FTFF

This is an acronym that most Mac users are very well aware of. Ever since the launch of Mac OS X in 2001, Mac users have been chanting this phrase and hoping that Apple will take note of it and fix the Finder with each subsequent upgrade. It seems that Apple had been ignoring the pleas of their user base till now. But with the launch of Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard, Apple has made an attempt to right their wrongs.

When the “new” Finder was unveiled by Steve Jobs at WWDC 2007, the Apple blogosphere was in a state of conflict. While some people welcomed the change with open arms and optimistically hoped that this would finally be the magical solution to all their woes, others were not quite so convinced by what they thought was only a new pretty face that would probably just introduce of slew of new bugs, leaving the existing ones in their place.

Leopard is here and after having used it for the past twenty days, I think that both the opinions were partly correct. While the new Finder does take care of most of the problems with the pre-Leopard Finder, the frequent appearance of the spinning beach ball being one of them, it does introduce a set of new bugs for us to contend with. Here’s a list of the few bugs that I have noticed to date and am pretty annoyed with.

Cover Flow

When you are in the Cover Flow view and are in the process of renaming an item, if you press and hold the left/right direction key, the Finder scrolls on to the other items, leaving the file half renamed. So now, while renaming, you have to hit the direction keys repeatedly in either direction to move the cursor. This is by far the most annoying bug in the Leopard Finder and it completely drives me up the wall.

Another little bug associated with the Cover Flow (and List) view is that when you create a new folder (⇧⌘N), it is created, but not set to be renamed by default like it should and does in other views. So you have to hit that extra Return key. Yeah, I know I’m picky but you can blame that on Apple’s perfectionism, not my own whims of fancy. When you set the bar so high for yourself, you have got to take the flak when you slip up.

Window Behavior

Finder windows have always behaved oddly on Mac OS X and Leopard does not seem to have fixed anything. The first problem is the size. Whenever you hit ⌘N while using the Finder, you can never be quite sure what size the new window will be. Sometimes it will be a tiny little window that only displays a handful of your fifteen hundred files, and on other occasions it will be a huge window that occupies the whole screen. It is completely unpredictable and, as far as I can tell, quite illogical.

Then there is the behavior of the spring loaded folders. Why do spring loaded folders open in a new window in the List and Cover Flow views? What is wrong with opening them in the same folder, like it does when you are in the Icon view? On a related note, it would be really awesome if we could have an integration of Cover Flow with the Column view and if there was a keyboard shortcut to show or hide Cover Flow. On second thought, I think it would make a lot of sense to eliminate the Cover Flow view altogether and instead have a universal keyboard shortcut that you could press while you are in any view to invoke Cover Flow. Any thoughts?

Path Bar

If Microsoft were like Apple, they would be screaming murder right now. Apple clearly stripped off the breadcrumb bar feature of Windows Explorer, decreased its functionality to the point of rendering it almost vestigial and moved it from the top of the window to the bottom to make it seem less like a copy. In other words, they pulled a Microsoft.

Unlike the breadcrumb bar in Vista, you cannot click on the names in the path bar in the Finder to jump up the file hierarchy. (It turns out that you can double-click on the names in the path bar to go to the folders directly. I’m sorry for the mistake!) You cannot click on the little arrows to see a drop down list of or navigate to the other folders at any level in the hierarchy. You cannot copy the path itself. All you can do is look at the path bar and determine where you are if you are feeling a little lost. Fat lot of help that is! The only time I find it useful is when I’m browsing through a list of search results and it lets me know where the selected file is at a glance. It could have been so much more…

Spotlight

This isn’t directly related to the Finder but I feel obligated to mention it nonetheless. Every single review or opinion column I’ve read so far has praised Apple’s decision to eliminate the Spotlight search results window from Leopard and have the Finder window take over the task instead. I, however, am not quite sure that I like this move. In Tiger, when I ran a search for a word and the list of results had only two movies, I could just hit “Show All” and be taken to a window that neatly showed me all the movies related to the keyword. All I had to do was double click on the movie I wanted to watch.

In Leopard, hitting “Show All” takes you to a Finder window with a thousand odd results for your query with the movie you wanted somewhere in between and completely indistinguishable from all the other files. Now, you either sort them by Kind and scroll down to the list of movies and select the one you want, or you hit the little ‘+’ button in the top right hand corner and further refine your search to only show you the movies. In either case, it is a step back from the previous approach of showing you the neatly categorized list of the top five results of each kind in a separate window.

Leopard assumes that you want to create a new smart folder every time you search for a file and throws in the more advanced options, when all you needed was that one other movie that got excluded from the Spotlight list. This flies in the face of Apple’s philosophy of keeping things simple. I’m trying to counter this by being more specific with my search strings so that the results appear in the Spotlight list itself. I hope Apple does something to simplify this.

Miscellaneous

Quick Look is one of the best new features of Leopard and is near perfect in its implementation. I only wish it allowed you to quickly copy text from the document you were viewing and maybe even drag images out of webpages, etc. Allowing basic interaction wouldn’t hurt. It does allow you to click on hyperlinks though.

Then there is the Desktop. Sometimes the Desktop stops responding—new files don’t show up, Quick Look stops working, and you cannot rename stuff. You can, however, select and launch the files that are there. This was a bug with Tiger and I’m saddened to see that it persists in Leopard too. In Tiger though, you generally needed to restart your Mac or relaunch the Finder to fix this bug, but in Leopard it is short lived and completely random. It stops working on its own and then regains consciousness whenever it wishes to.

One thing that surprises me no end about the Finder on Mac OS X is why the “Cut” option is disabled in the “Edit” menu. It is such a basic non-feature that its omission by Apple just cannot be explained rationally. You can copy and paste files but you cannot cut and paste them, even though you can achieve the same functionality with drag and drop. Switchers to the Mac are bamboozled that their Mac, which they revere in most cases, does not allow them to use ⌘X when they are browsing through files in the Finder. If anyone knows any logical reason for the exclusion of this feature, please enlighten me.

So there you have it, a list of the glitches I’ve experienced with the Leopard Finder. It has definitely been improved in Leopard—it is more responsive, networking is now fixed and surprisingly easy, and Quick Look is a boon—but it still needs some more work. Apple still needs to FTFF.

This is by no means complete so please feel free to sound off in the comments. If I’ve missed any glaring bugs, I’ll be happy to append them to this list.