climbingtractor

Operating systems are getting bigger and more complex with every release, but at the most basic level they have very little to do. To the end user the OS does two main jobs - it lets you run and switch between applications, and manage your files. In the years since the advent of multitasking very little has changed as far as launching and switching applications is concerned, and it is probably even longer since any radical change has taken place in the way we store and retrieve files.

The Spatial Finder

Up until the advent of Mac OS X the Finder used the spatial paradigm for displaying the contents of your hard drives. It was very easy for novice users to understand and use.

The magic of the spatial finder was that each folder had a window and the contents could only be shown in that window. The Finder would remember where you put the window on the screen and always opened it there so that it was easy to recognize. This was a stroke of genius by Apple as it soon became very apparent that people saw the Finder as the computer. A disc shown on the desktop (which used to be the root level of the computer) could be double clicked and the contents whether they be folders or files would be shown in a new window. Opening the content of that folder opened a new window and so on. It was, and still is, a very efficient way of browsing the file system because it represented the contents in a very familiar way. We are comfortable with it because things can only be in one place at a time and stay where you put them - just like objects in the real world.

Unfortunately, for the spacial Finder, file hierarchies got much deeper with many more files that anyone could have imagined back in the early eighties, and the spatial Finder was really outgrown for a great number of tasks. For some users with only a few documents filed away inside only a few folders the spacial system is great, but for even the average user the shear number of files and folders just makes this very elegant and easy to understand method of displaying content much harder to use.

The Hierarchical Browser

Microsoft was the first developer to make the move to the file browser which others (including the Mac) now use as the default way for viewing the file system. Interestingly, Gnome have now actually returned, in part, to the spatial model. Although the details of how each system works, whether it be columns in OS X or tree view in Windows, varies, the general idea is that you get a web-browser style navigation of the file system with the ability to go back and forward in the browsing history.

Obviously, the Browser paradigm is only really another way of looking at the hierarchical system where files are grouped together in folders nested one within the other in exactly the same way that it would be done in a filing cabinet. In many ways this is contradictory. The whole point in have a hierarchy is so that you can sort items into easily identifiable locations. This does not happen with the browser - opening a folder does not leave an easily recognizable trail of sub folders and can often leave you feeling lost. Perhaps column view in OS X (brought over from Next) is one instance where it’s reasonably clear where things are, although it does however have it’s problems.

Meta-Data Browser

The ill-fated BeOS implemented a meta-data driven file system in the mid-nineties, but it died along with the operating system. It was however many years ahead of it’s time and shows us where things should be headed.

All three of the main desktop operation systems in use today, Mac OS X, Windows Vista, and the various flavours of Linux, all leverage meta-data to some extent in the way that they search for files, although none of them actually use it for filing.

Currently, these operating systems use 'Smart' or 'Live' folders to group files based on a set of search criteria - pulling them from the hierarchical file system that is still used for storage. This is obviously a half-way-house since you have no control over the meta-data as you save the file, and it has to be placed somewhere in the hierarchy.

The Next Step

The browser paradigm is ideal for viewing a system where the main form of sorting is done through meta-data rather than location. It is actually possible and probably preferable to have no assigned location for the file. This is exactly like throwing all your documents in your home folder and sorting them by other attributes.

One of the best examples of this type of file handling currently available is in iTunes. Even with over six thousand songs in my collection I never have any problem finding what I want. Find as you type searching is incredibly powerful as is the ability the search by artist, album and genre. The paned interface is a very easy way to narrow down your search quickly and efficiently. iTunes now has 'CoverFlow' which allows you to easily skim through you're album covers - giving a very easy way to quickly identify an album by the way it looks, something you would do without thinking with a CD collection.

Additionally, iTunes lets the user forget about where the files are stored within the file system - iTunes is the file system as far as the user is concerned. Ok, it does sort things within the traditional file system so that you can go digging around in there if you want but as soon as you do it becomes obvious that the files and folders system is pretty limited. You have to first know the artist then the album and finally the song to be able to get to the file.

One of the main problems facing developers trying to implement a database style file system is that it’s ingrained in our minds that things seem to have a location on the computer and that it will always be there when we go to look for it. The spacial paradigm has been very successful because people understand it. A new way of sorting files will require a new way of thinking.

Macworld Keynote 2007 - Pretty funny if you like this sort of thing.

The comments are even funnier!

Currently my favourite image viewer for OS X is Xee - it's fast and allows you to browse through folders of images. It also has the smoothest full screen panning ever.

It has got a shite icon though, so here's a lovely replacement set from Adam Betts. Nice!

Before OS X there was no way to maximise any window other than manually resizing them, preferring to have a feature called Optimise, which resized the window to show all the content. With the advent of Apple’s UNIX based operating system there has been a certain degree of confusion surrounding the Zoom button (the green one) which isn’t helped by Windows users expecting it to be a maximise button and the rather haphazard behaviour in the Finder and Microsoft Office.

Firstly I want to take a good look at the different behaviours and how they best serve different situations, and then move on to try and come up with some sort of universal solution. Although this article focuses on the situation in OS X, the general principals are just as applicable to Windows or any other desktop environment.

Optimise

Optimise works very well when there is little content in a window and the user wants to make the window just the right size for the content. This worked particularly well in the Classic Finder when, typically, there were only a few items in each folder and each folder had its own window. With the abundance of windows it also helped to reduce the visual clutter and aid the spatial nature of the system.

Since the change to a browser style Finder in Mac OS X the optimise feature has been almost totally broken – windows never seem to be the correct size for the content and more often than not there are scroll bars. Add to that the fact that the contents change every time a new folder is selected and you have a situation where optimising seems almost pointless.

Of the current crop of Apple’s applications Finder, iWeb, Address Book, Safari, iTunes and Preview all optimise by some method or another. Of these, Safari, iWeb and Preview seem to work as they should, although Preview does have some small quirks. Finder, as mentioned is pretty much broken, Address Book appears to do nothing and iTunes changes the window to the miniplayer.

Optimising the window size in a web browser does have some advantages and some disadvantages; sites never get too wide unless they need to be, usually leaving room to keep an eye on other tasks, but the windows tend to be maximized vertically due to the length of most pages which seem, to me at least, quite awkward.

Maximise

Many applications these days prefer to use the maximise function of the zoom button rather than to optimise and it’s not just third-part software either since many of Apple’s own applications maximise when the green button is pressed.

Out of the Apple apps Mail, iPhoto, Grapher, Dictionary, Help Viewer, Sherlock, Text Edit, Font Book, Automator, iCal, and all of the pro apps maximise the their windows.

Most of the third party application that I use these days prefer to maximise the window – NetNewsWire, Path Finder, Ulysses, Camino and DevonNote are a few of them. In all of those, bar Camino, I really can’t see how the application would sensibly optimise it’s window size. As I stated earlier, optimise is good when the contents of the window don’t change often or aren’t very long.

Floating palettes

Many applications have floating palettes and toolbars. These tend to cause problems with auto resizing windows in some applications with Microsoft Office a good example of how badly wrong things can get. Photoshop has been around on the Mac for longer than most folk care to remember and is a great example of how palettes should be treated.

Fundamentally there is very little difference between the floating palettes of Photoshop and those in Microsoft Office since they both allow palettes to dock to the screen edges and to each other. Photoshop treats the inner edges of docked palettes as the edge of the screen and thus doesn’t allow the window to be automatically resized beyond them. In Word, for instance, this is not the case. The floating formatting palette does not bound the window and in fact has the strange behaviour of changing width depending on use, causing the scroll bar to be hidden some times. It would be far more useful for the windows to maximise within the bounds of the floating palettes.

Large monitors and the need to maximise

Whether there’s a button to maximise or optimise a window’s size is one issue – the other is whether you really want to maximise the window in the first place.

It’s not always the best thing for applications to maximise their windows. There are quite a few applications that really don’t make sense to have maximised and there are those that are most useful when you have them take up the whole screen. On a 20” widescreen monitor a maximised browser window is a bit on the wide side with lines of text on some sites being far too long (There’s a reason newspapers don’t print all the way across the page). However, in an application like Aperture where there is a need to focus on the job in hand having the window (and there is only ever one window in Aperture) maximised is probably the best solution. Obviously there’s very little reason to maximise a small window like a chat client.

Conclusion

Optimise is becoming a seldom used mode in Mac OS X and with the increased number of applications that have a single window mode it is perhaps time for Apple to get rid of the mode altogether. Whether the Optimise function is useful comes down to the fact that there needs to be little enough. Very few windows contain little enough information these days that optimising is of much use, save web pages which aren’t or at least shouldn’t be the full width of the screen.

The use of four buttons – Close, Minimise, Optimise and Maximise.

Overall I’d like to see a change to the way that maximised windows behave. Currently when a window is maximised it is still possible to move it accidentally – or on purpose. I find this to be quite annoying to say the least although a click of the Zoom button does fix it. If these windows were fixed in place this wouldn’t be a problem. Also, filling in the rounded corners in maximised mode would be a nice way of totally immersing the user in the application.

A full screen mode for every application.

So, it has finally happened - the wiki is now the main site and the forum software has been upgraded to the very nice Simple Machines. We've been threatening to do this for quite a while now, so it does feel pretty good to finally get things switched over.

Hopefully we'll see an increase in wiki use now that it's much more obviously 'the site' rather than just an add-on that most folk don't care about.

My biggest hopes are that the event page will really take off and that much more news, no matter how insignificant, will be added to the wiki. This was probably one of the reasons we didn't implement a 'Top Ten Threads' section on the main page - to try to encourage folk to post stuff like this in the wiki, where it can easily be found, rather than in the forums, where it may be lost forever. Very soon there may be a ban on posting events in the forums (and bumping them!).

Spam has been a real problem on SC for quite a few months now and was the main reason to move away from the mega-insecure-piece-of-shite that is phpBB. With Simple Machines we're hoping to make our jobs much easier.

The time has come for me to actually start writing something worthwhile in this blog, so I thought it best to start from a blank canvas - something to motivate me to fill these virtual pages.

What will I write?

Who knows!

Probably some generally geeky Mac stuff and some kind of day to day journal. There may even be something about ScottishClimbs.com.

We'll see in the next couple of days - once some teething problems are out of the way.