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The Finder The Finder has not fundamentally changed in Panther. You say, 'What about the brushed metal, and that sidebar? Sadly, that is not the case.
Although the appearance has changed in somewhat dramatic fashion (depending on how you feel about the brushed metal look), the user interface of the Mac OS X Finder is essentially unchanged. As you may already know, I consider this. But before we get into all that, let's look at what has changed. The Sidebar While versions of the Mac OS X Finder featured a customizable toolbar, Panther adds a sidebar to the mix and then turns the entire window metal. The Finder with a toolbar and sidebar The toolbar contains that perform actions: new folder, delete item, switch view, etc.
There's also a new toolbar item that pops up a menu containing the same commands as the control- or right-click context menu. It's the button with the 'gear' icon in the screenshot above. Panther includes this 'action' menu-button in many places as a way to ensure that there is a user-visible access point for commands that would otherwise be 'hidden' in context menus. I'm not sure how well an icon of a gear conveys the intended message, but the sentiment is sound. Other items that could previously be dragged to the toolbar (e.g. Files and folders) can now be dragged to the new sidebar as well.
There is a default set of items that can be changed in a Finder. Beyond that, it is up to the user to drag items in or out. The icons in the sidebar scale with the available space, shrinking from a maximum size of 32x32 pixels to a minimum size of 16x16 pixels as space becomes tighter. A scroll bar appears in the sidebar when the list of items no longer fits in the available space. A scrolling list is a big improvement over the for handling overflow. The primary conceit of the sidebar is revealed when an item is selected. Look again at the screenshot above, and notice that there is no horizontal scroll bar in the window.
Despite the fact that the item selected in the sidebar (my home directory) is actually located at the path /Users/john, it is not possible to back up a level in the directory structure by scrolling left in the column view. Apple considers this a feature. One of the complaints about earlier versions of Mac OS X was that the directory structure was not 'user-centric' enough. Used to 'owning' the whole machine, Mac users were uncomfortable with OS X's directory structure that dictated that their sphere of influence start a level or two down in the hierarchy. Panther's solution is not to alter the directory structure, but to create the illusion that a user's 'familiar places' (as indicated by the choice of sidebar items) all appear to be the top-level of the hierarchy when selected in the sidebar. While this policy may help some users feel more comfortable, it may also be seen as unnecessarily limiting by more demanding users. Live searching The search field in the Finder toolbar is now 'live', meaning it updates the result set as you type, a la iTunes.
The search feature uses the same window-hijacking technique used in the. Once you start a search, your current window 'becomes' a search results window. Luckily, clearing the search field or hitting the back button restores the window to its pre-search state.
Live searching in the Finder The scope of the search is also (unintuitively, in my opinion) independent of the contents of the window where you begin the search. I expected the scope to at least default to 'everything below the currently displayed folder,' but that's not even an option. The closest is the scope of 'selection,' which searches below the currently selected folder or volume. Update: if you choose 'selection' and then don't select anything, the Finder will apparently search from the current directory downwards. That's hardly obvious, but it's there.
The Finder's live search feature leverages the new framework in Panther. Powered by Apple's venerable 'V-Twin' search engine, SearchKit is used extensively, and to great effect throughout Panther. The rounded 'search field' widget has been added to the standard set of Mac OS X controls, continuing Apple's in this area. Labels The Panther Finder returns colored labels to nearly the full height of their System 7-era glory. (For those not following along, that was sarcasm.) There are seven label colors to choose from. While the label names can be customized, the colors cannot (without some resource hacking, that is).
Rather than tinting the icon of the labeled item, labels in Panther color the background of both the name and the icon. It looks like this. Setting Finder labels: what the heck is that thing? I put 'shows off' in quotes because I think this interface is an abomination. First, the 'Color Label' menu item (if you can even call it that) does not highlight at all when the mouse is over it. Second, it takes up nearly three times the vertical space of a normal menu item.
Third, it asks the user to click a series of tiny colored dots in order to make a choice. This is unlike any previous 'normal' menu item, and it is worse in almost all respects. The targeting demands are increased considerably, asking the user to aim horizontally as well as vertically, and substantially reducing the target size. Presumably in an effort to save space, text labels only appear when the mouse is over one of the tiny dots. As mentioned earlier, the cumulative space is more than that of a single, normal menu item anyway. What, I must ask, is so horrible about a 'Color Label' sub-menu?
Granted, sub-menus are harder to navigate than simple inline menu items, but I have to believe that they have better performance characteristics than the system shown above. The ability to implement arbitrary custom views within menus is a potentially useful capability, but the Finder's label menu shows exactly how developers can hang themselves (and their users) with all this new rope. Before we leave the topic of labels, let's look at the history of this feature. The Mac OS X Finder lacked labels from its inception, despite their presence in the Mac operating system since System 6 (circa 1988). Labels had become a central part of many Mac users' workflows, and they were sorely missed. Went so far as to add labeling back to the Mac OS X Finder through various nefarious means.
The common wisdom regarding the missing labels was that the decade-old mechanism for storing label information in classic Mac OS (a few bits in an HFS/HFS+ filesystem data structure) was due for an overhaul. The hope was that Apple was working on something much better than a paltry fixed set of seven label colors stored in obscure fields in Apple's proprietary volume format. Apple may indeed be working on something better, but the Finder labels in Panther use the same old obscure fields in HFS+ as their System 7 forbearers (and therefore have the same limitations). In other words, Mac users waited three years to get back what they already had, with no improvements. This could just be a question of resource limitations and priorities at Apple, but a more pessimistic theory surmises that labels were omitted from Mac OS X 10.0-10.2 simply because the ex-NeXT developers who lead those development efforts simply didn't like them. I actually don't subscribe to the latter conspiracy theory, but I am disappointed that a three-year wait did not result in the hoped-for spiffy new labeling system.
My fingers are crossed for Mac OS X 10.4.
Using the Mac OS X Applications About the Applications (02:05) Calculator (02:48) Stickies (01:07) Stuffit Expander (03:20) TextEdit (02:21) Introducing iCal (02:50) Adding Information to Appointments (02:35) Using To Dos in iCal (03:11) Searching in iCal (01:47) Sharing Calendars (02:56) Sherlock (06:21) Using Third-Party Channels (02:28) Using iSync with.Mac pt. 1 (04:04) Using iSync with.Mac pt. 2 (00:53) Using iSync with an iPod (01:47) Grab (01:58) Image Capture pt.
1 (03:57) Image Capture pt. 2 (03:17) Image Capture pt. 3 (02:16) Image Capture pt. 4 (00:37) QuickTime Player (01:54) DVD Player (02:50) Introducing iChat (04:14) iChat and Rendezvous (03:39) Video Conferencing with iChat (02:05) iChat Buddies and Other Settings (03:07).