According to sources, Apple will entirely re-design the Finder in its next major Mac OS X update. The new version of the Finder, code-named "Chardonnay" (like the wine), will be totally based on the Spotlight meta-search technology which was introduced earlier this year with Tiger. The aim behind this new Finder is to offer to the user the ability to browse his files just as he browses his music. Users will be able to browse files by different criteria (name, type, creator, creation date, modification date, etc.). Elsewhere, the first benchmarks of the new PowerMacs have arrived.
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The finder has been languishing a bit with most of the work in resent releases being done elsewhere. A graphical update was obviously going to happen, since it has happened with every release so far plus the resolution inependent features that currently exist but are not turned on active require it (to replace the current bitmap widget images with vector drawn ones). But if the are finally going to sort out 'Teh Snappy' it can only be a good thing.
Some of what they are saying about metadata looks alot like teh BeOS tracker features, which would be a good thing to have. But this is all rumour at the moment so we are going to have to wait a year and a haft before it is anything less than vapourware!
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Win FS would be a good thing, but so far they haven't really succeeded in putting it into the product, have they?
That's the big difference between Apple and Microsoft for me today: real artists ship. Microsoft has been tooting that horn for I don't know how long.
Guess what: I'm working on an OS that works by reading only those portions of your mind that are related to the system and all your commands are instantly carried out and you see the result in a beautifully rendered 3D holographic tank with a great AI-interface.
How does that strike you?
I believe it when I can buy it. Tiger is out there. Vista is planned to be released next year. God forbid something goes wrong.
Apple is silent about their new releases, but when they speak they blow you away [well, they blow me away, I know -you- are way too level-headed for that]. Let's see Vista living up to the hype that's been created for it. If it's half as good as they say it's going to be, we won't have to weep for Vista users, we'll merely have to pity them.
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Win FS would be a good thing, but so far they haven't really succeeded in putting it into the product, have they?
That's the big difference between Apple and Microsoft for me today: real artists ship. Microsoft has been tooting that horn for I don't know how long.
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ahem, leopard is not available yet, neither of them have shipped
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[quote] Spotlight is available in Tiger. WinFS isn't available anywhere. [/quote]
That's not entirely true--the WinFS SDK Beta 1 has been available publicly for some time now, and it's pretty functional. However, it's really not the same thing as Spotlight. WinFS is an object-based store moreso than a filesystem or just a metadata search and indexing engine. It doesn't just store files, it also stores contacts, document parts, and a host of other objects.
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I know we are meant to be talking about OS X, and I'm listening in interest to the new features we will have in Leopard...
Just a quick question, about a year ago I heard that WinFS slowed down the performace of the OS quite a lot, is this still the case (yes, I understand it is alpha / beta s/w)...
btw, for me, the finder was the app that most needed attention, I'm glad they are doing something with it. My guess is that Leopard will be something that will raise the bar for OS's quite a lot, esp. considering the timing of it's release, around the same time as Vista... There will be even more eye candy, Front Row will be standard and improved, we'll see Pages updated and a spreadsheet app introduced (maybe even a database app). I think the time has come for a media centre with most of the capabilities of MS's too, probably in a modified Mini with TV etc...
Just my guesses based on everyone elses ;-)
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From what I remember using the early builds of "Longhorn" that had WinFS, the performance ranged from being a bit slower to being comparable to XP. I haven't installed the Beta 1 build available for XP yet. I can and report back subjective perf if you like. In demos, the perf was at least comparable to XP. There's a video available on Channel 9 that shows off the Beta 1 build, the types of apps WinFS enables, and talks about how all the usual file management tasks you do today (backup, network access, etc.) will continue to work as you'd expect, but WinFS enables more and better ways of managing and visualizing your data.
This is probably the only video you need to watch to get your answers about WinFS:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=106356
However, there is other WinFS content available on Channel 9:
http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/WinFS
as well as the WinFS blog which should provide more info and allow you to also ask the devs about WinFS:
http://blogs.msdn.com/winfs
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If it's true, it would sound like a really neat thing to have in the Finder. I would use it.
SpotLight works great for me, but to have it baked into the Finder would make that just awesome. I would appreciate some more flexibility in how the search is done and how the results are returned, but I'm not complaining.
There's lots of stuff in the system that you don't see until you go 'hey, I need to know this' and it's there. Really neat.
The guy's surmising on the price of the cable... it's true that Apple does charge for these things, but then again, how much can you charge for a power cable?
If there are really big changes to the system I can't wait to see them. It's not going to be Vista, but I'll just have to make do 
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We're not going to know about the nifty stuff until the Betas will be released.
In the mean time they can keep cranking out amazing stuff like Front Row and Aperture. Just so they don't lose the knack for it.
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>>,,,browse files by different criteria (name, type, creator, creation date, modification date, etc.)
Shades of Lotus Magellan, one of the best DOS applications ever (and one of the best applications on any OS).
Magellan indexed your drive, allowing filebrowsing by by any possible criterion. Searchs could be run against a constrained collection of files, and results were shown in context. It shipped with drivers for most contemporary data and graphic formats, so those displays worked. It came with a decent scripting capability. Best of all, it was fast, very fast.
Magellan belongs with other great pre-MS domination DOS apps like Wordstar, Lotus 1-2-3, and Lotus Agenda.
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I agree, there is absolutely NO reason they should use a proprietary power cord like this. Sure if you only have one computer and upgrade every half decade then its not important, but what about in an office or any other network where computers are swapped around all the time. It sure is nice to have a box of power cords that will work in any monitor/pc.
Heck, if Apple is really that anal about it, they could make a standard power cord white...
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On the power cord, it actually is a standard cable, looks like an IEC320 C19/C20. Alot of the higher end HP servers and UPS's now come standard with them. Apparently code calls for them if you are pulling over about 10amp's of power.
http://www.accesscomms.com.au/iec320.htm
-Gft
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But look how much power you need to run Aperture!
I'd say the Address Book is pretty slick on the whole. However, Mail could be a lot better and the Finder is OK I guess.
What I think has happened with the Finder is this: Steve had this kind of vision of what he wanted Spotlight to be able to achieve, so rather than waste resources on trying to perfect a pre-Spotlight Finder, they made it OK-ish and will then (hopefully!) get the Finder right for a fully meta-data orientated system in 10.5
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if something goes wrong with a Spotlight based Finder?
Presumably all the OS files are still in their usual places, but how about user documents? If I have to go in and recover someone's crashed file system, will I be presented with a single directory containing a few thousand miscellaneous files to sort through? Will a CD, memory stick, etc, created on this system be usable on a windows system?
A better, more integrated Spotlight is fine, as long as the basic organization is there and accessible. Realistically, I'd still rather have the OS9 Finder back, but I'm sure I'd use Spotlight more than I currently do (once every few weeks, on the average.)
This is the main reason I'm not interested in WinFS (plus, I trust MS's engineering about 0.01% as much as I do Apple's, making any problems both worse and more likely.)
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HFS+ will still have directories so the basic hierarchical organization will still be there. The only difference (as i see it) will be that it will be easier for users to access the metedata functionality that already exists in the file system. There are HFS+ drivers in many other operating systems that will be totally unaffected by any change to the OS X finder.
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This would be super awesome if this feature was real.
Having "playlists" instead of cumbersome folders you have to go find is super sweet.
However, this would cause more learning with it being something new. Apple doesn't care about keeping OS X uniform, so users are always having to adjust and learn something new with every release. Somebody who has been using Windows 95 for the past 10 years could sit down at an XP machine, and be perfectly comfortable.
But the Finder definately needs a industry-leading redesign, I can't wait to see what comes of it.
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Only Apple would incite this much controversy over a power cord. As for a Spotlight-based finder, I think its a great idea. A search-based file manager is one idea that has languished far too long without seeing a production implementation. I for one can't wait to stick everything in ~ and not have to worry about directories ever again 
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ArsTechnica's John Siracusa has written some great articles about the various MacOS releases, and has devoted quite a bit of page time to outlining Finder's various flaws. This article is a good one: http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/finder.ars/1
It would be interesting to see how many of these things get fixed in the new Finder update.
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If Apple wants to build Spotlight like features into finder. Fine. Just be sure to let people be able to use finder just as it is, that is navigate folders.
I never use spotlight unless I can't find something, and even with spotlight it's a hell to find stuff.
Search based anything is bad. Why some are all about it I don't get. Seaching is for things like the internet when you have a situation were you don't know where something is, since you didn't put it. Its not for locating stuff that you know where it is. You don't go to google and type in "CNN" to find CNN, unless you didn't know the URL, but odds are you did know it's cnn.com
Non folder based filing is bad, things like itunes and iphoto and spotlight are awful like this. They are good for people who have no sense of organization and would otherwise dump everything in one giant folder. But for those of us who are organized it's pure hell. Want to delete your folder of warezed mp3s from your itunes library and leave your folders of legal songs, good luck, you can't do it, you have to delete the library and start over adding the folders you do want. Same if you want to remove a folder of songs, say a CD. Want to shift songs from one folder to another in itunes, screwed again. You have to go back to Finder. But then itunes is to stupid to have any kind of refresh to realized what is no longer there or what moved.
If the ability to work with files and folders as san people work with them goes away with 10.5, then a lot of people will have to go find a different OS.
I would really like to see some stats on how many people actually use spotlight. I would guess it's pretty low. I can see people playing with it when they first get it, and a few horribly organized people using it. But I would be willing to bet the majority of people just use it as what it really is, a good search function for when you actually can't find something. Such as finding something you download in Safari out of the folder you have it save to, since Apple has made it hard to chose where something goes when downloading it now in safari.
These new fangled file browsers I think are more of a product of geeks trying to re-invent the wheel instead or realizing the wheel we have works well, and the new wheel doesn't except to them since they like having things being as screwy as possible.
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Search based anything is bad.
Like Google? People love Google!
Seaching is for things like the internet when you have a situation were you don't know where something is, since you didn't put it.
The fact that I put it somewhere hardly implies I know where it is!
You don't go to google and type in "CNN" to find CNN, unless you didn't know the URL, but odds are you did know it's cnn.com
I doubt I'm the only one who types "osnews" into Firefox's address bar (which invokes a Google search) to get to OSNews. I also doubt I'm the only one who never bothers remembering URLs anymore, because its less mental baggage just to type a few words into Google.
Non folder based filing is bad, things like itunes and iphoto and spotlight are awful like this.
People love those apps!
They are good for people who have no sense of organization and would otherwise dump everything in one giant folder.
Like, oh, everybody?
Want to delete your folder of warezed mp3s from your itunes library and leave your folders of legal songs
Most people just have a big "music" folder, and stick everything in there. In any case if you're that organized, in a search-based system, you can easily add a "warezed" attribute to each mp3.
Want to shift songs from one folder to another in itunes, screwed again.
But why would you want to move songs from folder-to-folder?
I think you vastly overestimate the organizational proclivities of people. Most people I know keep their backpacks/briefcases, etc in chronological order (ie: oldest stuff is at the bottom of the stack!) They have files named "cheese" and "blargh", and keep tons of things on their desktop (in C: back in the win98 days). With the search-based UI, the can use the OS to help them out, while the truely autistic can use extensive metadata to organize more anal-retentively than ever!
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I think it comes down to preference, so Apple should (and my guess - will) leave the old classic finder as is (with nice eye candy etc...). Kind of like now how you can switch between brushed window with all the extra options or the classic look.
Having said all that, I think the future is kind of like how iTunes manages our music. A friend of mine recently bought a Mac for the first time, and wanted to know where the music was stored, where his pictures in iPhoto were stored and so on. He is now starting to understand that for iLife at least, you don't need to know (although I did show him how to find them). He is so used to traditional style apps that these new concepts take a little while to sink in. I think he is getting used to the idea of Spotlight too. He mentioned this morning that his new XP machine might not get the attention it used to.
But for those who don't wish to let the OS take care of too many things, then we should still have that option to browse - do things the way we did. I'm guessing in 5 or so years you will be hard placed to find a traditional brower perhaps...
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This could add more abstraction to the uderlying operating system that people need to access time to time. For instance placing an iTunes plugin in Library/iTunes might become increasingly hard as they group files together by characteristic. This might start causing confusing in some instances.
