« test | Main | The Computer Community is still too sensitive »

So with John Siracusa's article, and some interesting responses at by John Gruber and Michael Tsai , I thought I would add my own two cents, but from a different angle.

There is one comment in Gruber's response that I find interesting:

"But every single person who wrote expressing satisfaction with the current OS X Finder had one thing in common: they are all computer nerds. "
Well, that's likely a function of being a nerd. Non-nerds don't really sit around and debate UI. But it brought up a totally informal, non-rigourous, yet, pretty valid example of the fact that for a true computer newbie, the OS X Finder is not nearly as bad as you would think from Siracusa's article.

I happen to know someone whose first few months of computer use were Mac OS 9, followed by Mac OS X, and they took far less time to be comfortable with Mac OS X.

My 9 year old son, Alex.

Who never really got the Mac OS 9 Finder or setup. He could work with it, he could get it to do what he wanted, but rarely without the request for tech support echoing throughout the house: "DADDYyyyyy!"

In the end, I found it easier to just set up a bunch of aliases in a folder called "Alex" on the desktop, and tell him just to use what was in there.

Then around April of 2002, I set him up with an account on my G4 Tower, running Mac OS X 10.1.X. No password, and I showed him where he could find the apps he liked to use. That was it. I locked him out of the dangerous preference panes, and other than that, didn't really show him much about Mac OS X at all.

About two weeks later, I take a gander at him working...and was blown away. The desktop was different, the Dock was up on the side, and hidden, he had all kinds of pictures and apps that he liked in the Dock, three games going...

By himself, with no help from me, he had figured out where stuff was, and how to make it work. Customization, you name it, that was his desktop. Alex is a smart kid, (of course, every parent's child is smart), but he's not a computer nerd. He likes them, they're useful, but not as things unto themselves. Rather, the computer is a means to an end, and nothing more. If it isn't working right, the call for tech support goes out.

Yet, if we accept all the 'spatial Finder' arguments, then Alex's experience should have been the inverse of what it was. He should have needed far more help with the Mac OS X Finder. But that wasn't the case. In fact, by far, I'll bet right now that the amount of trouble someone has with the Mac OS X Finder, the more time they spent with the Mac OS 9 Finder.

This is not to say that all the complaints against the Mac OS X Finder are just MacMac whining. They aren't. There are still positional bugs that annoy everyone, including me. But that's a bug, not a design decision. I think that integrating pop - up windows into the Dock would be an excellent idea, and avoid the continual problems the Mac OS 9 implementation had if you were changing screen setups a lot. I'd like to see proxy icons become more useful for inter-application drag & drop.

But the number of people who do 'get' the Mac OS X Finder who aren't nerds are not insubstantial, and should not be glossed over. Remember, the Mac and the Mac OS have never been for nerds. They've always been more for newbies, and from what I have seen, Mac OS X does a better job of dealing with newbies than Mac OS 9 did. (please don't bother with a case by case example. For everything about Mac OS X that confuses a newbie, I can show you a thing in Mac OS 9 that is just as silly.)

Which brings us to the central problem with Siracusa's article, and ones that support the Mac OS X Finder in similar ways. They are only relevant if your work habits and methods are similar to those of the person who wrote the article. If you work in a significantly different manner, then a lot of the article loses validity. I don't think that copy and paste of files is a sign that Satan is making UI decisions at Apple. Snip, a huge chunk of Siracusa's article gone. I don't think that he thoroughly defines what he means by 'spatial' because looking at the dictionary, everything is spatial. Snip. I don't buy that the Mac OS 9 Finder was particularly 1:1 about things. Snip. I don't buy that the Mac OS 9 Finder kept you from knowing about paths. Snip. I also am really doubtful when an author invokes the name of Tog Almighty, as though they were following the one true path.

Of course, your experience will differ.

john

Comments

Warning for Notes users: The commenting system uses HTML.
I know this will be scary for some of you, especially Notes fans. However, open standards, rah-rah.
If you want to use less-than or greater-than signs, or other similar characters that HTML reserves,
you'll simply have to learn to do it the HTML way. Luckily, HTML is kind of popular, no matter what
your re-educators have told you, and you can easily find help on the intertubes.