It's crazy how deeply embedded the old Finder is in my subconscious. I opened the app and <i>instantly</i> noticed several differences from the original, even though I haven't run the old System 7 Finder in, what, twenty years?<p>Things I noticed:<p>- Command-W doesn't close a window.<p>- No animation when opening windows.<p>- Dragging outside of the close button while still holding the mouse button (uh, trackpad button) down should revert it to the non-pushed state until the cursor re-enters it.<p>- Obviously, the fonts shouldn't be anti-aliased. The metrics on Chicago look weird too.<p>I am so filled with nostalgia right now I don't know what to do with myself. I <i>loved</i> the System 7 Finder. It's one of the things that got me into UI design and pixel art.
> A smaller, more secondary reason for creating this was to sort of observe how a Classic-era app might run on today’s hardware. As our hardware gets beefier, it seems like our software gets chunkier. If we could port yesterday’s software to run natively on today’s hardware, how might it perform? Very fast, I’d imagine.<p>This reminds me of a small personal project I decided to take on a couple years ago. I did it both as an experiment in performance and for nostalgia's sake.<p>I bought as pristine an example as possible of Apple's last machine that could run Mac OS 9 natively, a PowerMac G4 (the 2003 MDD vintage). I upgraded the CPU and RAM as much as possible (dual 1.25 GHz G4, 2GB RAM), and replaced the hard drive with as fast an SSD as the system could handle (don't recall which SSD model at the moment).<p>In short, I was astonished at the "snappiness" of the system. Boot time took no more than 15 seconds. Shutting down took only about one second. The system entered sleep mode near-instantly. Opening and closing windows within an app happened as fast (or faster) than I could react to it. Opening and closing classic apps themselves was at least an order of magnitude faster than what I would consider reasonable analogs from today.<p>I already had a decent amount of disdain for how much time I spend on a modern Mac/iOS device waiting for the system to catch up to my inputs, but it got worse after having done this experiment. A simple example, but which pains me near-daily, is the creation of folders in the modern Finder. After typing cmd+shift+N, I often must wait an amount of time that must be on the order of several hundred milliseconds before typing the name of the folder (if I don't wait, the first couple characters I type will be missing from the folder's name, which is yet another time-sink to go back and fix the missing characters). And this is on an iMac Pro! I tried this exact test on my old-but-quick PowerMac G4, and I <i>never</i> had to wait nor lost any chars no matter how quickly I attempted to type the command and the subsequent folder name.
<i>I’ve learned many things throughout this journey. One of them is that modern user interfaces are absolutely gigantic compared to the user interfaces of the earlier days.<p>I mean, I guess it kind of has to be that way, in the age of high DPI monitors and bad eye sight, but WOW. Run Classic Finder just once and you’ll see what I mean.</i><p>Classic mac os ran at 72 dpi, compared to the modern 1x dpi of 96 to 110, so those controls were actually much bigger on screens of the day.
It looks like the link is undergoing some problems:<p>RuntimeException (500)
Failed to read /var/www/bszyman-dc/user/pages/07.feed/listing.md: Unexpected characters near ": '/blog'" at line 3 (near "items: 'page.descendants': '/blog'").
What I would <i>love</i> to see on a Mac (or Linux, I don't mind) would be Eric Traut's "Out of Context Menus" extension for MacOS 9.<p><a href="https://tidbits.com/1999/07/12/the-machack-hack-contest-1999/" rel="nofollow">https://tidbits.com/1999/07/12/the-machack-hack-contest-1999...</a>
I absolutely love the idea (fitting more data on the screen, ala Tufte), the execution (brings back memories of trying MacOS on an emulator) and the design (flat!! yes!!)<p>I don't understand why flat design gets such a bad press.<p>One of the best thing I have ever used was a classic windows phone. Efficient, organized, straight to the point.<p>Maybe it is just part of a retrocomputing trend, but I really like that.
One of the things that I missed for quite some time from the classic Finder was the ability to drag Finder windows to the edge of the screen where they would shrink down to a tab you could click to instantly access that folder or hover over while dragging objects so the folder would expand and allow you to drop objects into that folder.<p>However, the sidebar and spring loaded folders now offer functionality that is largely the same.
This appears to be a link to the source: <a href="https://bitbucket.org/bszyman/classic-finder-app/" rel="nofollow">https://bitbucket.org/bszyman/classic-finder-app/</a><p>And a link to the "main site" which has a download: <a href="https://classicmacfinder.com" rel="nofollow">https://classicmacfinder.com</a>
> It will really (probably poorly) perform Finder operations on your computer’s file system.<p>Ha! Given how horrifically bad the OSX Finder has always been at file management (not to mention its numerous unfixed bugs), I can't imagine how it could be much worse.
I believe that the abandonment of the Finder interface by Apple (both old and new) is having a devolutionary effect on computing. Generations of people are learning to use computers without understanding the differences between a folder and a file system, with little skill in maintaining a hierarchical system for organising their material, and so on.<p>Also, the fact that, today, you can't open a folder full of files and have the Finder window auto-size to fit the content (in list view, for example) is an indicator that Apple just doesn't seem to care about keeping this paradigm.<p>And thats a pity, in my opinion, because it makes stupid users. Being able to fundamentally organize ones cache of documents on filesystem is a key first step in gaining computer literacy, since very few computer systems out there achieve anything without a folder and a few files in it.<p>So, I'm quite encouraged by the effort to rebuild Finder - if we had an open source Finder alternative out there, which works to exceed the features of the built-in Finder, I'm quite sure I'd contribute to it. The devolution of Finder, and of filesystems in general, is personally a pet peeve of mine - there is nothing more frustrating than having to explain the concept of organising ones data to a user who really should know these things already - but don't, because Apple (and others) have decided the user doesn't need to have control over the fundamental building blocks of their system.<p>This deleterious effect, devolutionary in nature, of 'technologically refined simplicity for the sake of the user' is a real issue. I expect to see more examples of its negative effect in the coming decade ..