The classic MacOS's Finder was 'spatial'. Since each folder on disk could only be open in a single window, and that window remembered its position and layout, there was a certain physical consistency - it felt like the windows were the actual folders on disk, with the same kind of coherency and stability you expect of real-world objects.
Meanwhile, the Mac OS X Finder is not spatial. You can have the same folder open in multiple windows, each with different layouts. There's no longer that illusion that the window and the folder are one and the same – it's just a browser showing you the contents of the folder.
Yeah the classic Finder exploited human spatial and muscle memory to help users navigate filesystems quickly, which was pretty smart because those forms of memory are very strong — humans are generally quite good at remembering where things are in physical space, retaining such information more easily than we do abstract information like file paths.
Yes, based on the NeXTSTEP roots, everything should be object oriented. Think of it like visual copy/paste. Pretty much every on screen item should have a meaning and relationship to everything else.
For example, in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf5o5liZxnA at 35:00 you can see how an application is loaded from the network and a live chart dragged from one app to another. That isn't a one-off gimmick, it's how the OS and that version of Objective C worked.
I bought a Macbook because I was excited by this idea, but I quickly realized it was not even surface deep. I could drag some on screen elements around, but it was inconsistent at best.
But I guess there was a conflict with Raskin's idea of making everything resemble a real world equivalent (object as in "toaster app," rather than decomposed feature of "can toast") and they wanted to let third party applications do their own thing. If the whole OS (and network) was effectively the application, what's their product? Never let profound world changing innovation get in the way of a trillion dollar company, I guess.
I suppose by now we would think of it all as a graph rather than OO, just add coordinates (and the required couple decades of cultural development of how they would relate) and you've got your spatial interface.
I've always been fascinated with NeXTSTEP. It's kind of unfortunate that even the basic interoperability features that made it over to Mac OS, like Services, seem underutilized. I often forget they even exist, because they don't seem core to the default workflow.
I installed OpenStep in a virtual machine after reading this comment. I poked around a bit, but I'm not sure I encountered any of the sort of stuff you're talking about in the OS. Do you have any examples of things I could try to experience some of the magic?
Meanwhile, the Mac OS X Finder is not spatial. You can have the same folder open in multiple windows, each with different layouts. There's no longer that illusion that the window and the folder are one and the same – it's just a browser showing you the contents of the folder.
This article goes into a lot more detail. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/