fogeys' are with Mac OS X. They're back where they were when they first learned how to use a Mac, far below where they were with Mac OS 9, and isn't that an ego buster. (For those about to complain that there really is something magically easy about the Mac OS 9 Finder, think about how hard it is to explain that each mounted drive has it's own desktop folder, and there really is no way to easily distinguish between them to a newbie...)

The Finder organization complaints have some validity, but they are partially bugs, and partially silly. If you don't set your desktop to be pre-arranged, then you can drag stuff everywhere, and it will generally stay there. If, as in the OS 9 Finder, you arrange by name, then it does just that. The OS X Finder does have a really annoying mild case of "Settings Alzheimers", but that is fixable, and has gotten better.

I also find it curious that he talks about how he wants the Mac OS X Finder to be simpler, but then wants Apple to implement different types of windowing methods depending on how you're viewing a folder. That's increasing complexity, and decreasing consistency, and this would be an improvement?

Hardly.

He also advocates creating what would become a second Finder, namely the "Column view Finder", which would behave in an inconsistent fashion, depending on if you click, or double click on an icon. Again, there is no way that you can seriously advocate adding two or three layers of complexity to the Mac OS X Finder, and somehow expect that to make the Mac OS X Finder behave like the simpler, more consistent Mac OS 9 Finder. You do not achieve simplicity by adding on, you achieve it by taking away. I won't even get into the AppleScript nightmare this would create beyond a shudder at trying to deal with Folder Actions under Gruber's ideas.

There's a tendency to talk about the Mac OS 9 Finder as being "better" or "worse" than the Mac OS X Finder. Well, it's both. It totally depends on the individual user. I talk later in this article about efficiency improvements in Mac OS X's Finder. Well, that's totally true.

For me.

I work how I work, you work how you work. For me, going back to the OS 9 Finder is agonizing, because it doesn't, and in many ways never did work the way I like to work, whereas the Mac OS X Finder does. For someone else, they Mac OS 9 Finder was far more in tune with how they work, and Mac OS X's Finder is painful. If it sounds like I'm saying that much of this 9 v X argument is completely subjective, well, that's correct. I am saying that. But there are some issues to consider about this argument.

Another point to consider is that because of Mac OS X's structure, had the Mac OS 9 Finder been kept, it wouldn't be the same beast it is in Mac OS 9. Mac OS X has too many operational differences that would requiremajor changes to the Mac OS 9 Finder.

I also found one aspect the Mac OS 9 Finder to be amazingly infuriating. The way that it hid a lot of useful things from new users, and then made using them more cryptic than they needed to be. cmd-clicking on the title bar to get the path to the current folder. This is an incredibly useable thing, but it's hidden in OS 9. It used to make me insane to hear some Mac fogey hitting a newbie with some arcane list of bizarre key combos that you had to have to really hit your stride with the UI. If it's there and it's useful, make it obvious in the UI. I find that Mac OS X does a far better job of this. The Zoom box is another example. For newbies, this is just that weird thing that changes window sizes. It's not more useful in Mac OS X, but the icon has something to do with the function at least.

His comments on the Window = Folder relationship is interesting, because it's also sometimes the hardest thing to teach someone...that in Mac OS 9, a window is a folder. You spend all this time dealing with folders as containers, and surprise! it's a view too! This isn't just an issue for mental acclimatization to Mac OS 9, it's an issue for scripting too...that folder/window relationship makes scripting the OS 9 Finder a bit of a PITA. I find it far easier, under Mac OS X, to show that a window is just the way you look at folders, applications, hard drives, etc. This is a level of abstraction that is more natural.

Think about it.

Under the Mac OS 9 paradigm, to see what is in a room, you have to go into the room (icon view), or, if there are subrooms, you can open up the walls and look at them from within the room (list view). Unless you know the secret shortcut key, you have to leave every room you've been in with no walls, until you put the walls back on. If you do know the secret key, then as you move to a new room, all doors in the room shut, and there's no obvious way to see where you are in the building.

You can't be in a room, and easily see all the way back out to the building through the doors you left open behind you (column view in Mac OS X), unless you are still in the main lobby, (hard drive root), and have removed the walls from every room between the lobby and the room you want to see (expanded list view), or leave every room you've been in with no walls. There're no hallways in Mac OS 9.

Movement between rooms is not real efficient either. You either have to climb through a window that opens onto an adjoining room, (folder in the window), remove building walls, (expanded list view), or back out of that room, the same way you came in until you find another window that opens onto the correct path of adjoining rooms, even if it means going to the entrance to the building itself (desktop/har drive root). You can always create a new hole to move directly to that room (alias), or you realign the rooms to make your life easier.

Since Mac OS X uses windows as a way to view a room, you can just wander down the hall to the room you want to go to. You still have to go through rooms, but, you get to use doors. You can easily look back through the doors you left open behind you, and take a different door. You can see every door in every room you've been in, but the walls of the room are in tact, you're just looking through the window. You can even take a direct tunnel, (go to folder), but it doesn't require creating a new structure (alias). If you feel more comfortable with the Mac OS 9 paradigm, use that as well, but it's all within the same app. There's no 'special' Finder that does this in Mac OS X.

The physical interaction of the OS 9 Finder was quite tedious at times. If you wanted to move from your desktop to a folder that was 9 levels deep, and you didn't have an alias to that folder, was something like this:

Option 1: Clickclickclickclickclickclick.... 9 double clicks, and that?s assuming that you can get to your next target without scrolling...if you don't know the option key trick, since it's poorly documented, and not obvious in the UI, you have 9 windows.

Option 2: you know about spring loaded folders, so it's a click and a half, and hold...delay...boing...find the next target, gotta not let go of the mouse button, gotta not scroll outside the window, oh crap, wrong folder, move outside of that window, but not the creation window...real efficient

These lead to:

Option 3: this is of course what you do after going through options 1 or 2 too often...you put an alias to the folder on your desktop, rearrange your folder structure, or you put an alias to that folder in your Apple menu.

Let's get this straight...this is NOT an inherently efficient way to browse your directory structure. If you are putting aliases to stuff hither and yon, and rearranging things to be shallower, then the Finder is so inefficient that you have to work around it. This is not the mark of "The best computer program ever written".

The Browser metaphor for Mac OS X is not like a web browser, which is a stateless static view of data, with some dynamic capabilities. In Mac OS X, with spring loaded folders, and horizontal scrolling in the browser view, you can now move files in multiple directions far easier than you could. As well, the (quite intelligent) borrowing from Windows of the ability to cut and past Finder objects, like documents, folders, and applications, in combination with the browser view makes the Mac OS X Finder a far *more* efficient way

Again, for a physical analogy...with Mac OS 9, you have to drag your stuff behind you as you move to the final destination of your stuff. the only quick way is to get the destination next to the start, and throw the stuff through the windows of the two rooms. Under Mac OS X, you can certainly do it this way, or, you just mark the stuff you want to move, walk to the destination, and hit the transporter button. Poof, stuff's here. Even better, it's a copy, so if something scrambled the signal, the original stuff is fine. Then you walk back to the source, and chuck out the old stuff.

Direct manipulation is not always the best way to do things, and the Mac OS 9 Finder was crippled in many ways by its total reliance on direct manipulation.

Another problem I saw in the interview was Gruber's vague attempt to attribute the lack of adoption of Mac OS X to UI problems. This is simplistic in the extreme, and as silly as Apple's attempts to attribute the lack of adoption to some magic bullet application. Gruber's assertion may be true for a small percentage of Mac home users, but he leaves out a lot of issues. Most of the K-12 market couldn't move to Mac OS X until Mac OS X 10.2 and 10.2 Server came out. Not because of any UI fixes, but because prior to 10.2, there was no equivalent of Macintosh Manager and Netboot for Mac OS X. In a K-12 setting, there was no way to roll out machines without ways of locking them down and managing them.

At the University level, the relatively poor level of LDAP support prior to 10.2 was an issue. For many Universities, it was an issue of application support, and support personnel support too. It takes time to set up your help desk, it takes time to train people. Remember, University level students tend to take care of themselves. But university employees still need to get paid, and for that you need payroll software, and other things that only now are being supported in Mac OS X.

Up until Mac OS X 10.2, Apple didn't really have an OS with any sort of support infrastructure for any level of the educational market, so they couldn't really upgrade en masse until recently. The same holds true for corporate Macs. Prior to 10.2, getting a Mac OS X box into a state where it was compatible with management tools was tedious, and there were a lot of needed features, like remote installs, etc, that were missing without additional cash expenditures. That was a real drag on Mac OS X adoption rates, and it was almost entirely Apple's fault. But none of this was due to a bad UI.

He then dismisses a real problem in the Mac community, and it's our dirty little secret. We hate change. Oh we want Windows users to change, and Unix users to change. But we get really strident at any changes in OUR stuff:

• "Whaddya mean I have to deal with this MultiFinder thing? You only need to run one program at a time!"
• "Whaddya mean I can't turn off MultiFinder in System 7?"
• "Whaddya mean I need 4MB of RAM for System 7?"
• "Whaddya mean there's now color in the OS? Black and White is all you need!"

ad infinitum. I like using Macs, but I really do believe that the Mac community is unhappy unless they have something to complain about in a loud fashion. (Sidenote: Clarus is dead, the smiley Mac at boot is dead, both are dead, just like Elvis. Move on already)

Again, I think John Gruber and Shawn both raised some valid points, and none of their arguments should be dismissed without reading/hearing them and thinking about them. But they're not as right as they may seem either.

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