Apple Complaint #9: The Finder
There is a long and wordy history of weblog-based OS X Finder criticism, which I won’t even try to read, let alone recapitulate here. Nicholas Riley, John Gruber, and John Siracusa are all far more knowledgable arbiters of good UI than myself, and have produced their own, thorough dissections of the Finder’s shortcomings. For my part, I think Michael Tsai, in a post last month, does the best job of summing up my position on the matter:
Spiffy new features and a religious war over the spacial and browser paradigms are putting the cart before the horse. At this point, all I want is a polished Finder. Just something basic that lets me manage my files without frustration will be enough. By basic, I mean windows that auto-refresh and remember their settings, being able to move large numbers of files quickly, and other things that we used to take for granted. For the rest, I can wait for 10.5 or 11.0.
Well said! Forget piles, journaling file systems, and other showy upgrades: if Apple really wants to put the user at the center of Panther, they need to fix the Finder’s problem with non-sticking view options (one of the perennial OS X bugs), its inability to auto-refresh file listings, its lackluster performance, and a number of other issues. I think it’s safe to say that these fundamental problems have affected my personal user experience far more than my inability to stack files on top of each other!