Brian Kerr

If you’re interested in a weird successor to the Mac OS Finder and the Mac OS X “Finder” / Next File Viewer (going well beyond such “alternatives” as Path Finder, Xfile, or running Nautilus under X11), here you go.

A blogger has built an intriguing mockup of Desk — a modal, full-screen sequel to the Finder. Desk fits well with the recent OS X trend of modal displays — Dashboard, picture slideshows, etc. — and makes good use of all that space (although it’d probably look best on a 12″ iBook, and ridiculous on a 30″ display).

Below are some initial reactions.

The good

I like the potential for muscle memory via the sidebar on the left and the Windows XP-style task pane on the right.

Dock integration, again similar to Dashboard.

It has a shelf (here cleverly renamed “clipboard”). Fans of Quicksilver’s shelf will agree, this is a good thing to have built-in.

Desk takes advantage of the larger amount of screen real estate granted by the full-screen aspect. While the Finder’s grid seems huge and wasteful; Desk’s — even though it’s as big, if not larger — seems appropriate.

Spatial or browser-style: pick one. Even if Desk’s browser-style approach is not your favorite, at least it’s internally consistent.

The bad

The combined menu bar and application window — separation of the two is one of the only really consistent aspects of the OS X interface, I’d be sorry to see it go. Even a visual separator (like a line) would help.

It looks finicky. Paraphrasing Jamie Zawinski, “Desk is complicated because your needs are complicated.” But this doesn’t fit in with the austere halfway-elegance of OS X. Can you imagine Steve Jobs searching for “soccer” during a keynote speech with this interface? That’s the real test for Apple UIs at this point in history.

Where did column view go?

Finally

I haven’t written much about the Finder because, well, the labyrinth is thoroughly known. See:

• Daring Fireball (1, 2, 3)
• John Siracusa at Ars Technica (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
• etc.

That doesn’t mean, though, that I’m not interested! As I come across related links, I’ll file them at del.icio.us/tag/ftff.