When it first premiered in 1984, the Macintosh Finder was revolutionary. Although graphical user interfaces (GUIs) had been invented years earlier by Xerox PARC, and Apple first commercialized those ideas in 1982 with its Lisa system, a GUI had never before appeared on a mainstream, desktop, affordable computer. GUIs eliminated the immediate burden of learning and using a computer’s command line interface (CLI) by replacing them with built-in menus, icons, and windows. People who “got” the Mac were really getting the Finder.
In short, the Finder made it possible for non-experts to become computerphiles, quickly and easily, by replacing the CLI with the GUI.
Over the years, Apple’s spent a lot of time and effort to extend the Finder, to improve the Finder, to enhance the Finder. Thanks to pale Finder copies like Windows 1.0 and 2.0, better Finder clones like Windows 3.X, and the prevalence of UNIX GUIs like Motif, Apple’s had plenty of market pressure to keep the first real commercial GUI the best commercial GUI.
But in 1995, those of us who love the Mac realize that the Finder’s lost much of its state-of-the-art appeal. OS/2 Warp and Windows 95 both do things that the Finder can’t. And while Apple still offers the strongest user-based core technologies to wrap into the Finder (even Windows 95 can’t touch PowerTalk, AppleScript, QuickDraw 3D, or QuickTime VR, just to mention four—see sidebar, page 13), the Finder, itself, is starting to look a bit old and tired against the likes of OS/2 Warp’s shell and the beta of Windows 95.
 
The Task Manager shows a list of automated tasks to be performed by Apple Guide assistants.
7.5 First, Then Copland to the Rescue
And Apple knows all this. Don Norman, Apple Fellow and interface guru extraordinaire (see sidebar) has led a team of Apple’s best and brightest over the past couple of years trying to invent the future Finder. Call it the New Finder (I certainly have), but keep in mind that Norman and company are considering a slew of interface models that are far removed from the Finder. That’s how serious Apple is about regaining its GUI marketing and technological advantages.
The first of Norman’s efforts can be seen in System 7.5. While new interface ground was only lightly scratched (rather than seriously broken) with 7.5, Apple did lay out one cornerstone of the future — active assistance with Apple Guide (detailed in my column in Mac/Chicago, Nov./Dec. ‘94).
Apple Guide, for those who have not used it much, is built-in online help available in any application that incorporates it in the software (Apple provides it for the Finder, PowerTalk, and other 7.5 parts).
That’s not the interesting part. The interesting part is that Apple Guide is built into the System (well, it loads via extensions, but it will be built-in with Copland, or System 8), so that it knows what state the System is in, and it can work with those states, by controlling features, functions, and applications (thank you Apple Events and AppleScript), as it helps you accomplish a given task. It can even highlight what it’s doing with coachmarks that are easy to follow.
 
A basic Copland Desktop shows some of the new features: Tabbed pushdown folders (bottom left), simultaneous file-copying (you can also do other things while this is happening), built-in PowerTalk (Catalogs and Mailbox icons to right), drag-and-drop printing (see LaserWriter icon), and messages that notify you when assistants complete tasks.
Copland’s software agents will be built on Apple Guide and AppleScript. Using a basic interview protocol, you’ll define your software agents (very much the way the third-party Open Sesame and Magnet programs work today).
Once defined, these agents will include three basic pieces that (1) state the actions to be performed, (2) offer the schedule or other trigger for the actions to be performed, and (3) tell you when they are done running.
Copland’s Finder then extends the ideas behind Apple Guide, by moving them from active assistance to automatic assistance. In short, it takes you from “show it to me” to “do it for me.” That means a lot when it comes to learning new features of applications, but even more when learning new features of the Finder and its associated technologies.
 
Gone is the “System Folder” we’ve known all these years, replaced by the new “Mac OS Folder.” A “basic-style” window will have a folder like the one above.
Beyond Copland, Apple Guide will start to figure out who you are as you use your Mac. It will build a set of expert preferences, methods, usage patterns, and other characteristics for each user of a particular Mac (Copland will support multiple user “login” profiles, which gets this started), and then use those to help anticipate what you want done and how best to do it.
Enhancing the Desktop
But the Copland Finder offers a lot more than automatic assistance. It also offers a slew of new appearance preferences that allow you to build a custom look for all the familiar desktop elements (windows, menubars, dialogs, menus, etc.) and for the behaviors they exhibit. And you’ll be able to build multiple appearance and behavior sets, save each one for each person using a Mac, or save separate sets for particular uses by the same individual.
 
Copland’s new Appearance Manager will let you change the style and colors of windows, desktop patterns, scroll bars, fonts, and other aspects of the Desktop. You could have a futuristic-looking Mac like the one above, while the kids could sit down and switch it over to something that likes like the one below.
 
The Copland Finder also includes a number of other Desktop enhancements that make the everyday stuff of finding, using, copying, deleting, and backing up your files easier. The three most important include push-down tabbed folders, quick folder navigation in file dialogs, and auto-opening folders.
Tabbed push-down folders allow you to create tabs at the bottom of the screen representing individual folders (see page 5). To do it, you just drag the folders you want down to the bottom of the screen where they turn into file folder tabs, with the names of the folders appearing on the folder tabs.
How you use tabbed folders will be up to you. You’ll be able to tweak the Finder to display them as you see fit. In fact, with Copland you will be able to configure the Finder in a myriad of ways to suit you and anyone else you might use your Mac, since the OS will now store a whole bunch of system-wide preferences, including what software agents you have defined, along with the basic stuff like desktop appearance, scrollbar speed and color, and the like.
File dialogs will include improvements that will remind most of you of Now’s SuperBoomerang additions. The new file dialogs include a list of frequently used files and folders, plus a window showing document previews.
 
A different Mac setup for each user means everyone at home (or at the office) gets the Mac they want, even if they share the same one.
Like System 7.5’s file dialog boxes, the Copland file dialogs will show the contents of only one folder at a time, but it uses a graphical tree instead of a pop-up menu to indicate the hierarchy above the current folder. This makes it easier to navigate around the file system while in the dialog.
Auto-opening folders incorporate a feature that’s a cross between Now’s FolderMenus and Highware’s PopupFolder. When you drag the cursor to any folder and leave it there (you set the timing delay) the folder flashes and displays the next level below it in the Finder hierarchy. Move the cursor to another folder in the level and repeat the operation. You may do this all you want, drilling through folders like they were cheap balsa, until you find the heartwood (target folder) that you are after.
If you look at these improvements separately, you could make the same incorrect arguments made for the improvements in System 7.5 — that they are nothing more than third-party aids strapped on. But you’d really be missing the point to the Copland Finder.
Unlike System 7.5, which did have to resort to including licensed third-party add-ons to achieve interface improvements (since Apple just didn’t have the parts in its own bin to use), Copland’s Finder architecture is being designed from the beginning to work with Copland’s internals (its “preemptively multitasked microkernel” and “hardware abstraction layer,” just to name two), not as an assemblage of one part from column A and two from column B.
Mac OS vs. Windows 95
The Copland Finder has also been designed to be instantly familiar to anyone who’s used a Mac before, and that’s where Apple may have a problem.
We all know that Microsoft has gotten more publicity about Windows 95 than if Michael Jordan had been its spokesperson. And the Windows-oriented press has followed right along with this nonsense, fawning disgustingly over what, quite frankly, is simply Microsoft’s first GUI-based operating system, not a revolution in operating systems.
But that does not matter. What matters in the computer marketplace of 1995 is appearance. And Windows 95 has the appearance of a world-beating major breakthrough from the company that thinks it invented personal computing (all factual evidence to the contrary). So Apple cannot deal with the Windows 95 problem as if it were on a level playing field. It is not. And that’s the rub with the Copland Finder.
It offers lots of subtle, yet deep improvements that all add up to a considerably more flexible and easier-to-use GUI than Finder 7.5. Once you get a crack at the thing in mid-to-late-1996, you’ll know exactly what I mean. Kudos to Apple for not fixing what ain’t broken.
 
The trouble with subtle, yet deep, is that no one can hear you whispering “look at how we’ve naturally evolved the world’s best GUI” when the guy next door is shouting “Windows 95 has dumped the File Manager,” to the screams of “YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!!!!!!!!!!”
From a technological point of view, the Copland Finder will push the Mac OS standard of computing a good three years beyond anything available on any other computing platform. Beyond OS/2, beyond Windows NT (including that OS’s next version, code-named Cairo), and way beyond Windows 95.
But technology does not win the battle of the marketplace, which is why you, and I, ought to be worried. If there were ever a time for Apple to really start hitting Microsoft and Windows 95 with advertising body blows, now is the time.
Even if they have to spend the farm to get the point across, Apple’s got to make sure we (and the rest of the personal computer marketplace) understand that while Windows 95 is surely a better Windows, it comes up very short of Copland and the Copland Finder.
Don Crabb is a Contributing Editor to Mac/Chicago and many other publications. He is a Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Chicago. He is senior series editor for Hayden Books’ The Don Crabb Macintosh Library and author of The Guide to Macintosh System 7.5. He co-hosts and co-produces TV’s “Personally Computing.” You may reach him via e-mail at decc@cs.uchicago.edu and visit his home page at http://cs-www.uchicago.edu/~decc. The opinions expressed are his own.
Reprinted with permission from Mac/Chicago Magazine, July/August 1995.
