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]

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.

 

[ScottW]

The advantage over preview is they are much larger and you can resize cover-flow to your liking. So you can easily flip through them and much better than preview in that fashion.

Once cover-flow has built the "preview" image for a given file, then it doesn't have to generate it again.

Yes, I agree, if I could reach up with my finger and flip through it like on the iPhone, that would be awesome and yes, cover-flow is not the same using your mouse vs your finger.

Obviously, it will have very specific useful purposes, but outside that, your probably not going to use it. I know I won't be flipping through my Applications to figure out which one I want to launch today.

 

[Timotheos]

Yes, I agree, if I could reach up with my finger and flip through it like on the iPhone, that would be awesome and yes, cover-flow is not the same using your mouse vs your finger.

Sounds abit like they are training us for touch screen GUI if you ask me

 

[symphonix]

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

Nope. The spotlight / metadata file system creates preview images of all files as they are written. This means if you save a 100 slide Keynote presentation, it'll process in the background just after saving and store all 100 slides as fairly-low-resolution preview images in the metadata system.

When you open it in Finder, you can flip through these pages in the finder preview instantly.

Because the previews are stored using PDF, 1000 page word documents might only use a couple of kilobytes of metadata to store a pretty-good quality preview.

The system that Apple have implemented is pretty impressive, and I think it'll make 10.5 a must-do upgrade.

 

[fryke]

The fact that Cover Flow in Leo's Finder is resizable and the preview-pane in Column View is not is in no way an excuse or a reason for Cover Flow. They could've simply improved the preview-pane instead.

Let's look at it from the user-need perspective...

So you have, say, a folder with 100+ poorly-named PDFs, Word-files or images and need to find the correct one visually. Cover Flow shows you, basically, _one_ at a time. You'll go through them one by one (though you can select the speed) until you've found a suspect. Then have to decide whether it's the correct one - and if it's not, move on.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that sounds like an idea from the eightteenhundreds. Why not use icon view instead with large previews instead of icons? Show me ten or twenty at a time. If I'm working visually, I can decide _much_ faster when I look at a couple documents at the same time instead of just one (plus maybe a glimpse of the ones next to that).

Cover Flow is very linear. Plus: When I'm scrolling quickly, it's often too slow, so I have to wait for it updating again. If I miss the correct one because of this, I'll look at the next 50 ones individually until the end of the list before either (incorrectly!) deciding the document is not in this folder or starting all over again, because there's no hint as to _where_ I lost track.

They should at least have invested a little more into updating the preview-pane of Column View (which _does_ replace list and small icon view very well for me, or at least is a very good addition) plus updating icon view.

 

[symphonix]

Well, Fryke, you'll be pleased to hear that the Finder's icon view and preview pane have both been improved dramatically in Leo (as I shall now call it). You can (at least on some of the developer previews) flick through the pages of a document, and bring it up to a very large size, right in icon view or in the preview pane.

I stand my my claim that the new Finder in Leo is very good. That isn't an endorsement of Coverflow, though, which is really just eye candy.

 

[Mikuro]

^^ I agree with Fryke.

I'm glad to hear the icon view has been beefed up. I was afraid they would neglect it.

I seem to recall Apple adding a 256x256 size to the icns format. They've never used it as far as I know, but I assume they intend to upgrade their file icons at some point. That would make icon view's previews more useful. They could also make a new dedicated preview view that works basically just like the current icon view, but with all dynamic icons and at larger sizes. i.e., Cover Flow without gimmicks. (Edit: After re-reading Symphonix's last post, I guess this is possible. Excellent.)

The underlying technology of Cover Flow is great (or so it seems from what I've heard), but that doesn't make the implementation great. I think if Cover Flow actually turns out to be the best way to accomplish much, it will only prove that Apple isn't trying very hard to make efficient alternatives! (But again, as long as it's not replacing anything it's not fit to replace, I'm all for it. It's cool, and it's bound to be well-suited to something.)

Going by what Symphonix said, though, it sounds like third-party developers will be able to access the same images Cover Flow uses, so a screamin' implementation is inevitable, even if it's not in the Finder.

 

[fryke]

Well, Fryke, you'll be pleased to hear that the Finder's icon view and preview pane have both been improved dramatically in Leo (as I shall now call it). You can (at least on some of the developer previews) flick through the pages of a document, and bring it up to a very large size, right in icon view or in the preview pane.

I'm using them from time to time. I thought the preview pane on the right of Column View was not settable for future uses, i.e. you can set the preview up for one view, but closing the window and starting anew would switch to a default.
Unless you mean the Quick Look thingie, which isn't the same, of course, since it _again_ adds a new layer instead of using what's there. (I love Quick Look though.)