[jawngee]

This article is full of flaws.

Finder was just rewritten from the ground up, from scratch. Heavy investment.

Spaces is about windows management, which has nothing to do with Finder. Same with Expose.

iPhone and iPad deal with files, one way or the other.

[dcurtis]

iPhone and iPad deal with files, one way or the other.

For mere mortals, the 'file' as a concept is further up on the pyramid of taxonomy; most people think about their stuff in lower classifications like photos, movies, documents, etc.

When you see a bear, you don't say "Look, an organism!" You say, "Look, a bear!"

[glhaynes]

Finder was rewritten because Apple is aggressively moving to 64-bit code which means Cocoa, not Carbon. Despite such extensive changes, the Finder (as seen by the user) arguably changed less than it had in any previous upgrade.

Similarly, iPhone and iPad deal with files one way or the other, but the point isn't how it works underneath -- you could have a team rewrite iPhone OS to use Newton-style "soups" and have essentially no change to the user's experience. Files are a convenient abstraction for programmers (and, remember, an abstraction is all they are -- in the end, disks are just a linear stream of bits that the kernel/file system layer "artificially" organize into "files"), and there doesn't seem to be any need to hide a file system from programmers. But users are, in most cases, better off dealing with app-specific document managers.

[a4agarwal]

the finder was rewritten (so i was wrong about that) but it didn't functionally change. Apple isn't actively innovating within the Finder.

Spaces and Expose are not "Finder" directly, but they are still concepts trying to deal with the issues around windows, multiple apps, and sharing between apps.

[rbanffy]

Look at Gnome shell for some fresh desktop innovation.