Case Study 2 - Mac OS 9
Imagine how much nicer Mac OS 9 could be if the Finder actually worked…
Part of the file system viewers case study.
I can’t work out whether it has a bad case of amnesia or whether it simply flunked its elementary math (look at the expanded folder). I think it flunked most of its grades actually.
The following folder defaulted to a view of merely the Name and Comments columns. From View > View Options I added a third, Size column:
All very well, but see what happens if I then put that column on the right.
I think it is actually impossible to get any sense out of the column after that. You can see that resizing the window and the column lead to various mangled content, as does zooming the window, where it decides that I want to see all the sizes in bytes. If it weren’t for the Finder, Mac OS would be all right.
Every now and then the Finder runs out of memory, and stops drawing in any of its windows or acknowledges that they exist. In the first picture, ShadowIRC is frontmost but the Mac has not told it to redraw its windows properly:
I imagine this is because the Finder’s windows technically don’t exist. Click on the image for the full picture, as you can see that a second ShadowIRC window has ended up visibly behind the Finder.
If you then return to the Finder, the window manager clears the screen where the Finder windows are supposed to be, but then nothing appears:
