Jaguar Finder

Jaguar Finder isn't bad... if you're a NeXT user or a new user and you don't know better. In fact, in those cases, many things might be better. But if you're a Mac user, and especially a power user, it was different in ways that were mostly for the worse. It feels like the Finder got a promotion; it used to work for me, now I work for it. NeXTies didn't fully get the Mac, and were highly resistant to listening/learning -- and that made things harder for them and the customers than it needed to be.

👍 Column-View: is far better at navigating deep hierarchies and exploring some areas than the old Mac ways.

👍 Back button: Good stuff, that people use. Microsoft was right in making the interface feel more like a browser. People are familiar with the browser metaphor, and Apple borrowing from that makes sense as well.

👍 Window Controls: Apple made the window controls look/work more like Microsoft Windows. It's worse than the Mac way, for accidental behaviors, but users are more familiar with it -- so probably a win.

👍 Open/Save has plenty of issues. But I do think that mimicking column view is a move in the right direction. If we can make it consistent, then it will be fine

👍 Long file names with Unicode characters: both wins of Apple's old 32/24 character limit.

👍 File Name Extensions: using file name extensions is lame over Apple's superior Type/Creator, but if you're going to use that cheesy shit, at least they implemented it better than Windows/UNIX. (With warnings on changing names).

👍 Command Line: I like having a command line for some things. UNIX gives me many shells, that are fast and standard. If Apple could give me a better interface than terminal, and more interfaces so I could avoid it even more, I'd be ecstatic.

👍 Dev Tools: Apple's first implementation of their dev tools are a big step backwards over the 3rd Party ones. But it's nice to have it integrated with the OS and always there (or optionally always there). And they'll get better over time.

👍 Large icons: these are a win visually. I would have probably gone for a vector based solution, and stuck with 'illustration/cartoon' style rather than "real life" photos, as the former are better at conveying abstract ideas. And we lost a nice rule-set on how to use icons. But the new icons look good, and they do convey more feedback and information -- that's a win.

👍 Dock: even the dreaded Dock has a few upsides: it is more visual feedback, and can manage some things better (like hiding/showing app windows). New users understand it, because it behaves more like Microsoft.

👎 Spring loaded folders - I know some will say that Jaguar has them but in Jaguar they only have half of the functionality. There were two behaviors: drag, and double-click tunneling. Jaguar got the first behavior mostly working but is missing the second. I used to tunnel by double-clicking on the first item, and then it would behave like I was dragging something for rapid navigation. This was intuitive, easy, fast, and cool.

👎 Tabbed Windows - (Popup Folders) - it was always nice being able to decide how I was working and just dock a window at the bottom of the screen or set up and arrange my own topical dock (that frankly worked much better for me). Apple never implemented them as well as they should have (that whole moving around and resizing stuff on a portable, and I wondered why the top and sides weren't also part of the metaphor) so it could certainly be implemented better. But don't take away what I had and tell me I shouldn't miss it. I miss it.

👎 Application Menu - the Dock replaced this functionality, poorly. It was aways much faster and better than trying to play the "find the running app" shell game that is the dock. The App menu even has the texual names of things (instead of playing concentration by matching the little pictures in the dock, or me having to rollover them) and a menu gets out of my way when I'm done with it (progressive disclosure). You can use 3rd party hacks to make things work more like they used to, but Apple breaks them every OS update, and they're not built-in.

👎 Application Menu - the Dock replaced this functionality, poorly. It was aways much faster and better than trying to play the "find the running app" shell game that is the dock. The App menu even has the texual names of things (instead of playing concentration by matching the little pictures in the dock, or me having to rollover them) and a menu gets out of my way when I'm done with it (progressive disclosure). You can use 3rd party hacks to make things work more like they used to, but Apple breaks them every OS update, and they're not built-in.

👎 Apple Menu - it was a customizable menu that I could put things I wanted in there. Apple wastes it with none of the customizability it used to have.

👎 Control Strip - Apple moved this stuff up into the menubar to make it noisier and more crowded. The Old Apple Way was better. (Having it out of the way, until you needed it).

👎 Button view' - you used to be able to turn all icons in a window into "buttons" and setup your own dock, if you wanted it. Apple replaced it with the less versatile dock. Yeah, thanks for that.

👎 Finder Labels - I used to set colors and labels for items. I liked that the finder tried to adapt to my way of working and had generic behaviors like that which worked the same everywhere. Honestly, when I saw Copland's dynamic folders (auto-searching) labels became immediately 10 times more valuable. I could flag anything, anywhere as "hot" and have one folder which listed all the "hots". This was great and far more advanced than what I have now.

👎 Location Manager - there used to be a way to have all your settings change depending on where you were (for laptops): home or work. Apple eliminated that.

👎 Persistence - I used to set Window positions, size, controls, and views and they would consistently work. Now they don't. Sometimes they work but often they move, change size, or change what controls are shown. When I open a new window it sometimes inherits from the previous one and sometimes not. I'm amazed at how consistently wrong it is at guessing what I want or what I expect. It used to work better.

👎 Put away - I used to just go to the trash or an item on the desktop and "put it away", and it would go back to where it came from last. Apple never implemented this for OS X. So if something gets moved out, you can undo (briefly), but if it wasn't the last thing you did, then you have to manually do for the computer, what the computer should know how to do.

👎 File Name limits - You can type a name longer than it should allows, then after you hit return it throws an error. What's up with that? Are you stupid? The old Mac used to just beep and stop you while you were typing to let you know that you went too far. This is just common sense dynamic feedback. Making it an after the fact error is just annoying.

👎 Grids - You used to have more control over Icon grids and be able to make them tighter (more space efficient); now I'm a victim of Apple's settings.

👎 ESP / Precognition" : I liked being able to type the first few letters in something and have it guess the rest. That doesn't work (reliably).

👎 Open / Save" : Why can't I resize things in column view so I can actually read from my list? Why aren't the controls and keyboard shortcuts the same between different Finder views? Have you heard about consistency? This went backwards.