3D Finder!

simX

simX

Unofficial Mac Genius
I thought you guys might like to look at this (kilo and gplex know that I was raving about it).

It's a 3D Finder. Very nicely built. There are some annoying aspects about it (gets slow as you open more platters, you can come out of the swimming pool, which makes the program behave weirdly, and you can't drag things from platter to platter), but overall it's very well done, and you can even add labels again! :)

This is definitely something to check out.
 
Didn't Apple have some sorta' short-lived side project called Project X or something that started experimenting with a 3D Finder meta content environments back in 7.x?
 
I never played with that project.

I used this program over the weekend.
It is ok, more of a game, its less productive but looks a little nicer in a futuristic way ;)
 
I used to play with something similar on X windows about 10 years ago. There were various themes, including a haunted house, a space shoot'em up, etc. Completely unusable unfortunately. It was actually 4D, because the objects used to move around. In order to launch an application with the shoot-em-up theme it was necessary to chase the file around and blast it. I wasn't very good so it used to take me about 10 minutes to launch any application, and then it was usually the wrong one. The haunted house executables used to creep up and scare you - quite funny. I wouldn't have wanted to get a virus though :D

Can't remember the name of it unfortunately - I only played with it for a couple of days whilst I had a large computation crunching on my machine (Used to take a couple of weeks).

Roger.
 
Yeah, it seems like everyone's working on these analogies, even Microsoft, but I don't see how any of them actually improve the interface. You can only take the file/folder analogy so far, and then it gets in the way. The trick is knowing when to stop.

-Rob
 
Here's the direct link:

http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/macwarriors/eoh2k2/3dosx/3DOSX.dmg

If you're in Internet Explorer, it will likely spew out a bunch of stuff. In that case, go to this page:

http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/macwarriors/eoh2k2/3dosx/download.html

And then control-click on the download link, and say "Download to Disk" or whatever the option is (I'm not in IE right now).


And amo, yeah it'll suck on an iBook, because it uses OpenGL which requires a good graphics card, and an iBook's graphic card isn't that great. It even gets really slow when multiple platters are opened on my comp.
 
I found it ran nicely on mine if I kept the size at about 60% of screen. Interesting, though I couldn't work out a way to set it up as a Finder replacement even if I wanted to.
I doubt that this will come to anything, but it is this kind of experimentation that helps us work out what is important in a user interface and what we can get rid of.
 
Personally, I think a well-designed 3D interface could be vastly more intuitive than the 2D interface we have today. The key word here, of course is "well-designed". :p While this 3D Finder is fairly well designed, it still isn't a complete replacement (I was going to use it for a while, but then I realized there's no great way to move files and folders around).

You CAN however replace this as your Finder. All you need to do is drop it in your /System/Library/CoreServices folder, rename it to "Finder.app" (naming the old one something like "Finder.bak.app"), and then every time you click the Finder icon in your Dock, it will open this app instead.
 
Whoah, this is cool, Apple needs to do something like this or at least have it optional, some poeple would be too annoyed by it, but still it's got great potential! Hopefully these people will continue to update this and make it a tue finder replacement :)

The only other thing like this I've heard of is "Cool OS" which is now called "Enviro OS" but it is a shell for Win95/98 (yes, evil) that is based on Quake 2, providing a 3D environment for file management and probably deathmatch too :D

http://sourceforge.net/projects/coolos/
 
Cool. It's dock-aware! And while you can't drag between platters, you can Cut/Copy and Paste between them. With a little work this could be awesome!
 
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