I wouldn't call the Finder the "worst application" lightly. The thing is, to many the Finder is essential to using the computer. True, it is possible to live without the Finder, but users should not be forced to do this just beacuse Apple has managed to completely ignore this vital program. Not only is there a multitude of small things that together make the Finder very annoying, there are several large issues that make it decidedly suck. As we on the internet say: FTFF!
It's not like you can use it
FTP. The Finder crashes randomly when I am working with FTP servers. But that doesn't really matter because I have no reason use the finder for FTP. That is because the Finder doesn't even bother to support FTP. Sure, you can look at files. But you can't use it to edit or add files. I really want to know why IE in Windows 95 supported FTP, yet more than a decade later Mac OS X still doesn't? Apple certainly doesn't do it out of fear of harming 3rd party developers (we all remeber Watson, right?), so why is it? People say that they would just as soon use 3rd party clients, but the point is that we shouldn't be forced to. All of this is compounded by the complete lack of SFTP or AFS support. What's going on here, really?
Excessive Complexity... from Apple?Let's review what you have to do in Mac OS X to access a volume over the network:
Not exactly. In order to mount a commonly used volume this is what you have to do
- Click the Network in the Sidebar OR type Command-k
- Double-Click on the Volume in the Network Folder or in the Favourite Servers Section
- Marvel at the fact that the buttons have moved a few pixels from where they were in Panther
- Click the Connect Button in the dialogue
- Select the Volume you want to Mount
- Press OK
We have a 5-step process (not counting step 3). The problem with this is that there are steps that you should not have to go through every time. First, why should I have to re-authenticate every time I connect to a Server? Does my username change all the time? It would be OK to have a re-authenticate option, but I shouldn't have to click through the dialog every single time I connect to a server. What's especially ironic is that Windows servers don't force me to do that: they authenticate automatically, it's only the Mac servers that can't automatically authenticate. Next, to have to choose the volume is a needless step. Look at that picture. Not only is there the hard drive, but there is my user folder. Somehow, the last time I checked, my user folder was not a volume. My user folder is already in my hard drive, so it is being listed twice. Yet, there is an additional complication. Users that are not admins cannot see anything besides their own user folder, and other user's public folders. This makes no sense, had the user been sitting at the computer they would have been able to access applications just like the adimns can now. Why is there so much complication for an issue that should be quite simple? It would be much better if connecting to a computer over the internet worked like booting a computer as a FireWire target drive: all drives on the computer show up automatically.
There is another layer of stupidity that I skipped over at the beginning. "Network" appears as a folder in the Finder. You can click on it in the sidebar, and there it is. Only, this is in no way shape or form a folder. It would make sense if you could use column view starting from network to browse the servers, or if servers has disclosure triangles. But they don't. The network shares you can access should simply be represented in a view that clearly is not a folder (since you're not allowed to open them like folders), not in the fake-folder-like-thing they are currently. Lastly, even on a clean install of Mac OS X there is a completely random and useless item in "Network": /automount/library. I haven't the slightest clue what this is, and when I try to open it, it just says the alias is broken (see above). Also, what is that "Servers" thing for in the Network view. Are all of the things I see not servers?
Multiple Networks Failure There are often cases when I am connected to networks via multiple network interfaces. What I mean, is, I can be connected to my home Wi-fi network, and then also be connected to another computer via a Firewire network (since Firewire is 8x faster). The problem is that the Finder's "Network" doesn't recognize this second network. The only way to get the second network appear in the Finder's "Network" is to turn of AirPort and restart. I know that being connected to multiple networks could present a problem, insofar as the same computer would show up twice, but I suspect that Apple could come up with something.
But if you Disconnect... And then there is what happens when you disconnect yourself (or are disconnected from) a server. The Finder freezes. You can't do anything. If you try to use an open or close dialogue, that App will freeze. I timed it, and from the time I put the computer I was connected to asleep, it took 90 seconds for the Finder to unfreeze, and display the server disconnect window. Just because a server is disconnected, the Finder is totally 100% unresponsive for a minute and a half? It takes a lot longer to connect to a server than to disconnect from it.
Menus and Folders
The various menus in the Finder also have some inconsistencies. The most notable is that you can create new Smart Folders in the File menu, but the other two menus (the action menu and contextual menus) only have the ability to create New Folders and New Burn Folders... but not Smart Folders. Another inconsistency is that Automator stuff is only available in the contextual menus, nowhere else. By far though, the most problematic is the way that the Finder remembers recent folders. Ideally, it would be exactly like history in Safari, that is, holding down the Back button reveals a menu of recent folders in the order visited. Unfortunately that isn't the case, still, you would hope at least that the Recent Folders option would operate like the Recent Documents option in every Apple app. You know what I mean: the last few items in chronological order, with icons, and a clear way to differentiate between two items of the same title. Not a chance. Instead it lists, well, the last few files it alphabetical order. If they have the same name, too bad, it doesn't show you the path, you have to just guess which is which.
One other folder-related issue is the creation of new folders in list view. Whenever you create a new folder, it adds the folder to the topmost directory that you have open in the window. This is not the ideal case because often in list view I am many layers deep into the system (which, by the way, is the point of list view: you can be at both the root and also many directories deeper). So here I am, and the new folder is added many pages up, not in the directory I have currently selected. I have to then scroll to the top of the window and then drag it to where I wanted it in the first place.
Burn?
There are two major flaws with burning in the Finder. The first is that the Finder doesn't support CD-RW's or DVD±RW's. It treats them like non-writable media. This is a problem because they are writable. The whole point of RW's in that you can re-write it many times. What good is it if you have to copy the files to your HD, use some program (that the regular user colud well not know about) to erase the disc and then start over? Reall, the way Windows does it is just fine: treat them like Floppies, in that they can be written many times.
There is another flaw dealing with burning media in the Finder: the little burn icon in the sidebar. It is nice to be able to burn right from the sidebar, but it's not useful right after I have inserted a blank disk. The burn button inside the Finder window is disabled until you drag files onto the disk. Why doesn't that burn button in the sidebar just remain a regular eject button until I drag files to it, since I'm much more likely to want to eject a purely clean disk than to want to burn that disk with nothing on it. This works hand-in-hand with the CD-RW issue. I belive the ideal system would be like this: if a CD-RW is inserted and has stuff on it, it will have an eject button just like a blank disk should. Then, when you drag a file onto it, that icon turns into a burn icon, indicating that it has been changed, and that you must burn its contents.
The last issue with burning deals with Smart Folders. I made up a Smart Folder that searched a certain folder for certain images. I then burned this Smart Folder to a CD (by dragging the Smart Folder to the CD). But when I opened the file in the Windows OS I got a file of ".savedSearch" type. I realised immediately what had happened. It had saved the query and not the files. Apparently Apple decided that the "right" thing to do was to burn the query. This needs changing beacuse the end user could reasonably expect the Finder to burn the contents of the folder. Think of smart playlists in iTunes, you can burn them just like a regular playlist (and it doesn't burn the metadata query either!). As we use Smart Folders more and more, it certainly would be nice to be able to burn them.
Activity Monitor There are a couple things wrong with the above window. One is that it blatantly violates Apple's guidelines on titlebar widgets. See my page on that topic for more info. The other is that there is a much better solution then what it has right now. Right now I can be doing three different actions (copying isn't the only thing that makes a window like this, all lengthy actions in the Finder do) and there are three separate windows. A window similar to Safari's download manager would work fine in the Finder. It could be a real HIG-compliant window that shows current activities in the Finder.
Dynamic ColumnsAnother complaint I have is that it's unnecessarily hard to use list view, because the columns don't resize to the width of the window. As you expand and collapse different folders the columns change in width, going off the right-hand side of the screen. This happens even when you have the window expanded to full screen. When I go and organise or view my files, I usually need to have four or five columns open, and I need to be able to see all of them. If they expand right off the edge of the screen, I can't see them. If there wasn't already an application that automatically fit the columns to the window's width, I might think that I was asking for too much. But there is such an Application: Mail. As you resize the Mail window the columns resize dynamically to fit all of the data into the window.
There is another complaint I have against columns. First a quick background note: I usually keep all of my windows at "All windows" in the view options. This is to keep all of my windows having a consistent look. Unfortunately, the current system used by the view options is illogical and confusing. Whenever I resize the columns or change their order it switches me from "All windows" to "This window only." This means that there is no way to make the appearance of windows constant if I want to change Apple's column order, or change their relative widths. I would hope that the columns would act like any other attribute of the "All windows" option.
The Get Info Window
In the get info window you see some metadata, which is nice, but not nearly enough. What's strange is metadata does not always appear in the More Info section. Take Pages files, for instance, if you set an Author in Pages, the Spotlight metadata store knows that Author data, but you cannot see it in the Get Info window. Moreover, there is no way to edit or add metadata. No, I'm not talking about Spotlight Comments. Those are just a single Metadata field. I'm talking about real Key:Value metadata. If I would like to set a Due Date or Recipient for a file, I am out of luck. Nor does it help that all of the problems with Previewing in Spotlight also apply here.
Drag and Drop In my opinion there are some "features" that Apple adds that make the computer harder to use. One such instance has to do with dragging and dropping in the Finder. When I go to drag a file, the Finder windows will move around right underneath my pointer, without any provocation! This happens whenever there is a part of the window that goes off the edge of the screen. I know the point of this "feature" is so that there will not be any hidden folders, but the reality is much less convenient. You see, this action results in a moving target. On top of that, it's slightly delayed, so I can drag a file to folder x and just before I let go, the whole window moves and the file is dropped into folder y. This "solution" to revealing hidden files is unacceptable: it causes more problems than it solves.
Cut and Paste What about cut and paste? They seems like the most basic of actions, yet the Finder doesn't support them. I can't just cut a file or files from one folder and paste into another. I know you can drag the files this way, but sometimes it's difficult and time consuming to do so.
There's a Max of items in the Sidebar You can't add any more items to the bottom of the sidebar or even move an item to the bottom of the sidebar, if you have to scroll to see the bottom. You can add as many items to the sidebar as you wish, but only at the top of the sidebar, not at the bottom. But it gets crazier. If you scroll down below where you could see initially (without scrolling), you can't move items at all! Trying to move an item down below the initial screen will result in that item being removed from the sidebar. And craziest of all, this isn't even strictly true, there are a few items below the initial screen that you can move, like some sort of imaginary DMZ between the moves and the move-nots.
Oh, an then is the little problem that you can't nest folders in the sidebar. You can in iTunes, a program designed to handle Music. You'd think that a program designed to handle all files would have more advanced features, not less advanced features. Also, if Apple implements this and doesn't allow smart and regular folder nesting, I will be very disappointed.
Not Like Spotlight... or is it? There are a great number of good things that came with Spotlight (though a great number of bad things too). A couple of the better things are the ability to group items that are in a list view, and a button that allows you to view the file's information right in the window. However, neither of those great features were added to the Finder. You can use them if you are doing a search, but only if you are doing a search, not when you are doing regular browsing. Another drawback with list view is that there is no way to have secondary or tertiary sorting (i.e. Sort by Kind, Date Created and Size, in that order). If there was actually a contextual menu for the menus, there could be sub-menus for higher order sorting.
Unfortunately, Column view is worse when it comes to sorting: there is no way at all to sort. Also, I think that columns should resize to the width of the window just like list view should fit. Maybe it's just me, but it seems inefficient to have a quarter of a column that is unusable, when I know Apple has the programming prowess to make the columns always fit to the width window.
Lastly is icon view. I love this view because it offers previews of files. Well actually, it doesn't. Even PDF's, which could be previewed with Spotlight, do not show their contents. Icon view also can offer some useful metadata. However, it could do much better. Apple's (unchangeable) grid is large enough that it could fit much more metadata, like date and filesize.
If I remember correctly at the Keynote where Steve introduced the Panther finder he called it a "user-centric" Finder (as opposed to a computer-centric). The things here show that the Finder is still quite computer-centric. I can only hope that all these things are problems only because Apple has stopped paying attention to the Finder, for a whole new Finder is being released with Leopard.