TIGER TWEAKS COULD KILL FOLDERS

Spotlight is a desktop-search tool that, unlike previous search methods that were painfully slow, constantly indexes the contents of files on the hard drive, picking out keywords deeply nested in spreadsheets, PDF files and even some images.


The way Spotlight transforms the computing experience is akin to Google's effect on the web, say the designers at frog, which has helped create the look and feel of hundreds of consumer products, including the Mac SE and the Windows Media Player.

Instead of looking up websites in a directory like Yahoo, Google allows web surfers to find sites with a quick keyword search. In the same way, frog's experts argue, a web-like search is more relevant than traditional methods of locating desktop data in a neatly organized hierarchy of folders.

"The Finder has been dying for a long time," said frog creative director Cordell Ratzlaff, who previously worked at Apple Computer, where he directed human interface design for Mac OS 8 through Mac OS X. "As hard drives have grown in size and the number of files people have on their computer has increased, the Finder has become less useful."

"Spotlight changes the landscape fundamentally -- how people manage and organize things on their computers," added Mark Ligameri, also a frog creative director, who formerly worked at Microsoft on the user interface of Windows XP and the forthcoming Longhorn. "Spotlight is a good alternative to the hierarchical organization of information."

This fundamental change is not obvious, because Spotlight is superficially similar to previous Finder search tools, said Ratzlaff.

Users type search queries more or less as they did pre-Tiger, but "the quality, scope and presentation of the results are significantly better, so users get good benefits without having to change their behavior."

The current Finder, meanwhile, has lost some of its simple elegance.

"Compare, for example, a Tiger Finder window with its left-hand navigation panel, three-column browser view, forward and back buttons and advanced-feature menu, with the simpler look and feel of earlier Finder versions," Ratzlaff said.

Another sign of the Finder's decreasing relevance: the increasing incorporation of file-management functions into applications.

"ITunes and iPhoto provide immersive environments to allow users to better manage their music and photo files," Ratzlaff added. "Both of these developments are indications that the Finder is not meeting people's needs. I think and hope that the Finder as we know it will go away in the next two years, likely with Mac OS 11."

Ratzlaff said the Finder will transition instead into something that's more like Spotlight, and searching will become paramount over browsing, which is the reverse of Mac OS X today.

"A radical design would have Spotlight usurp both the Finder and navigation services (the dialogs that applications use to open and save documents)," he said. "Google's desktop search will continue to pressure the Finder and will likely hasten this transition, which is a good thing."

Another indication of how we may work in the future is provided by Tiger's Smart Folders feature, which lets the user save the results of a Spotlight search as a virtual folder that automatically updates as new items matching the search are added to the system.

"Smart Folders is another significant nail in the Finder's coffin," Ratzlaff said.

Apple begs to differ. "The Finder is far from dead," said Wiley Hodges, a senior product line manager for the Mac operating system. "It is still an extremely familiar metaphor that's logical, putting related and relevant data into folders. Spotlight extends the Finder with queries for frequently used folders."

Mark Rolston, frog's VP of digital media, whose clients have included Dell, SAP and Ford, agrees with Apple.

The problem, he says, is that "we tend to organize data by hierarchical folder. But we may want to view the data many different ways, organized by different criteria, often through ad-hoc searches.... These new search tools offer multiple ways to find things according to changing context."

A simple example -- when Rolston needed to clear disk space on his laptop, he used Spotlight to find all the bulky QuickTime movie files scattered across many different folders. Then he created a Smart Folder for them so he'd always be able to quickly see which little-used files he could delete.


Source:
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/commentary/cultofmac/2005/06/67774