vita@falstaff.crd.ge.com (Mark F Vita) (10/31/89)
In article <111900082@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu> ddgg0881@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu writes: >I have two major irritations when using the finder: > >1. You have two folders open and you want to transfer or >copy a file from one to the other. You click on the file >you want to move and then its window comes to the front >which totally obliterates your view of the destination folder. >Yuck! it would have been easier to use DOS or UNIX. > >2. When using multifinder typically you have a lot of windows >open for whatever applications you're using. If you go to the >desktop these windows block out your view of the trashcan. It >feels pretty bad when you can't even remove files. At the Boston Mac Expo in August, Apple demonstrated a prerelease version of the new Finder that will ship with System 7. The new Finder is pretty nice, and seems to address many of little annoyances that currently irritate many Mac users. To address your particular beefs, in the new Finder, it will be possible to click on an icon in a rear window and drag it into a forward window without having the rear window come to the front. It wasn't clear whether this was achieved by waiting for a mouse-up event before making the window active. The engineer doing the demo seemed to imply that it had something to do with the mouse being in motion. Someone here pointed out that this wouldn't help if you wanted to copy more than one file. This may be true. However, note that another feature of the new Finder is that when you drag a rectangle to select a group of icons, the icons are selected *as you drag*, instead of after you mouse-up. Maybe they'll come up with a way to use this feature in combination with the above behavior in order to make copying multiple files easier as well. As for the issue of large numbers of windows accumulating on the screen, in the new Finder, by holding down certain modifier keys, you get "tunneling" behavior; i.e., when you open a child, the parent window is closed; when you open a parent, the child's window is closed. Using this feature, you can quickly move up and down the folder hierarchy without having the number of open windows increase. (Apparently this feature has already made into the Finder shipped with System 6.0.4). Some other notes about the new Finder: Seemed faster overall; supposedly it was completely rewritten (in C++). One exception was that moving files from folder to folder on the same disk seemed slower (keep in mind that this was prerelease software, though). Font/DA Mover functions are built in - just move icons into the system folder. Anything - DA's, CDEVs, sounds - can be opened by double-clicking from the Finder. If you double-click on a CDEV, it comes up in its own little window. If you double-click on a sound file, the Finder plays the sound. Anything - applications, DAs, cdevs, documents, folders, aliases (see below) - can be put into the Apple menu. This is done by placing their icons into a special folder in the system folder called the AppMenu folder. The menu is dynamic (i.e. adding stuff to the AppMenu folder causes them to show up immediately in the Apple menu). The list of open applications under MultiFinder now appears at the top of the Apple menu, instead of at the bottom. Aliases - Very much like symbolic links in Unix. The new command is in the File menu; you select a file, then select "Alias" from the File menu (very similarly to the Duplicate command). A new icon is created with the default name "<filename> Alias". Icon is same but has a little "pointer" graphic next to the icon. Very useful when used in conjunction with the configurable Apple menu -- you can create aliases for all your favorite applications, drop them into the AppMenu folder, and be able to launch the applications by selecting them from the Apple menu. Find - "the first Finder that finds". New commands added to the Finder's Edit menu: "Find" and "Find Next". When the Finder finds a matching file, it selects the icon and brings its folder window to the top. Selection - In the Icon view, you can select icons by moving around with arrow keys. Also, you can select files in any view by typing the first part of the name a la SFGetFile. Preferences - Views are customizable; you can add various file attributes (i.e. date modified, etc.) to the visible display (somewhat like task nodes in MacProject II). Mark Vita vita@crd.ge.com General Electric CRD ..!uunet!crd.ge.com!vita Schenectady, NY