Comments on: Eight Windows Features Mac OS X Should Adopt

By: laurens

laurens — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 01:37:37 +0000

Hi, as a Windows user I was looking for a reload-button aswell, to check the progress of backup files being uploaded to ‘My First Mac’. Apart from the fact that the world would be so much easier with Explorer and Finder updating automatically, the fastest way to quickly reload finder is ‘apple ]’ followed by ‘apple [’.

Maybe this is useful to anyone!

By: Robert Michel

Robert Michel — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 03:45:50 +0000

You could use the same reasoning to argue that we remove the reload button from our web browsers. File systems can change just as quickly as web pages and can be just as expensive to poll.

I agree there is an underlying problem, but I don’t agree that it can be fixed.

The underlying problem isn’t with the Finder (or Explorer), but with the way the file system works. To remove the reload button, I need the file system to tell my app when to reload. The problem is getting all file systems to do this reliably.

And in the absence of an auto-notifying file system, what should the Finder do? Poll more often?

By: Eddie Hargreaves

Eddie Hargreaves — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 00:58:54 +0000

Thanks for your response to my write-up. It was much more well-reasoned and thoughtful than a lot of comments I’ve seen. I do agree with you in theory and want to point out that I wrote “Ideally, a refresh button shouldn’t be needed in the Finder at all”

Although the Finder has improved in the area of updating its contents, it isn’t perfect. There are still ocassions where I have to manually select files to get their info to update in the list view columns. Best case scenario is that they simply fix the Finder so I don’t have to select any files or hit a Refresh button. But after nearly six years of waiting for that wonderful world, I’ve kind of given up hope on that front.

Also, I was wrong when I wrote that Command-R is not currently used in the Finder. It is actually used for Find Original, which I do use on occasion and would not want changed.

By: John Cowan

John Cowan — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 21:39:57 +0000

I agree with Mike Roberts. The computer is the network nowadays: two of the various “disks” I have mounted on my Windows box are my home directory on ccil.org (via FTP) and my Amazon S3 account (via WebDAV and JungleDisk). There’s no way that those sites can send some Mac-specific notification that something has changed.

By: Mike Roberts

Mike Roberts — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 15:04:48 +0000

I agree with you in principle, but it’s definitely something I puzzled over when I started ’switching’. It should definitely be possible to make things work correctly with local or standard filesystems, but what about when you’re using a remote or non standard FS (e.g. the new Mac Fuse stuff that Google open sourced)? If they don’t have an effective update callback on update, then you’re forced to either poll automatically for changes (which could eat network bandwidth) or let the user refresh manually.

As it stands right now I’m forced to unmount / remount or use the terminal in certain scenarios.

I guess this can be summarised as ‘fix the underlying problem if you have control of it, otherwise provide a workaround’