I don't mean to rant but the Finder in OS X really does not work well. I'm an Apple fan, and I appreciate the technology but sometimes you see the lame engineering hiding in fancy eye candy and think, so what? It's not enough to rest on your laurels, Apple. The Finder is busted, plain and simple.
Far from being the elegant, sophisticated filing system that gets work done, it consistently presents barriers to moving data around. It does this by nature of the GUI, the way your locational awareness must transit multiple levels in a mechanical and time consuming fashion to move information around.
Certainly you can do this by opening two windows and dragging them back and forth. Or you could get in the terminal and type something out that a few mouse gestures should accomplish. It's more than frustrating, it's a barrier to being productive because your spending too much time focusing your way through endless levels of directories when you just want to see two at once to copy things between them.
Or move seamlessly between levels or on the same level.
Let's take a Finder window and do this. Put it in column view and try to scroll all the way to the left.
It looks like this:
I mean look at this big blue thing? What's it there for, I don't know. Some kind of blue beastie that gives no clues where the objects on it live. And worse, the root directory is cut off from the file system.
Duh! Not really. Apple just wants to confuse the heck out of you so you'll buy more of their product. A slight sense of confusion in the consumer promotes a sense of identity loss, of an empty hollow place inside that comes from technology with senseless interface tweaks.
Yes, this is weird. Here's some more weird stuff. I can't click down on the white spaces and simply mouse-drag the whole shebang sideways.
I can't create a dual view so I can move stuff back and forth between directories.
I can't easily see two places at once to copy between them.
I have to traverse the file system level by level by double clicking on folders that make me have to keep track of where I am in the hierarchy all the time, so I can then traverse back down it again, level by level, or open a new window and do it again.
Even worse, most of the time my applications don't remember where I was just working, or worse where they just saved a file, what place in the hierarchy.
Now, I'd be first to admit that technology can lots of effort to develop and fine tune. But, the Finder's interface development has been notably short-sighted in Apple's case. They've focused on the eye candy, and on specific tactical advantages in media, production, creativity and a stable platform to produce all kinds of cool stuff. And all the action takes place in the applications. The Finder is like a dead zone where mouse clicks go to die. The shortest way between me and my destination is the best way.
Finder, you really don't get it.
