Tag Archives: finder

Mojave Finder Misfeature

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MacOS X has a feature that nobody else has: Miller Columns. (There were evidently once a few Linux file managers that implemented it, but I’ve never seen it, and I’m too lazy to track them down. OpenStep did, which was where I first encountered them, but that was a straight knockoff of NeXTSTEP. Besides, nobody uses a bare Window Manager any more. The hipsters these days are all about desktop environments and— Hey! You kids! Get off my lawn, you kids.)

Miller Columns, we were talking about. Neat feature. It’s been there forever. Since before it was MacOS X.

So of course, in Mojave, Apple screwed it up. Behold:

The preview (right-most) panel used to provide some useful information. Now it has a button that enables you to see some useful information. THANK YOU SO MUCH, APPLE.

Cool MacOSX feature

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I’ve found it increasingly hard to approve of Apple for the last while (like seven or eight years) so I wanted to point out something I like. I don’t know when it appeared, but I only just noticed it myself.

You may have noticed that MacOSX apps are good at tracking changes to the filesystem. You can be editing a document in one app, and you change it’s name in the Finder (or the Terminal) and the first app notices that and doesn’t try to save it under the original name. Good job, Apple. All the OSes should do that.

But here’s the feature I just noticed. I’m downloading a file (using a non-Safari browser) and I notice that it looks like this in the Finder:

Notice the grey progress meter next to the file? Pretty slick. I don’t know what the API requires on the part of the web browser, but it’s nice that the rest of the OS can be aware the file is open (easy enough) and it’s 85% done (pretty impressive).