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Yeah, I remember seeing that one screenshot that introduced the Aqua interface. It showed transparency with menus and dialog boxes, and the blue scrollbars or whatever, and it was so ridiculously cool.

http://www.coolmacintosh.com/macos.jpg

Suddenly everyone wanted their computer to look like that...about every other theme on Gnome-look or Mozilla (the seamonkey kind) became a ripoff of the new interface. This got to the point that Apple responded with a bunch of cease and desist letters to people providing Aqua themes. Even Microsoft trashed their Whistler theme for the now famous fisher-price interface on XP, which I thought was a knee-jerk response. They promised everyone that XP would have a fully skinnable interface (ten years later we have a whopping three themes that were ever released without needing a hacked Uxtheme.dll file).

It also lead to a pretty big discussion about why XFree86 couldn't pull off the transparency and stuff. In those days, it was difficult to even have your XFree86 support Truetype fonts much less anti-aliasing and transparency. It took a couple of years, but eventually we got xcompmgr and later, Compiz-Fusion to provide cool graphics effects. But I still think it all started with what OSX was doing at the time.

I'm not a particular fan of Mac OS X's interface. I would've preferred a modernisation of Platinum, instead of the inconsistent mess we have today... I can use Mac OS X, but it doesn't endear itself as much as Platinum did.

http://toastytech.com/guis/macos9about.png

Totally agree with this. IMO as software has become more complex, worked on by more people, we've ended up with UIs that are less consistent and have a whole pile of incoherent ideas thrown together. While many of the ideas are valid or even valuable, losing consistency has been a big loss. This isn't a criticism of Apple either - it seems like a general industry trend.

Platinum consistent? You kidding right?

http://img220.imageshack.us/img220/4065/macos9wc6.jpg

I can understand aesthetically preferences, for colors as they say there are tastes. And I do prefer "squarish" GUIs to Aqua's roundness. But just say so, do not try to justify it with an argument which is so patently false. Classic MacOS may have had a simpler GUI, but consistency was one of its main attributes. It may have looked "more consistent" when compared to the wild west of GUIs at the time.

Edited 2011-03-24 23:21 UTC

That was Rhapsody/Mac OS X Server 1.x... it looked awful. You also need to contend with the fact, it's just not the same OS. It was an OS with a subset of the old Classic Mac API (Carbon) and a way to emulate the rest of the OS (Classic). If you had anything to do with the ALPHA and BETA program, Aqua was a progression that was more or less made sense.

It looked awful? I still consider Rhapsody the best looking desktop system of all time. Imagine if they had actually finished the thing!

http://www.guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/desktop/full/rhapsodydr2.p...

heh, I just bought my first mac the other day. a 11" mba. Its awesome.

I've owned macs in the past, but they were all hand-me-downs.

I love it so far.

I got one up recently as well - agreed, fantastic machine. Silent, fast, (enough - not a quad-core i7 MBP, but...), full keyboard, good screen res, and so perfectly portable. It's the laptop I've been looking for for the past 15 years.

Yeah, I'm really really happy with it so far. I could have gotten some other ones, like the samsung 9, but they were outside my budget, lol. How often can you say that about a Mac? The only upgrade I did was the 4gb ram. The cpu wasnt worth it and I can upgrade the ssd later.

Mmmm... 256 or 512GB SSD in the 11"! I'm at 4GB, though I did do the CPU too since reviews indicated it was noticeable. Though I guess not to me since I can't compare it to the 1.4GHz? In any case, sweet machines they're making.

I TOTALLY wanted a Mac back then! I was so in love with the UI. My Windows XP desktop still has an OSX theme! I even fell for all the fanboy bragging of the stability and usability of Macs. Until I was forced to use them. So, I guess they ARE very easy to use, but, I can get those suckers to crash in minutes, multiple times a day. Of course, if that's your goal, you will succeed. That aside, I don't know if the OSX UI was revolutionary, but the hardware that it was installed on forced x86 hardware makers to make their product better looking. That's what I believe, anyway.

It was quite revolutionary. For example it took 7+ years for Microsoft to copy the pdf display model (Avalon, WPF) that allowed all kinds of effects. I think the first release of the WPF is actually the reason Vista sucked so much at first.

What? That was funny. And, not even that for off topic given that Osx is about the only fork of Darwin in existance.

(I'll let this thread die though.. back to reading about why Finder is the best/worst part of osX. )

Amazingly, this is something Apple did a long time ago.

http://www.aux-penelope.com/index.htm

Enjoy.

Hah, I was thinking the same thing. It's not that it crashes, it's just still not great. But I dislike Windows Explorer a lot more.

Finder crash? I haven't seen one of those since 10.2. What are you guys doing to cause the finder to crash?

Use it?

Seriously Thom, what is it you actually DO to cause it to crash?

I have to agree. I "use it" on a daily basis, most days for the whole working day. I have both network and internet hosted volumes mounted, as well as internal, USB and Firewire drives, am constantly moving files (drag and drop) between local, network and internet volumes, have auto synchronisation of various volumes using Time Machine, iDisk sync and CCC (which includes auto mounting and unmounting of volumes), all happening at the same time, have a Windows VM running in VBox that has local filesystem access (not that this is specifically Finder related, but it does access the filesystem), and I can't remember the last time the Finder crashed.

PEBCAK maybe?

Same here. I use OSX heavily most of the week. I have seen the finder crash maybe a couple of times in YEARS of usage.

That is the problem with qualitative arguments and hearsay being put forth. Something which most technical writers without proper engineering background miss when writing about a field which demands quantitative and precise data/arguments (science being what it is).

Being inside engineering groups which produce some of these products, it is always a hoot to read these sort articles in which the author is projecting their cluelessness on the subject more than anything.

I've had it crash and/or freeze on my Mac Pro with 24GB RAM. I'm doing high-res rendering & Photoshop work (2Kx2K, 4Kx4K) + development. It sometimes will actually choke when building the thumbnail image previews - I go into a directory, and I've seen all 24 cores go to 100% Finder usage and become non-responsive, thumbnails stay blank, and waiting doesn't help. I've had other cases where it wouldn't update the thumbnails anymore - update in PS, save, thumb is unchanged. If you quicklook, you see the changes. Doing a restart of it fixes it.

I'm sure it's a corner case, but I imagine I'm not the only one who has one.

I have never had Finder crash on our mac pro or mbp at work nor on my mba. What exactly happens?

Network shares are a pain in the Finder. Random "disconnects" (it's still supposedly there but the Finder can't read anything), resuming from sleep causes the Finder to beachball for 5 minutes when opening mounted shares, and every now and then (few times a month, sometimes every week) it'll just give up and crash. Restarting is impossible, you'll get a numerical error - only a full reboot will fix it.

I've had consistent issues like this crossing 4 releases, and about... Seven, 8 Macs or so. Do a Google search - you'll see I'm not the only one.

Huh. Thats odd. I'm glad I haven't had this issues yet. *crosses fingers*

That's what is called "user epic failures"!

Even the Finder of Tiger on my iMac Snow (which is G3 600Mhz) does not crash. I do not even need to mention my MBP 13". Oh and I never had a Finder crash on my iMac G3 333Mhz with Panther running either! It was really slow though the Finder had never crashed.

Why is that a user failure? Or are you just trolling?

It might not be user fail, but you have a lot of anecdotal evidence and so does everyone who contradicts you... the truth lies somewhere inbetween though. SMB has always been problematic on every non Microsoft platform, so using that as a reason the Finder sucks doesn't really prove a lot. Ever try using SMB under BeOS with Netserver? Exercise in pain. I've used Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard and the reliability of SMB has gotten better with each iteration. Couple that with the news that Lion is dropping SAMBA in favour of an Apple internal implementation, well, I guess the future might be better!

It depends on what is in your mind when you are trolling in every Mac news article including the ones you posted. Is it an article about Finder in Mac OS X? If you want others not to defend Apples' side, just do not troll in the first place.

I wouldn't call it any sort of epic fail - it's more stable than it used to be. But the fact that you haven't had it crash for you, while being absolutely wonderful, doesn't mean that Thom, I, or others haven't had issues. Like I say, I think the amount/severity of failure is overstated, at least for what I've run into, but it's not some perfectly stable app either. And depending on how Thom is using it, he may see issues more often than I do.

There are tens of millions of users - it's just possible someone has issues and that that someone happens not to be (lucky!) you.

I know. Actually I was teasing Thom who (and because) always trolling on Mac ever since. He should be not biased.. at least try hard not to. considering his position on OSNews.

Despite the fact that finder has never crashed on me, the above statement is absolutely true. For a unix based operating system the implementation of networking in the ui sucks a metric sh*t ton.

Agree. It happens. One question to Thom though. What are the file system and the OS running the shared folder? E.g. if you set up an SMB file share from a Linux server and then connect to it from a Mac, it is very likely to be a nightmare. OTOH, SMB works more or less smoothly between Windows and Linux or between Windows and Mac. Sometimes it is unclear whom to blame - the client or the server, especially if both are "aliens" in terms of the network protocol.

All Windows 7 machines with NTFS. Nothing exotic, stock installs.

I too use it for years and it crashes less than i.e. skype - almost never. I don't know what you do to crash it but if it's frequent - check for plugins or some wild soft with messes up

Off topic question; does Skype have a way to disable starting and logging in at bootup? Normally this is a checkbox in the Skype options but for some reason I can't seem to find that setting in the Osx version. I'm sure it's a ID10-T issue but I can't spot what I'm missing here.

System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items maybe?

Might be there. I'll have to wait until I'm home tonight to confirm. It was just wierd that it's not Skype's direct options interface being that it's even in the Skype option on the Iphone.

They select a file, press and hold the Cmd key, and then try to press the X key. This causes a semi-transparent picture of Steve Jobs putting his death glare on them to fill the screen. After that, the computer freezes, and must be rebooted in order to be usable again.

Edited 2011-03-24 21:52 UTC

Maybe this?
http://www.brunerd.com/blog/2011/03/22/finders-nasty-inherited-acl-...

Apple needs to bring Finder into the 21st Century and get away from all the old Carbon File Manager cruft! Make Finder truly a Cocoa app, file operations included. The icon really does visually represent the bipolar love/hate relationship some users have with Finder!

Edited 2011-03-28 04:17 UTC