# 10.5 Finder's Tabbed Browsing



## Veljo (Jun 28, 2006)

Not sure if this has been already posted in the past or not, but did anyone know that the Finder in Leopard will have tabbed browsing? I've seen a movie and some screenshots of it, but I haven't posted them here in case there were legal issues. Still cool nonetheless.


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## Qion (Jun 28, 2006)

That would definitely be better than multiple-layer windows.


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## adambyte (Jun 29, 2006)

Hmmm... interesting twist on the Finder... assuming one would be able to drag from a window up to a tab, down to another folder.... this could be quite useful...


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## Qion (Jun 29, 2006)

Yo, yo. Check it. (Not from my blog though!  )


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## fryke (Jun 29, 2006)

Image's not there.


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## adambyte (Jun 29, 2006)

Ooh, did you check out the other things? Look at the icons in the dock... it looks like the address book and calendar are combined into one super-app!... or something.

And... is that... Internet Explorer in the dock? wtf?


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## Rj (Jun 29, 2006)

has anyone got a link to the pics/vids ?


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## Qion (Jun 29, 2006)

You could get the blog link by dragging that image to your URL bar.


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## MisterMe (Jun 29, 2006)

Qion said:
			
		

> That would definitely be better than multiple-layer windows.


Your "screenshot" has been acknowledged to be a fake. The OP, however, is taking about a movie, not faked screenshots. I have seen the movie. Aside from the Finder tabs, the visible changes are subtle. For instance, there is no claim of native Windows support in the Finder.


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## fryke (Jun 29, 2006)

Where have you seen the movie?


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## ora (Jun 29, 2006)

It was online, i got  a link via rss, but they guy ran out of bandwidth so i didn't manage to see it. From reading the comments it was short and low quality though, and lots of people were saying it was a fake.

The clip is mentioned here.


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## fryke (Jun 29, 2006)

macrumors.com article - http://www.macrumors.com/pages/2006/06/20060628222147.shtml - has three mirrors for the video. Looks real to me. At least on first glance, I see nothing giving away a fake. Then again, this is not soooooooo big news. We all expected the "metal" interface to become the next Brushed Metal, and tabs are en vogue and make sense in Finder windows, I guess.


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## ora (Jun 29, 2006)

Cheers Fryke! yeah, they don't look fake to me, but who knows. I love tabs in browsers but I''ve yet to see how it works in the finder, they'll have to have implemented the drag and drop between them very very well for it to be useful.

PS- congrats on passing 10k posts, at this rate your personal count will soon surpass the total word association post count.


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## Mikuro (Jun 29, 2006)

The screenshots scare the bejesus out of me, for one simple reason: the upper-right tic-tac widget to turn off that godforsaken toolbar is _missing_. So I'm glad it's fake. The video doesn't show that part of the screen, though.

I hope they let you save sets of tabs. It'd be nice to open my apps folder and have all the sub-folders I use for sorting available as tabs.

I've wanted tabbed folders (not the same as tabbed windows, which can contain any number of different folders) since OS 8. Looks like I still won't get them, but I guess that's okay.

I have to admit, though, I'm scared at the very idea. Not because I don't think it's a great idea; I do. It's just that ever since OS X first came out, Apple has had a habit of taking great ideas, implementing them badly, and using them to replace things for which they're not suitable replacements. Basically, Apple's lost my faith. Spotlight was the final nail in that coffin.


(I was about to say "and why is Safari now Aqua", and then I realized it's not Safari, but Internet Explorer. WTH?!? Edit: Oh, it's supposed to be the _Windows_ version. Cute. Obviously fake, but cute. I didn't realize before because macosx.com crops it off and doesn't let me scroll.)


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## fryke (Jun 29, 2006)

Hm.  I'm actually a little intimidated by the number of my post-count. I guess I have to limit myself to only spend 23 hours a day on macosx.com from now on.

And: I agree, drag/drop between tabs would be a must. But I guess they wouldn't add tabs without that. I'm looking forward to my one-window Finder. Then again, I'm already using mostly one window nowadays. And this makes me wonder whether a fullscreen Finder with tabs wouldn't be a better/cleaner idea. Certainly it would be entirely different to the Finder of old (i.e. classic Mac OS) and would prevent us from using nice desktop pictures, but it would make some sense for users who like the approach of only using one window, anyway.

(That IE on the screenshot was about virtualization. There's signs of Windows/BootCamp all over the place in those fake screenshots.)


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## ora (Jun 29, 2006)

On the drag and drop, i agree it will be there, but its about how its implemented. How fiddly is it to drag a file to a non-sleecvted tab, how long hovering over before the other tab comes to the front. Finder windows now behave very well in later versions of OS X, sliding around to accessible places then moving back to where you left them, I hope the tab system comes out as polished.

Also, how will expose work with tabs, will expose consider a multitab window a single object, or will ti do the tab-expose splititgn thing from the Shiira browser? I have many quastions, I gues sI'll just have to wait like everyoen else.

One last thing, if they do decide to make more bold UI changes for the finder, I'd actually prefer they become more bold. Go fora Jef Raskin inspired zooming interface or something like that. I know its unrealistic but I'd really like someone to break out of the standard interface paradigms in a non beta, effective way.


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## fryke (Jun 29, 2006)

The hovering time would be set in the spring-load feature in Finder, I guess... It's the same feature, after all. Exposé would behave as with a Safari window, i.e. a window with tabs is _one_ window. Anything else would be a veeeeery wild ride.


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## simbalala (Jun 29, 2006)

Mikuro said:
			
		

> I have to admit, though, I'm scared at the very idea. Not because I don't think it's a great idea; I do. It's just that ever since OS X first came out, Apple has had a habit of taking great ideas, implementing them badly, and using them to replace things for which they're not suitable replacements. Basically, Apple's lost my faith. Spotlight was the final nail in that coffin.


You know, for all the whining I read about this or that feature/non feature in the Finder you'd think that people spend all their time, most of their day, messing around in the finder to the exclusion of all other things.

The underlying technology of SpotLight is very good and if you want to have a look at a very nice alternative front end for it have a look at NotLight.

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/20543

edit: or SpotLaser which I don't like quite as much although it's spiffier.

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/20042


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## fryke (Jun 29, 2006)

I think I've said it a thousand times before, but if Spotlight doesn't let me search for a file by its name without also showing me a thousand other results based on the files' contents, it's not really a good file-search engine for me. It would be soooooooooooo easy to let users decide whether content or filenames are more important to them. Spotlight _does_ have a prefpane...


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## simbalala (Jun 29, 2006)

fryke said:
			
		

> I think I've said it a thousand times before, but if Spotlight doesn't let me search for a file by its name without also showing me a thousand other results based on the files' contents, it's not really a good file-search engine for me. It would be soooooooooooo easy to let users decide whether content or filenames are more important to them. Spotlight _does_ have a prefpane...


Hence NotLight.

Very lean front end for tapping into the SpotLight database. Define the criteria as tightly as you like.

But the bones and the real complexity come from the SpotLight core. You can even define and save your own search methods.


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## Qion (Jun 29, 2006)

ora said:
			
		

> One last thing, if they do decide to make more bold UI changes for the finder, I'd actually prefer they become more bold. Go fora Jef Raskin inspired zooming interface or something like that. I know its unrealistic but I'd really like someone to break out of the standard interface paradigms in a non beta, effective way.



Absolutely. I'm glad I'm not alone when my heart cries out for a redesign and a step out of the standard interface box. I was honestly a bit disappointed when I first fired up Tiger, if not purely for creative lack of change. I'd like to see something revolutionary with Leopard's Finder.


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## CreativeEye (Jun 29, 2006)

finder windows dont need tabs. 

what happens if you have two finder window opens with the same tabs somewhere on each? think about it... even today finder windows won't auto-refresh if you change something in one window - whilst the other is open. I hold no hope that tabs would fix this, they would only complicate it!

here's where i think tabs are long overdue... itms! i hate moving selecting a band and then having to go back to the genre, selecting another and so on...


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## ora (Jun 29, 2006)

Qion said:
			
		

> Absolutely. I'm glad I'm not alone when my heart cries out for a redesign and a step out of the standard interface box. I was honestly a bit disappointed when I first fired up Tiger, if not purely for creative lack of change. I'd like to see something revolutionary with Leopard's Finder.



Excellent! My MSc Thesis was on this and I got rather passionate about it, and pretty dubious about the qualities of the desktop paradigm for UI. Even if things are awkward for a while I'd love to see something different. If anyone is going to be abel to do it, its Apple. Their users were loyal enough to go with the 68K to PPC, OS 9 to X and IBM to Intel shifts, they'd have the best chance of getting away with a drastic UI shift.


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## Cat (Jun 30, 2006)

I'll just ask the stupid question then: 
Finder Tabs means Cocoa Finder means radical all-round Finder improvement?

Apropos filename search in Spotlight: put quotation marks around your query.


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## fryke (Jun 30, 2006)

The quotation marks don't work if a file's named project_alpha_20060525 and you search for "alpha", because Spotlight then doesn't see it. I simply use EasyFind.app ... (nicer than NotLight in my opinion). It's not that I don't find ways around problems, it's that I think Apple went wrong here. 

Tabs in Finder does not mean it's going to be Cocoa at all. You can change the interface without touching the code. I _fear_ they'll spruce up the Finder with features without actually finally replacing it with something better.


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## powermac (Jun 30, 2006)

Tabbed Finder does seem to be the next logic approach. I plan to wait for WDC and see the official announcement and demonstrates from Jobs first. 
Personally, I like Apple to have a tabbed Dock.


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## Lt Major Burns (Jul 5, 2006)

where is that faked _image?_  i wanna see.  also, spotlight is close but very flawed, as fryke said.

searching for p will bring up results, ph, then pho, then phot will all get reasonable results, but if you were to drop the first letter, or generally search for terms within a word (construction, to find deconstruction, for example), then it falters and fails, like very early simple web search engines.  the whole menu and real-time as-you-type based approch to it is poor, as the result you want darts about all over the place till it's finished searching... never mind eh?


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