“It’s no secret that I don’t like the Mac OS X Finder. Almost every article I’ve written about Mac OS X has included a litany of criticisms, from small annoyances to fundamental philosophical differences.”

“The advantages of spatial interfaces are so obvious that we take them for granted in the real world. From the time we are born, we are presented with the task of recognizing and manipulating objects in space. Even before the time of our earliest memories, dealing with such “interfaces” has become so natural that we never even think of them as interfaces at all.”

Advantages include:
Memorability
Efficiency
Satisfaction

“It’s the useful properties of real objects in space that make the Spatial Finder what it is (or ‘was’, since the last Finder that can reasonably be called ‘spatial’ was in Mac OS 9). These properties are:
• Coherency: there is a direct, one-to-one relationship between folders and windows.
• Stability: files, folders, and windows go where you move them, stay where you put them, and retain all their other “physical” characteristics: size, shape, color, location, etc.

“That’s it! It seems simple because it really is. But these two properties have far-reaching consequences that go a long way towards making the Finder more usable....

“’Under the covers’, of course, each file on disk was actually two “files” in the Mac file system’s volume structures (a data ‘file’ and a resource ‘file’), plus assorted pieces of metadata--including the icon itself!--stored in other locations entirely. But to the user, these separate pieces appeared as a single, indivisible item that was inextricably bound to the mental conception of ‘my file.’ The illusion was so well executed and so relentlessly consistent that users trusted it implicitly. ‘This icon is my file.’

“This same coherency also extended to Finder windows, to the degree that the a Mac user might not have understood what you meant by “Finder window” back in the days before Mac OS X. ‘Oh, you mean this folder.’ There was no such thing as a ‘Finder window’ that ‘displayed the contents of a folder.’ Double-clicking a folder opened it. The resulting window was the folder. When scrolling, moving, or resizing that window, there was no doubt about which folder was being affected. And the stability of the interface was such that there was no doubt about what that folder would look like the next time it was opened.

“The illusion was so powerful and so like the familiar physical world that the Finder itself disappeared as a separate entity. It has been said that ‘the interface is the computer’, meaning that the average user makes no distinction between the way he interacts with the computer and the reality of the computer’s internal operation. If the interface is hard to use, the computer is hard to use, and so on....In the days of classic Mac OS, the Finder was the interface--and, by extension, was the computer....It was the meticulously constructed, relentlessly maintained illusion that files and folders were real, physical things existing inside the computer that you could manipulate in familiar, direct, predictable ways.”

“When the spatial state of objects (size, color, position, etc.) cannot be relied upon as a means to identify and manipulate them, it ceases to be a useful method of interaction.”

“Some would say that the Spatial Finder is unnecessarily limiting, and that it leads to a “messy” desktop full of windows that have to be managed manually.”

“Although it may offend Mr. Jobs’s aesthetic sensibilities, the simple fact is that humans are much more adept at dealing with visual/spatial clutter than mental clutter. By compromising the user’s ability to manage files and folders based on familiar spatial cues and behaviors, all the complexity of the file system hierarchy is simply moved from the screen into the user’s mind.... Although mentally visualizing abstract relationships and hierarchies is a skill familiar to computer programmers and other people who frequently use systems that require such mental gymnastics (e.g. the command line), it is not a skill that most people possess in any significant quantity.”

“In the absence of reliable spatial cues, the user must depend on more abstract pieces of information. The act of recalling a file’s location based on its position in the hierarchy of the file system (i.e. the file’s “path”) and then using a browser-style interface to navigate to that location is like remembering names without faces to go with them: it can be done, but it takes more work than remembering name/face pairs, or even faces alone.

“The original designers of the Mac user interface understood this. When the Mac still had a Spatial Finder, file ‘paths’ were never seen by a user...

Before the introduction of the Mac, it probably seemed impossible to DOS (and Unix) users that anyone could use a computer without ever seeing a file path, or even knowing what one is...Over the next decade and a half, the Mac showed that not only is “path-free” (i.e. “spatial”) file management possible, it is a much better match for the abilities of the human beings.”

Thanks dxtr;

Will do.
Charles

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