Cover Flow Remains Superfluous

[Qion]

All this marketing with Cover Flow... I believe that the major integration of it with every new product Apple releases, including Leopard, is ridiculous. I think it's a great idea to finger through a line of album art with a touchscreen, but with anything else, it's a pure and simple exacerbation of overboard Open GL effects. The new fatties and even the new classics don't handle it too smoothly, anyway... according to Major Burns, it's devoid of anti-aliasing and is slow in loading random album art. Also, am I the only audiophile that has a rather extensive classical collection of music that doesn't have album art? It's ugly to watch the default blank Cover Flow spaces flash by, especially when some of your favorite tracks are ones without pictures.

The idea that the file organizer in my next operating system will be based around Cover Flow is sickening. I said once that it's not bad for browsing, but as far as actual work goes, it's childish. If I'm to work in a three-dimensional file enviroment, give me some options! What's the point of floating icons in a line? Don't I already have that in list view? In fact, right now, I have my camera export file set to 128 x 128 JPEG previews. I can see as many rows as can fill my screen, and I can visually navigate through a thousand pictures and documents more rapidly than viewing them in a single line. If Apple would like to seriously satisfy the professional as well as the consumer market, they should take example from the lovely Aperture application they created... I don't see any single lines in there!

I've decided that I'm belatedly rather unhappy with the next generation Finder, as well as some of the new iPod GUI. Apple could really shift paradigms with the animation technology in Leopard, and it almost seems as if they're choosing not to.

[fryke]

Now you've put the idea in their heads to add Cover Flow to iPhoto and Aperture. :/

(i.e.: Completely agree with you.)

[Mikuro]

It makes a good demo. As long as it doesn't replace anything, let them reel in customers with eye-candy all they like.

What really bugs me is when these fancy demos replace superior features (the Dock), or when they marginalize superior old features by ignoring them to the point where they're much less useful than they should be (column view and "toolbar mode" in the Finder did this to the "Classic-style" modes). When Apple introduced column view, they started neglecting icon and list views, even though column view is by no means an adequate replacement.

Right now I have no real problem with Cover Flow, but I agree that it's...troubling. Apple has proven that they will sacrifice usability for glitz (or in the case of icon view, outright stubbornness).

[symphonix]

Originally Posted by Mikuro

It makes a good demo. As long as it doesn't replace anything, let them reel in customers with eye-candy all they like.

That's pretty much how I saw it. "Hmm. That looks pretty awesome. I doubt I'd actually use that, but I bet that'll win some people over to Mac." Now if they just make a pink iPod touch, they'll corner the market.

That said, the new Finder in Leopard is really nice. Icons are at a much higher resolution, you can flip through pages of documents inside the finder, and in general it is a lot more versatile in the way it sorts and manages files and folders. Coverflow, though, is still a gimmick that can be handy to use for some things, but not something you'd use everyday.

[ScottW]

Well, I seem to have a different perspective, and I did get to play with it in 10.5 (legally). I hate cover-flow for iTunes, I don't tend to listen by albums and I get no joy out of flowing through my music covers.

That said, the use of it on the file system has great potential, for anyone with an archive of stuff to sift through, especially if your weak in the naming your files department.

For example, I scan most of my paper documents I want to keep using a document scanner that saves it in PDF form. I will import a lot at one setting and will rarely take the time to name those documents anything useful. One day, I was trying to find something, I knew it had a color, which made it easier, but I had tool at the "preview" mode of all the pdfs to try and find the document, as these had not be OCR'd and searchable by spotlight.

Having Coverflow for that purpose, seems like a great idea, I could easily flip through my hundreds of PDFs and find what I was looking for.

In addition, if you where a designer and had a lot of PSD files or various things and where sifting through something to find something that you don't remember the name or named it untitled 2.psd, then you can sift through your psd files that way.

So, I think in the finder arena, it has tons more potential than in the music arena, but then again, it all comes into what is useful to you. If you tag your files, file them correctly and name them something useful... the cover-flow may not be useful.

[Lt Major Burns]

i'm just curious to see how a 1.3gb psd would fare in coverflow. will i get spinny beachball hell?

[Mikuro]

That's a good point, Scott, but what advantage does this have over the already existing "Show Icon Preview" feature? I use that for quickly identifying images all the time, and I just don't see Cover Flow replacing it.

Of course, it does NOT work with PDFs in Tiger, but I think that's another matter entirely. From what I've seen, I believe that in Leopard it will support the same range of files as Cover Flow and Quick Look (correct me if I'm wrong...NDA permitting).

You know what I'd really like? iPhone-like scrolling. Might be a bit awkward with a mouse, though.

[eric2006]

It's all a plot to kill the G4s. There's no way my machine could handle that smoothly, at least, not in the larger folders.