Article by stridey

People tend to like to complain about Mac OS X’s Finder, because frankly it has a lot of problems. The biggest of those problems is that it’s built on top of two paradigms: The spatial Finder of the classic OS days, and the NeXT File Browser. There’s an excellent description of why they’re so different here, but what it basically boils down to is this: in the OS 9 spatial paradigm, elements (eg windows) represent a true spatialization of the file structure, whereas the NeXT browser is, well, a browser. The end result is that the Finder is built off of two different designs which were stitched together after the fact, and all sorts of weird things spring from it.

One is the UI for Finder’s View Options floater.  It’s a very specific problem, and it may seem like a niggle to you, but to me it’s a constant annoyance, which is only made worse by the fact that it would be so easy to fix.

Now, I like to customize my windows, for both usability and eye-candy reasons. When I open my root directory, for instance, I like to browse in column view, but I like my home folder to have nice large icons. After all, the home directory contains eight folders by default, and I find it best for my file organization to leave it that way. But I digress; the bottom line is that I end up using the View Options floater a lot, to customize specific folders’ UI to suit my needs.

The problem arises because of the View Options’ radio button of doom: Toggle it the wrong way, and ruin the default UI for your system.

Picture the following scenerio: You open a folder, you go to view options, you see the nice big friendly Icon Size slider, you shift it up to to an eye-pleasing 52x52. The only problem is, the radio button was set to “All windows,” so now every folder not set to “This window only” has 52x52 icons. Every single window’s View Options should not have the power to change the global setting.

I believe that there’s an intuitive, logical solution to this design problem: move the global prefs to the Finder’s Preferences window. In addition to the already existing General, Labels, Sidebar, and Advanced prefpanes, we should have a Default View Options prefpane. There you would set everything you can set in the current View Options floater, plus default window size, view (icons, list, column), and position. That would also clear up a whole slew of confusing “open the window, change the setting, close the window, open the window” procedures.

In the specific window’s View Options floater, all you’d need to do is replace the radio buttons with a “Use custom preferences” checkbox: all items in the floater other than it are grayed out unless it is selected.

There’s precedent for this solution: NetNewsWire sets default persistence and refresh rate preferences in the Preferences window, but gives each subscription group “Use custom refresh schedule” and “Use custom persistence” setting. Implementing this behavior will make Finder more intuitive, less destructive, and easier to manipulate.