[Geek] Why the Mac's spatial finder was a good thing

I've been trying to explain this to someone on CIX, and this effort attracted praise from a mate of mine. So, in the vague awareness that I've not posted much real content here for a while, here is that piece...

Background: the classic MacOS had what's called a "spatial" interface. If you put an icon in a particular place on your desktop, it stayed there, forever - or until you moved it. When you set a windows's size and position, the Mac remembered it, indefinitely. There was a one-to-one concordance between files on disk and icons on the screen; it was impossible to have two windows open showing the contents of the same folder, because that would mean 2 icons showing for each file in that folder. What this meant was that Mac users could organize stuff by simply putting it in a given position on the screen, on the desktop or in a folder, rather than buried in a hierarchy of folders. This is totally different from just about every other GUI ever, where the OS positions windows and icons and thus they move around randomly, and you can see a single file in an arbitrary number of places simultaneously.

Now read on...

Humans are pattern-manipulating machines and in certain domains our pattern handling works best given context.

For example: in 1994, when I was run over, I lay in my hospital bed and described to my landlord's girlfriend the location of just about every unread book among the dozens of random piles of random books dotted randomly around my bedroom. "Go for the stack to the 2nd left of the stereo, go down about 10 books, look for the one with the orange spine with black text 2 up from a silver metallic one..." And so on. This was easier than giving her a list of authors and titles. My memory works like that; most people's does. She brought in about 6 carrier bags full of books and over 90% were the right ones. IOW she got almost all of my unreads - say 90% of them - and very few reads.

Now, the proper way for me to do it would have been to have sorted and categorised all my books alpabetically and by genre. Then I could have named the ones I wanted and she could have found them readily.

But real life isn't like that. We don't do things like this unless compelled. Most of us have cluttered desks and cluttered homes and just put things down and we find them again (if we do) based on where we remember putting them and what they were near. Patterns and context.

It is how the human mind and brain work.

Now, if you are designing a computer to do this task, you can either [1] attempt to compel your users to sort and categorize, [2] make the computer remember where everything is so that they can use their associative, content-addressed human brain, or [3] provide them with rich search tools.

Most computers do #1. These days, everyone's adding #3.

What the Mac did which was unique was provide #2. This is a deep and tricky area. It's hard to do and results in some weird side-effects.

E.g.

If you are going to store where a file appears and replicate this info, you must ensure that it only appears in one place at a time - so if you click the spinner in list view to show a folder's contents, if that folder's window was open, it disappears. This makes Mac novices go "huh? WTF?" But it is necessary behaviour. It is better to do that than to refuse to allow them to click the spinner. What the designers realised that they shouldn't do, though, was allow the files in that folder to appear in 2 places at once, because once you allow that, files cease to become entities and become abstractions - just pointers to files, references.

It's OK to allow references, but they should be explicit. Like aliases. The name was italicized and there was an arrow in the corner of the icon; both readers and graphical-grasping type people get a cue.

If you provide your users with this sort of system, it makes it much more useful for the sort of person who just strews stuff around to find their files.

It's not mandatory. You could set all your folders and your desktop to automatically sort by any criterion you wished. The OS still remembered where windows were, though.

It's an extra feature, a useful extra thing that makes organising and finding your stuff easier, if you choose to use it. If you don't so choose, if you are by nature one of the sort of people who alphabetises their record collection or something (and such people scare me, personally), then set the Mac to sort everything and ignore the window placement. It's no burden.

It's an extra facility, but it's a very clever, elegant one, something that's hard to do right but very easy to miss the point of.

If you've never had it, you don't miss it. If you have had it and used it, it's great, invaluable, priceless.

But it has weird side-effects, like disappearing windows and a filer that can't show both a tree and subfolders in listings. These drawbacks are actually minor and you can work around them; it's worth it for the things they enable.

But if you don't understand the big picture and just want to fix the weird side-effects and add in "back" and "next" buttons and stuff, you collapse the whole wonderful house of cards and are left with a rather sad heap instead.

Apple could have Carbonised the Classic Finder and left it in place and working, and added on top a NeXT-style Browser. It would be like the folder view and Explorer tree views of Windows. 2 views, 2 choices, and people who use one seldom use the other. Different ways of working. Different strokes for different folks. It might have been hard to get the Classic Finder to do big scalable photorealistic icons but that would have been a small price to pay functionally, though a huge one stylistically.

But it didn't. What it did was try to makeover the non-spatial NeXT desktop and make it look like the Mac one: disks and files on the desktop, folders containing icons that you could open or nest or reuse for different views like the Windows one.

The result is a sad mishmash. It's not spatial, but it's also not an efficient tree-driven view or a browser-like one. Sometimes it remembers views; sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it's NeXT-like, sometimes it's
superficially Mac-like, sometimes it's Windows-like. It's inconsistent.

That's not good. This is a really clever OS which does some great stuff by eliminating much legacy rubbish and starting over from a solid base, but at least one baby got tossed out with the bathwater.