QotD: New Finder in 10.5
Posted October 22nd, 2005 @ 09:09am by Erik J. Barzeski
Question: Do you believe it?
My Answer: Sure, but it's not what people may think. I think that it's possible to add the features they're talking about without chucking the existing code base, and for those who have been after Apple for an "entirely new Fidner" or "a Cocoa Finder" or "a rewritten Finder," "re-designing" is not the same as "re-writing."
You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.
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Posted 23 Oct 2005 at 9:31am #
I fully expect the Finder in Leopard to be slicker, faster and make Julienne Fries.
I'm a programmer. I know that it might involve more/less threads, or a redesign or reworking of the architecture. I also know that if it were to be rewritten in Cocoa, chunks of it might actually be *slower*, since most of the underlying file system calls are made in pure C, and Cocoa design tends to end up wrapping things in classes and methods. (However, this might be a totally wrong thing to say, since those intermediary classes might be optimized out.)
Like Wil Shipley said on the Intel switch: "As long as Apple picks the fastest chips, they could be tortilla chips for all we care." and similarly, at the end of the day, I couldn't care less what they end up using as long as it turns out to be better. (And if it's not better, that's not because of Carbon or Cocoa but because of misplaced priorities.)
Posted 23 Oct 2005 at 12:40pm #
I think something more evolutionary than revolutionary is in store; some of the rumor sites treat it in a chicken little sky is falling way. It will probably just provide an easier way to add metadata at most, and be very similar to what is already is available between iTunes and Spotlight interfaces. It will make more habits than it will break. (look at all the classic habits that were pulled back into OS X, although some user notions probably needed to change).
Posted 24 Oct 2005 at 10:43am #
As a long time CLI freak I was never a fan of Windows Explorer. After making the switch to OSX in 2004 I never really had a problem getting used to Finder. I like it, even. Yes, yes, I can see that it definitely could use some major improvements in responsiveness along with major other obvious additions-- but as it is I use Finder where I never could stand using Explorer.