Hi all,
I'm afraid the problem of not retaining information on the selected
View is built into Leopard. See this extensive rant excerpted from
the Ars Technica review of Leopard at:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/12
If you want to read this from the source, use VO-Shift-Command-H to
move to the heading "An application divided against itself"
<begin quote>
Upon first using the Leopard Finder, you will be forgiven for thinking
that things are looking up . . .
Unfortunately, things are much more grim than they first appear for
fans of spatial file management—or anyone else that cares about view
style retention in the Finder.
The Leopard Finder makes its usual, halfhearted, buggy attempt to
retain window size and position for each folder. It still does so
using .DS_Store files in each directory, and those files are still
written in an undocumented binary format. What the Leopard Finder no
longer even attempts to do, however, is remember the view style for
each folder (e.g., list view, icon view) unless explicitly asked to do
so by the user. Here are the steps required to do that.
Open the folder.
Set its view style to the desired state.
Open the View Options panel (type command-j or select the item in the
View menu).
Check the "Always open in ... " checkbox, where "... " will be the
view style set in step 2.
This process must be repeated for every single folder that you want to
retain its view style. If you do not do this, the view style of any
given folder will be the same as the last view style that you
explicitly selected for any folder.
In other words, while window size and position remain attributes of
individual folders, view style is now a global attribute of the Finder
application itself (optionally overridden by a per-folder setting that
must be manually applied as described above). Here's a demonstration.
Click to Play
Finder global view style
Note how Folder B's view style appears to mimic the view style set for
Folder A. What's really happening is that the global Finder view style
setting is being changed. Changing the view style anywhere—whether
it's in Folder A, Folder B, or somewhere else—determines the view
style that every newly opened Finder window will use. The only
exceptions are those folders that have had their view styles manually
pinned to a particular value using the "Always open in ... " checkbox.
And by the way, checking that checkbox does not mean that future
changes to the view style of that folder will be retained. If you want
to retain a view style change to such a folder, you must do the
following.
Open the folder.
Set its view style to the desired state.
Open the View Options panel.
Uncheck the "Always open in ... " checkbox, where "... " will be the
view style as it appeared in step 1.
Check the "Always open in ... " checkbox, where "... " will now be the
style set in step 2.
Again, repeat this process for every every single folder that you want
to retain the new view style that you've set for it.
This avalanche of mandatory explicit action effectively represents a
denial of service attack on the spatial style of file management. It
overloads the user with a never-ending stream of mundane tasks, making
the formerly transparent process of view style retention so
inefficient that it will likely be abandoned entirely.
If the Mac OS X Finder wants to be a pure browser, then fine, go for
it. But in a proper browser, all view state—not just view style—is
rightfully an attribute of the browser itself rather than the thing
being viewed. For example, when opening a URL in Safari, the Safari
application determines the size, position, and adornment (toolbars,
etc.) of the resulting window, not the web site being viewed.
So why has the Leopard Finder chosen to make view style alone an
attribute of the application, leaving window size and position as
implicitly belonging to each folder? Why the continued charade of the
two different window styles? Hell, what explains the continued
existence of the global "Always open folders in a new window"
preference that effectively stops any window from being a proper
browser?
The Finder remains a truly conflicted application. On the one hand,
the balance has shifted heavily in favor of browser-style file
management in Leopard. On the other hand, many features related to
spatial file management remain. It's a mess, and shifting the mess to
one side or the other is not going to help much. It's particularly
painful to watch Apple continue to flounder in this area when there's
a blindingly obvious solution.
Of course, Apple could go all-browser or all-spatial, but presumably
neither of those extremes is attractive or we'd have seen one already.
No, the Finder has to do both. I've often gone into great detail about
the particulars of such a Finder, but apparently there's too much
nuance in that approach. Let me say it more plainly: for the love of
God, Apple, just freaking separate the two modes! Let each be true to
itself, free to flourish and expand in the appropriate ways. I can
boil it down to three bullet points.
Two window styles: browser and spatial.
No ability to transform a window from one style to another.
The "New Finder Window" command becomes "New Browser Window."
Then just make the browser and spatial windows behave according to the
rules of their respective well-established conventions. That's it! Oh,
sure, there are details to be sorted out, like, say, coming up with a
reliable, efficient, user-specific mechanism for storing view state
information, eliminating the scourge of .DS_Store files. But these are
details; get the two modes sorted and everything else will fall into
place eventually.
The Finder on the couch
I first noticed the new view style behavior in Leopard when I logged
in one day and saw that all my open Finder windows had reverted to
icon view. That's obviously a bug, I thought, and I filed one with
Apple. As I investigated further and came to understand the underlying
cause, I replaced the previous bug with a new one that reported the
strange "global view state" phenomenon. Needless to say, the bug was
closed with the status "Behaves Correctly."
Uncharacteristically for Apple, a brief explanation of the rationale
for the change accompanied the closure. The boilerplate-esque text
said, in part, "To appeal to most users, the view style mechanism has
changed in Leopard. [... ] To view all folders in your favorite view
style you need only click on the view style button once, and you will
remain in that view style."
Rarely are we given any insight into Apple's reasoning when it comes
to user interface changes, so I'm inclined to mine this tiny nugget
for all its worth. It seems clear to me that the new behavior is
intended to satisfy a demand for more browser-like behavior, something
that "most users" have told Apple they want. I don't find that
surprising; ever since the sidebar appeared, the Finder has certainly
looked the part of a browser. Its behavior, however, has remained
schizophrenic. The common user response: "It looks like a browser, but
doesn't behave like one. Please correct this."
On the other hand, apparently some people at Apple believe that going
to a full-on browser would be too much. Perhaps they fear it will
result in a flood of complaints about "windows not remembering their
settings."
This is the type of feedback you can expect from regular users:
expressions of particular pain points. It's not their job to solve the
Finder's problems or even to understand the underlying causes. But
being reactive to this kind of feedback at this level of granularity
will only lead to feature churn.
And so you get changes like those made to the Leopard Finder. A change
here to address a situation where the Finder isn't browser-like
enough, implemented in such a way that it (further) breaks spatial
mode. Oops, now let's throw in an "Always open in ... " view option to
make those other people happy. And round and round it goes. Push
something in over here, something else pops out over there. No one is
thinking about the big picture.
As a sop for spatial file management fans, the "Always open in ... "
view option fails spectacularly. It's more like a giant middle finger
from Apple. At the very least, an option to restore the pre-Leopard
behavior of automatically retaining view style on a per-folder basis
(radar 5543643) is necessary to restore some semblance of balance. But
in the long run, it's all futile unless the larger issues are addressed.
Finder summary
The Finder was one of the biggest surprises for me in Leopard. It was
not apparent at all from the brief Leopard Finder demos shown at the
various Macworld Expo and WWDC keynotes that such significant changes
had been made. Certainly, there's wasn't even a whiff of the new
policy on view style retention.
After many years of bugs, poor performance, a feeble browser, and a
pseudo-spatial mode, it'll be interesting to see what kind of reaction
this change gets in the wider Mac community. You don't need to know or
care about any of the high-concept user interface theories to get
annoyed when the results of your actions are not respected enough to
be preserved. On the other hand, the Finder has been flaky about state
preservation for years. How many Mac users have simply given up trying
to make the Finder a familiar, hospitable place? Maybe no one will
even notice that view style changes are no longer preserved
automatically.
Well I sure as hell noticed, and it pisses me off. I'll be gritting my
teeth as I wander my hard drives, manually pinning down the view style
of each folder I care about. I'll grimace every time I naively change
a view style only to be surprised later when I realize that my change
was ignored because I forgot to (re)pin it manually. I'll curse as I
spend time and energy finding a way to automate the entire tedious
process. (I've gotten as far as figuring out how to set the "Always
open in ... " checkbox using a hex editor on the appropriate .DS_Store
file. Sad, but true.)
The Leopard Finder's saving grace may be that the increased
responsiveness and new features are likely to overshadow all other
issues, and will go a long way towards damping the flames of hatred
burning in certain corners of the Mac world (even as the view style
changes ignite more).
Way back in 2002, I wrote that "the changes being made to the Mac OS X
Finder betray a fundamental lack of vision." This continues to be the
case. Not only does the Leopard Finder take no bold steps towards a
brave new world of file management, it even further distances itself
from a coherent incarnation of established file management paradigms.
The changes in Leopard do indicate that Apple has taken a renewed
interest in improving the Finder, but motion is not the same thing as
progress. For where I'm sitting, it looks like one step forward, two
steps back.
<end quote>
Cheers,
Esther
