About the Finder...

Any fan of the current Mac OS X Finder that has made it this far into the article is undoubtedly thinking about the much-beloved column view and Finder toolbar. First things first: "column view" is not a "view" in the world of the Spatial Finder. In other words, it is not an option in the "View" menu for folders in the Spatial Finder. This is a natural consequence of the definition of the Spatial Finder. Two column-style windows can show the contents of the same folder in two different locations, violating the "coherency" constraint of the Spatial Finder: there must be a direct, one-to-one relationship between folders and windows.

It's true that, if the contents of each column of a column-style window were proxies instead of actual files and folders, and if column-style windows were represented by another variety of "magical" folder, then column-style windows could technically conform to the rules of the Spatial Finder. But the contents of column-style windows are an exact match for the contents of actual folders, so making them proxies makes little sense. Unlike the contents of live search folders, the columns in a column-style window do not represent a slice across the spatial world of the computer. They are an exact duplicate of the spatial representations, but without the interface relationship coherency. The only remaining purpose for such an interface element would be the navigation experience provided by columns.

But if that's what people want, there's no reason it has to be shoehorned into the Spatial Finder. Why not go all out and create a proper browser for the Finder, totally unconstrained (as seems natural for a browser) by the spatial world of the computer?

And so I propose the Finder Browser: a purpose-built, visually distinct file browser that tries to do everything a browser is good at doing. (Note that the Finder Browser is a feature of the Finder, not a separate application.) First, let's address the visual distinction issue. Browser windows (unlike folders) will have toolbars. But since the toolbar's visibility may be toggled, we can't rely on that alone to differentiate browser windows. As loathe as I am to admit it, when I visualize a Finder Browser window, I see brushed metal. Yes, boo, hiss, and all that, but I'm just trying to be honest. Anyway, even something as simple as a colored background for the window contents would do the trick. Furthermore, since the toolbar would likely be visible in some form most of the time, and since browser windows are capable of view styles that regular folders are not (e.g. column view), it should be easy to distinguish them at a glance...even without any brushed metal.

The browser-like features of the existing Mac OS X Finder are not particularly ambitious, especially when compared to other browser-like software. The most common example is the web browser. Before trying to think up any new, "innovative" features for the Finder Browser, there are plenty of good ideas in modern web browsers just waiting to be adopted. Here are a few obvious choices:

• Bookmarks - A simplified version of this feature already exists in the form for "Favorites", but it seems only natural to expand this feature to match the bookmarking facilities found in web browsers.

• Back/forward buttons with history - The OS X Finder already has back and forward buttons, but they lack history pop-up menus. And although the "Recent folders" menu item keeps track of a handful of past locations, it is very limited when compared with the robust history tracking found in most web browsers.

• A stop button - In a browser environment, users should decide when to stop waiting for a slow network disk, or other long-running task. A folder can just be closed if the contents are taking a long time to load, but browser windows are "reusable" and should not be tied to the performance or accessibility of any single location.

• An address bar with auto-completion - This is probably an "expert" feature, but why not add a proper address bar to the list of toolbar components? In addition to history-based auto-completion, it should also support shell-style tab-completion for file paths.

• Snap-back - Let's steal one from Safari...yoink!

I could go on, but you get the idea. You may also be wondering if I'm suggesting that a full-fledged web browser be added to the Finder. After all, if I can type file:// URLs in the Finder Browser's address bar, why not http:// URLs too?

But recall the goal of the Finder Browser: a purpose-built file browser. There are things that a proper web browser must accommodate that the Finder Browser does not want to deal with (e.g. HTML, Java, Flash), and there are features that the Finder Browser must have that are of little use to a web browser (e.g. Finder-style file/folder manipulation). It is better to keep the two things separate. So although the Finder Browser will handle FTP, NFS, AFP, SMB, WebDAV, and other file-oriented protocols, typing an http:// URL into the address bar of a Finder Browser window will launch a web browser.