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In this article on Jaguar (a.k.a. Mac OS X
10.2), I’d like to focus more specifically on
the changes, fixes, and improvements made by Apple
to the new Finder (version 10.2) and on performance
issues as a whole as I can perceive them by using
Mac OS X 10.2 on my Power Macintosh G4.
The New Finder
The new Finder is one of Apple’s main selling
points for Jaguar. There is a specific
page devoted to it in Apple’s section on
Jaguar on their web site.
The first claim made by Apple is that the new Finder
“has been rewritten to handle multi-threaded
tasks” and therefore provides a significant
speed boost. As with all performance issues, there
is a good deal of subjectivity involved here, as well
as many factors (amount of RAM, processor speed, etc.).
However, in my own limited experience using the 10.2
Finder for common tasks over the past week or so,
things are indeed improved. The “multi-threaded”
capabilities mean that the Finder is less likely to
“lock up” while trying to accomplish a
certain task (such as connecting to a remote server).
Of course, there will still be performance issues
if, like me, you are still stuck with an antiquated
modem connection — and that’s unfortunate,
since many modem users are likely to be people with
limited computer expertise, who are the people most
likely to be disconcerted by unpredictable responsiveness
issues. (An expert user knows what is involved in,
say, getting his Mac to connect to his iDisk folder
via a modem connection and is more likely to understand
why things might get choppy for a few seconds.)
Still, on the whole, the new Finder does indeed
perform in a smoother fashion. Accessing the iDisk
and copying files to it is less disruptive than it
used to be. But it’s not perfect. For example,
just a few minutes before writing this, I tried to
transfer three MS Word files to my “Documents”
folder in my iDisk, and things went smoothly for a
while — and then the Finder locked up and I
got the dreaded never-ending “spinning beach
ball” cursor syndrome. It did not exactly convince
me to purchase a .Mac subscription for myself (which
I have not yet done, vaguely hoping that Apple will
offer more options).
A control-click on the Finder icon in the Dock confirmed
that the application was “not responding”
anymore, and the contextual menu gracefully offered
me the option to “Relaunch Application”,
which I did. (This avoids having to use a force-quit
when the Finder locks up, which is a nice touch for
those users not familiar with the force-quitting procedure,
even though it is more readily accessible in OS X
than it used to be in OS 9.)
Another problem is that, for some reason, Apple
has decided that the Finder icon in the Dock would
no longer behave like other applications and bounce
while it is relaunching. So you have no easy way to
tell whether the application is indeed relaunching
or not. In my case, it just so happens that the “Relaunch
Application” command didn’t work properly
and only quit the Finder, without relaunching
it. So I had to click on the Finder icon again to
get it to relaunch properly.
Local Improvements
Locally, the speed improvements in the Finder are
also noticeable. I have a “Downloads”
folder that typically includes several hundred files,
because that’s where all my email attachments
and files downloaded via the Web or by FTP go by default,
and I am always behind when it comes to dealing
with these files, sorting them, and filing them away
or trashing them depending on their nature. Under
10.1.x, scrolling up and down the contents of this
“Downloads” folder would be a pain. It
was unacceptably slow in “List” view mode
and was only barely acceptable in “Columns”
view mode. Now, the speed in both modes is improved,
and dealing with folders containing a large number
of files in OS X is more feasible again —
although it is still not quite as smooth as it should
be.
Another area where speed hasn’t improved significantly
is the “live” window resizing. When grabbing
the resize box at the bottom right of a Finder window
and dragging it in a given direction in order to resize
the window, there is still an unacceptable delay before
the window matches visually what you are trying to
accomplish with the mouse, which of course continues
to cause excessive movement of the mouse and time
wasting. The delay is shorter than it used to be in
10.1, but it definitely is still there — and
will probably remain there for all but the fastest
Macintosh machines available.
Other improvements to the Finder include further
integration of Windows server browsing (now accessible
from the “Network” icon at the top of
the hierarchy, thus no longer requiring the use of
the “Connect To” menu command).
The Finder preferences window now includes new or
revised settings:
New
Finder preferences
The “Keep a window’s view the same when
opening other folders in the window” option
— which was obviously rather unintuitive to
those familiar with the one folder = one window equation
of the traditional Mac OS — has been replaced
by “Open new windows in Column View”.
This is obviously not the same, and would be a welcome
improvement if it actually worked. However, the problem
is that it only seems to apply to new windows created
using the “New Finder Window” command
(cmd-N).
When you double-click on a folder icon with the
command key down in order to open the folder in a
new window, it still opens in icon view, regardless
of what the option is. Similarly, new windows created
by using the spring-loaded folders and windows (see
below) also open in icon view, which is not quite
appropriate for windows containing numerous items.
Spring-Loading & Drag-and-Drop
As indicated, the spring-loaded folders and windows
are back — and I was curious to see how Apple
had combined them with the decidedly non-spatial metaphor
of the Columns view (where you can see several levels
of your folder hierarchy at the same time).
In this respect, the solution adopted by Apple is
quite elegant: the behavior changes depending on where
the item you are dragging comes from. If you drag
an item onto a folder in Columns view that comes from
the sameFinder window,
then when spring-loading kicks in it opens a new window
(in icon view, unfortunately). On the other hand,
when you drag an item onto a folder in Columns view
that comes from another Finder window
(or from the Desktop), then when spring-loading kicks
in the Finder stays in the same window in Columns
view and simply moves up and down the hierarchy of
columns, depending on where you are trying to go.
The drag-and-drop process itself has been fine-tuned,
with the addition of a “plus” sign in
a green Aqua widget next to the cursor icon to indicate
that the drag-and-drop process will generate a copy
of the item that you are dragging (usually obtained
by depressing the option key while dragging) rather
than move the item (usually obtained
by simply dragging it). This change applies system-wide,
however, so it also appears in other applications
when using drag-and-drop.
As well, when you drag something to a folder, the
icon of the folder now not only becomes highlighted,
but also changes to a slightly different icon representing
an “opened” folder. The change is most
visible in icon view, however:
Icon
for open folder
In other views, the icons are too small to notice
any significant difference.
Get Info & Previews
Another reversal on Apple’s part is the return
to the more traditional “Get Info” behavior
for cmd-I. It now opens a separate window each time
you do cmd-I on another item, like it used to do in
Mac OS 9. The “Show Info” window
is no longer an “inspector” type of window
whose contents change depending on what is highlighted
in the Finder.
The only aspect left over from OS X 10.1 is
that, if more than one item is selected, cmd-I will
open a single window titled “Multiple Item Info”
providing a synthesis of the nature of the selection
(whereas it would have opened a new information window
for each selected item in OS 9).
Get
Info window for multiple items
The new “Get Information” window is
actually more than a simple return to the Mac OS 9
way of doing things. It presents everything in a succession
of collapsible sections, as can be seen in the screen
shot below:
New
"Get Info" window
Many Mac users will be disappointed to see that
Apple engineers don’t appear to have altered
their approach regarding the old Mac OS 9
“metadata” (i.e. file type and creator
codes), which are still conspicuously absent from
the Get Info window. If you want to continue using
Mac OS 9 metadata efficiently, you will
need a third-party product such as Bare Bones Software’s
SuperGetInfo.
Another interesting thing is that Apple has extended
the “collapsible” concept to the file
preview in windows in Columns view mode in the Finder.
At any time in Columns view, you can now click on
the arrow next to the “Preview” heading
in the preview column to collapse the preview.
Preview
on
Preview
off
The setting is Finder-wide, meaning that if you
collapse the preview in a given column, then the preview
of any item that you might subsequently select in
any Finder window will be collapsed. If you un-collapse
a preview, then the behavior changes again. (The change
is not retroactive, meaning that if you have two windows
each with an item with a preview in Columns mode,
collapsing the preview in one window doesn’t
automatically collapse the preview in the other window.
But any item that you might subsequently select anywhere
will have its preview collapsed.)
As well, there are now three view options in Column
view, as can be seen in the picture below. (Previously,
there were no view options in Columns view.)
View
options for Columns view mode
These options are Finder-wide, meaning that they
apply to every Finder window in Columns view, instantly.
You cannot apply them to “This window only”,
unlike view options in Icons view or in List view.
Bug Fixes & Miscellaneous
The new Finder also features various improvements
and bug fixes that will likely be discovered over
time through regular usage. One bug fix that I noticed
immediately was the fact that the “I-beam”
cursor used when editing text in the Finder (such
as file names) no longer “disappears”
when using the cursor keys. This used to be a problem
in OS X 10.1, where the systematic disappearance
of the I-beam cursor while moving was a constant source
of annoyance.
Apple has also redesigned certain icons in the Finder
toolbar (most notably the “Computer” icon,
which now looks like a flat-panel iMac — and,
more importantly, the toolbar now also features an
(optional) “Forward” button in addition
to the “Back” button.
The behavior of the “New Folder” command
(cmd-shift-N) has also been slightly altered. In OS X
10.1, if you pressed cmd-shift-N several times in
succession, the Finder would go down one level in
the hierarchy each time. In other words, if you did
cmd-shift-N once to create a new folder, and then
cmd-shift-N again, the Finder would create a second
new folder inside the first one, and so on.
In Jaguar, the Finder now stays at the same hierarchical
level, meaning that if you press cmd-shift-N several
times, it just creates several new folders at the
same level in the folder hierarchy. (This is more
in line with the way it used to be in OS 9.)
The dialog box that appears when moving one or several
files to a location that already contains copies of
the same files has finally been changed.
Instead of the utterly useless 10.1 dialog box that
would ask you to confirm that you wanted to replace
the existing files with the ones you were dragging
for each and every file in your selection, the dialog
box now has an “Apply to All” check box:
New
dialog box when replacing multiple items
In addition, the dialog box is again smart enough
to tell you whether the files you are about to replace
are “older” or “newer” than
the files you want to put instead. Finally, the dialog
box also features a “Don’t Replace”
button that lets you selectively replace certain files
and not others. All in all, this means that we finally
have a “replace” feature that is worthy
of its name in the Finder.
Another interesting small change is that, regardless
of the “Highlight Color” that you have
selected in the “General” preference pane
in the System Preferences application, if a Finder
window is in the background, the highlight color of
whatever is selected in that window turns to grey
— rather than to a paler shade of the highlight
color like it used to do in 10.1. This, presumably,
is a way to avoid situations where the paler shade
is barely distinguishable from the highlight color
itself. However, the change only applies to the Finder.
Other applications still behave in their own way in
this respect.
More importantly (and more problematically) the
behavior still isn’t appropriate in Open/Save
dialog boxes, where you can have the full shade of
the highlight color for two different items in two
columns at the same time, such as a folder in the
left column and a file inside that folder in the right
column (this is unlike what happens in the Finder
itself in Columns view, where there is only every
one column with the full shade of the highlight color,
and the other columns use grey instead). This really
needs to be fixed by Apple, as it can be very confusing
to determine exactly what is highlighted and “active”
in Open/Save dialog boxes at times.
Other Finder bugs, unfortunately, still aren’t
properly fixed. For example, the bug that sometimes
causes file information (modification date, file size, etc.)
not to be updated immediately when the file is changed
by its parent application is still there. Sometimes,
it still takes a full log-out-log-back-in sequence
to see the changes.
Find Is Back!
For a long time now, the hybrid nature of Sherlock
(both a search tool for the contents of local volumes
and a find tool for the Internet) has been more of
an impediment than anything else when it comes to
searching for local files. Under OS X, Sherlock
2 was a separate application that took too long to
launch, and its file searching capabilities were just
one small aspect of an all-encompassing interface
that had nothing to do with local file searching.
All this is changed in Jaguar. Apple has recognized
that Sherlock was frustrating, and transferred its
file searching features back to the Finder itself.
File searching is now part of the Finder application
itself, which means that you no longer need to launch
Sherlock to have access to the features. (Sherlock
3 is now exclusively a Watson-like
Internet application designed for retrieving various
kinds of information from various kinds of web site.)
The Finder’s Search feature is now accessible
either directly in the Finder toolbar (you might have
to customize it to add the Search field to it) or
by typing cmd-F, which opens a separate “Find”
window very similar to the window we used to get in
the Finder in pre-Sherlock days.
The
"new" Find window
By default, using the Search field in the Finder
toolbar searches through what is currently highlighted
in the corresponding Finder window. For example, in
the image below, the search will apply to the item
that is currently selected, i.e. the “Eudora
Mail” folder in this case.
"Search"
field in toolbar
If you want the search to apply to a different selection,
you need to first select the appropriate destination
in the Finder window.
On the other hand, the “Find” window
will do a search on all “Local disks”
by default. Other options in the “Search in”
menu include “Everywhere”, “Home”,
and “Specific places”. The “Specific
places” option opens an additional section in
the window where you can either select a combination
of existing volumes or add specific locations.
Finding
in specific places
Unfortunately, you cannot customize the “Search
in” menu by adding specific sets of volumes
or folders to it. All you can do is add places (such
as specific folders) to the default list of places
(which includes all the currently mounted volumes
plus your “Home” folder). In addition,
the “Find” window is not resizable, which
means that the list of places can only display four
places at a time. I have eight volumes mounted by
default, so this adds some unnecessary scrolling for
me.
The search criteria themselves can include all the
familiar options (file name, content, date created,
date modified, kind, extension, size, and visibility),
as well as several instances of one criterion (to
further refine the search).
Criteria
in Find window
The search results appear in a new window (or in
the same Finder window if you are using the Search
field in the toolbar) divided into two familiar panes.
As a whole, the feature is very good (much better
than Sherlock was) and very fast. It could be even
more flexible, however, by offering the option to
search for X or Y (and not just X
and Y). It could also provide some
indication of the location of each result in the first
pane of the “Results” window that doesn’t
require you to click on the item in order to display
its exact location in the second pane. For example,
the first pane could also have a column with “Volume”
or “Location” along with “Name”,
“Date Modified”, “Size” and
“Kind”.
Apple also needs to correct the default behavior
so that adding a criterion such as “date modified”
doesn’t automatically add the requirement that
the date modified “is today”, like it
does now. It would be more intuitive if the addition
of the criterion just added it with its neutral value
(in this case “No value”). Just like the
default value for the “file name contains”
field is nothing, the default value for “date
modified” should be “No value”.
Finally, other third-party utilities (as well as
online search sites) already provide options for “fuzzy”
searches (approximate spellings, etc.). The concept
could be extended to the Finder’s searching
capabilities as well.
But these are minor quibbles. The good old “Find”
feature is back — and it’s a big relief.
Stability and Performance
It is hard to separate Finder performance observations
from system performance observations in general. It
is also quite difficult to have an objective view
of the situation after having spent more than a year
using previous versions of OS X and having been
forced to get used to sluggishness
in pretty much every operation. And, of course, speed
is still a subjective thing, due to the wide variety
of possible approaches, configurations, etc.
As well, since I have been complaining so much about
performance in OS X in previous columns on this
site, I should at least spend a couple of paragraphs
discussing performance issues in Jaguar as a whole.
For the record, in this column I am talking
about performance on a 3-year-old Power Macintosh
G4/450 AGP with 1 gigabyte 0f RAM and a brand new
ATI Radeon 8500 AGP with 64 megabytes of RAM (which
should take full advantage of Quartz Extreme in Jaguar).
The only really slow part of my set-up is the Internet
connection, which is provided by the modem in my AirPort
Base Station and which gives me maximum speeds of
33 Kbps. (The phone lines in my area are not good
enough to get any closer to 56 Kbps.)
As indicated earlier, overall things are better
in Jaguar’s Finder and in OS X 10.2 in
general — but don’t expect a big leap
forward in terms of speed for everyday tasks such
as writing email, working in Word, or browsing the
Internet. (The improvements might be more dramatic
in multimedia applications, but I don’t use
QuickTime Movie Player or iTunes all day long every
day so I can’t really tell.)
Mac OS X is still not optimized for people
using slow modem connections, which means that you
are unlikely to use the Finder to navigate anything
beyond your local volumes and servers. Jaguar’s
Finder is supposed to be able to connect to FTP servers
directly, but when I tried this last week with one
of my own FTP servers (somewhere in California), I
got a system freeze that required a hard reset of
my Mac. So I haven’t tried since. You might
have better success if you have a high-speed Internet
connection.
Downloading large files over a modem connection
still causes Mac OS X to slow down significantly,
which is annoying and, combined with the performance
issues of certain third-party applications, can still
cause things such as stalls and overtyping. For example,
the stalls in Microsoft Word v. X that I have
been complaining about extensively are still here
under Jaguar, and they get worse when you are downloading
something in the background. On the other hand, I am
able to type very fast in Bare Bones Software’s
Mailsmith while downloading a large file in Explorer
without experiencing any stalls or overtyping, so
obviously there are application-specific issues at
play here.
I have also noted a significant increase in Word
crashes (unexpected quits), especially when opening
Word files by double-clicking on them in the Finder.
Word is by far the least stable of my OS X applications
— and I can only recommend that you save your
Word documents all the time, and especially before
switching to another application.
Other applications are more stable. The only one
that still has problems for me is the Print Center
(I will talk about this more extensively in a future
column). Mac OS X itself still suffers from
some nasty bugs, which I have already experienced
in about a week of using Jaguar. Trying to connect
to the Internet using the AirPort modem can sometimes
cause great disruptions in all applications (it happened
to me again just this morning when I first woke my
computer from sleep and tried to connect to the Internet
for the day), which can make the machine unusable
for several minutes (until Internet Connect finally
manages to dial in and get connected, after which
things go back to normal) or actually even require
a hard reset. Sometimes, waking from sleep also causes
weird problems in certain applications, where nothing
responds to mouse clicks anymore except for the menu
bar. I also got the message yesterday, after several
minutes of intense hard disk activity, that my disk
was “full” (it has 2 gigabytes of free
space) and that I should quit applications to free
some space. Given that I have 1 gigabyte of RAM and
I wasn’t using many applications at the time,
I suspect this was a bug in the system itself that
caused it to saturate both the RAM and the virtual
memory. In any case, only a hard reset fixed the problem.
That’s still, in my opinion, too many hard
resets in a single week of using Jaguar, and I certainly
hope that further updates will quickly resolve the
most glaring bugs in this significant new version
of the system.
Conclusion
There is no doubt in my mind that Jaguar is an upgrade
that is worth its price, and that overall things are
still getting better all the time. There are inevitable
glitches in any new major upgrade such as Jaguar.
On the other hand, after a year and a half of using
OS X on a daily basis, I can now see that it’s
unlikely that Apple will ever do anything to make
using a modem connection under OS X any more
palatable, and that my 3-year-old G4 is nearing the
end of its computing life as my main workstation.
Still, until my employer finds enough money to buy
me a new system, and until broadband becomes readily
accessible in my (rural) area, my current configuration
will have to do — and Jaguar is certainly an
improvement, on the whole, over previous versions
of OS X. There are many things to like about
the new system in general and the new Finder in particular
and, provided that you take a few precautions, upgrading
now is definitely a viable option if you have a configuration
that can significantly benefit from Jaguar’s
new and improved features.
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Stargazer's
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TheSky
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The
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Watson
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