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Panther Part 2. The Aftermath (Finder)
OK I must be really losing my sanity, as after the massive data loss of the Installation Nightmare, any sane person would have just dropped Panther like a hot rock, and set the lawyers on Apple over the lost income. But no, its still on my Powerbook, and here's the first part of the reason why.
First some brief background on my urgent need to upgrade to the bleeding edge. My need for Panther was mainly due to a number of nasty bugs in Jaguar that where getting close to driving me nuts or at the very least dumping OSX for PPC Linux. Some of these bugs where right out of the twilight zone, such as; finder losing icons, windows moving after copying a file, strange icons appearing, then comes the total mess which claimed to be SMB support, complete with its vanishing file trick.
Yes this list could go on and on, but rather than bore you, all that you really need to know, is that the upgrade was urgent for the sake of my sanity, and just important as it included the new Pixlet video codec, which looks good for my video services.
I see no real point in going through every one of the new goodies in Panther, especially as Apple puts the count at 150+, so I will concentrate on the major changes. And no I am not just going to rant on about my horrible data loss, honest :-)
In my case most of the bugs in Jaguar where to do with Finder, which to me is almost as bad as Windoze, with its bugs, lack of enough threading, and clunky user interface. So with that in mind you can expect the total replacement of Finder was of more than passing interest to me, and makes a good place to start.
The new Finder
Yes its been finally replaced, and replaced with something thats in a totally different class to what came before it. This time the it looks like the suits actually left the developers alone, allowing them to produce something thats well thought out, and implements a near total shift in functionality.
Yes I said its "a truck load faster", and thats not a term I use lightly. In the bad old days, Finder was a real CPU hog, and regularly took my 1GHz G4 to 100% while doing even fairly small tasks, such that I used to kill it and jump into the command line, which was always much faster. Now that said, the command line is still faster, but now the gap is smaller, with the CPU usage being much lower even for some horribly large file copies. A most welcome change.
Anyway, a picture is worth a thousand words, so here it is, the new finder
In the bad old days, you used to add directory shortcuts (sorry cannot think of anything else to call them!) to the toolbar, which tended to get a little out of control, and in my case drove me nuts, especially when the window size made displaying all of them impossible. Now in this new world those same shortcuts are laid out vertically down the left edge in what I call a shortcut column, which to me anyway makes perfect sense.
If you look at the screen shot, you will see this shortcut column is broken up into two parts, another stroke of genius, as it allows for mounted devices to be always shown, which was another pet hate of mine. One thing to note, is that Apple by default does not display the local machine icon, no ideas why!. Not that this a real problem as its very easy to add it, which is just what I did, and yes 'Phobos' is my machine name (Its one of the martian moons).
Another new feature, are the eject buttons for removable/network devices right next to their icons. Sure this may sound minor, but its yet another work of genius, and will appeal to those who find the 'f12' or "Ctrl Click/eject" functions annoying. I am neutral on this one, but still find myself using it more and more.
In the lower half are the shortcut icons, which now boast spring loaded pop open windows, such that when you drag a file onto one, the destination for the short cut opens in a new window, better allowing you to control where the file ends up. Whereas back in the bad old days, this was only available to directories in finder windows (it still is), not toolbar shortcuts.
Now its free of these shortcuts, the tool bar has more real estate for customization, which is always welcome, especially in my case. Now looking at the new default tool bar, you see the original back/forward/view buttons are still present, but now there is a new one, which brings me to yet another new feature, which is moving to action based tasks. This new button is actually the action menu, which is a updated version of the contextual "Ctrl Click" menu, and does mirror its functionality. A minor change, but still useful.
While on the subject of the contextual "Ctrl Click" menu, its got several new functions, with the most useful being the "Create Archive" which does just what its name suggests, and creates archives of the selected file, or to be exact, Apple friendly .zip files. Sure Windoze has had this for years with winzip, but its still a very welcome addition.
Other than that, this menu now has the ability to change the color of the label for any item in the window. As interesting as this is, currently I cannot think of a use for it, but you never know this could change. Anyone with any creative suggestions please let me know, and anyway its better than "easter eggs".
One final new feature to talk about before moving onto the networking stuff, is what Apple calls "Finder Admin Authentication", which allows you to access files as the admin (root for us UNIX users) user directly without having to either logout or goto a command line to use sudo. In this brave new world, when you try and access something that needs admin permissions, you are prompted for the password. Again its not a new idea, Linux has had this for a while now, but its still another welcome addition.
OOPS, almost forgot to mention the brushed metal interface thats now standard. Yes I know that this is a very personal thing, but I like it, others however will not.
Closing words
Put simply I like this new Finder, its about as different as it gets to the old "clunker", is actually better than expected and so far I have not identified any serious problems. Should this change expect this page to be updated.
Links and Related Pages
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