Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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Bad Bad Finder

685 words

Hm, after writing my previous entry I realised that the debates I had quoted from have continued since. So be sure to follow the links I gave and look at the follow-up discussions.

Quite interesting are the discussions at ~stevenf: Zing (I'll leaving figuring out whether or not this is the name of a person or whatever as an exercise to the reader). There are a number of arguments made and issues raised in the discussion. Firstly THEM's argument:

I do most of my file manipulation in the Terminal, simply because it is faster. mkdir name is faster than cmd-shift-N - type name, 1 step versus 2. I'd venture to say I do more file manipulation in X than I did in 9 due to the power the Terminal offers over both the OS X Finder and the Mac OS classic Finder.

Quick move all jpeg images in a different folder from the one you're working in to yet a different folder, all without leaving the folder you're in.

In the terminal that's one command (mv /path/*.jpg /path/) in either Finder that's a lot more difficult and time consuming, especially if the target is a different drive, Finder will copy and Terminal mv will copy+delete. The process can be lessened in OS X if you have the target folder in the toolbar.

is quite flawed in a couple of ways: What's the speed of creating a folder in the Terminal if you decide that you want special characters (spaces, stars, Japanese, whatever) in the name half way through? I don't think it can match the Finder.

Similarly the comparison with moving the files is flawed even more. The example given will move all files whose name end in '.jpg'. You'll miss all JPEG files with different ends to their names. Using the Finder's list view instead, you can simply sort by file type rather than file name extension and get all of them. Of course the next challenge would be to move all files whose size is in a particular range or whose changed dates are. I'm sure this can be done in a line of Perl, but is it a reasonable thing to do?

Of course THEM has (have?) a point in saying that the Finder should offer an option to actually move files between volumes. It should have done that for years - and it's not exactly rocket science.

dsandler says

The metal look isn't merely bad for usability because of its inconsistency (and substantially lower text contrast); it's slow. There's no way to optimize the resize of a metal window; unlike the tiled pattern of the normal window look, the metal texture must be re-composited for every frame (in an offscreen buffer, without the benefit of any kind of hardware acceleration). I think the glacial slowness of window refresh is probably the single biggest usability problem in iPhoto and iCal.

and of course is right about the technical aspect of redrawing the metal pattern, but unfortunately wrong about the speed thing (which may perhaps apply to the QuickTime Player). At least these apps are still glacially slow when not using the metal pattern. I am using Unsanity's Metallifizer to remain sane but it doesn't help speed-wise.

My suspicion is that this - sadly - is a problem with Cocoa. Notably, the Cocoa iApps are sluggish and unresponsive in their behaviour and most notably the OSX's calculator is so embarrasingly slow that it's beaten hands-down by my Mac SE speed-wise. Also, we tried to write an application that does non-trivial graphics output in a resonably fast way using standard Cocoa NSViews but the result was so slow that we disbanded the plan. And that's bad. Cocoa is lovely and very neat. But if Apple doesn't improve it performance-wise, it will only be useful for Robert Daeley suggests. It's just that at this stage responsive Cocoa application sounds like an oxymoron. If you want it snappy, you've got to use Carbon, X11 or the Classic version.

Just my other €0,02.

December 6, 2002, 1:26

Comments

Comment by Greg Epkes: User icon

Panther doesn’t seem to have addressed this issue.

January 11, 2004, 8:33

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