Betalogue

Here’s a simple scenario that I am confronted with on a regular basis.

In the Finder in Mac OS X 10.5, when you press command-F (for the “Find” command), the Finder takes over whichever window is currently the front window in your Finder environment, regardless of what its contents are. The window simply becomes a search window.

The only connection between the search window that appears now and the previous contents of that same Finder window is that, in the section of the search criteria where you define the scope of the search, next to the default “This Mac” button, there is a button for the folder whose contents the Finder window was displaying before you hit command-F.

I suppose that Apple’s engineers have had long and hard discussions about whether this is a desirable default behaviour, and that they have decided that the pros outweigh the cons.

The fact remains, however, that sometimes I hit command-F in the Finder and then immediately realize that, for a variety of reasons, I didn’t want to lose the existing contents of the Finder window that the Finder’s search feature has just taken over. I wanted to keep the existing contents visible, and start a search in a separate window.

I should have opened a new Finder window first and then hit command-F, but hey, nobody’s perfect. Sometimes I forget.

Luckily, there is a way to reverse the search feature take-over. I can just hit the “Back” button in the Finder toolbar, which exits the search mode and goes back to a regular Finder window displaying the contents of the folder that was the focus before I hit command-F.

But that’s where the Finder’s weirdness when it comes to handling view modes hits. If, before I hit command-F, the Finder window in question was in column view mode, then after I hit command-F and then click on the “Back” button to go back to the Finder window as it was before I hit command-F, the Finder returns to the folder that I was viewing, but displays its contents in… list view mode!

Why does it not go back to the column view mode?

I tried with icon view mode, and the Finder does not change view modes there. If, before I hit command-F, the Finder window in question was in icon view mode, then after I hit command-F and then click on the “Back” button to go back to the Finder window as it was before I hit command-F, the Finder returns to the folder that I was viewing and to the expected icon view mode.

But it doesn’t work properly with column view mode.

I tried to figure out why the Finder would do that based on my view options. It is not due to the fact that the folder in question has its own specific view mode: this happens for folders without a specific view option.

I cannot see anything anywhere in the Finder preferences that indicates what my preferred default view mode is. There used to be an “Open new windows in column view” in the Finder preferences, but this option is gone in Mac OS X 10.5, so God knows how you define the default view mode for a new window. (I think you do it by opening a new window and then changing its view options and then checking the “Always open in XXX view” option in the “View Options” palette, but really, this is far from intuitive. I say “I think,” although really I should test it myself, but I don’t dare because I am honestly afraid that it is going to make a mess of my current view options and I feel far from confident that Mac OS X will give me the control required to undo what I just did.)

In any case, we are not talking about the view options for a new window here. We’re talking about the view options for an existing window, which I was viewing in a certain view mode before I hit command-F. I would expect the “Back” button to take me back to that same state, but obviously that’s too much to ask.

And that’s really where the crux of the issue is in the Finder in Mac OS X 10.5. Apple might have been following a certain logic for handling view modes, but there are bugs in the implementation that are so obvious that it makes the entire situation totally confusing and makes it pretty much impossible for the user to figure out “how things work.”

I mean, with a bug like this one, how can you expect the average user to think anything other than “view options are totally out of my control”?

It really is as if Apple’s engineers didn’t bother to test their new design choices in the real world, with simple, real world scenarios such as the one described above. Sure, if I want to do a search in the Finder and I don’t want it to affect my existing windows, I should remember to open a new window first and then hit command-F. But Christ, I am human, I make mistakes, sometimes I hit command-F first and then realize my error and want to go back to where I was before.

It’s as simple as that.

And, simply put, in Leopard’s Finder, Apple has got it wrong. Once again.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Sunday, December 2nd, 2007 at 9:56 am and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.