Tabbed Finder Window | June 3, 2004

Aaron Egaas said on June 3, 2004 8:59 PM

No explanation? Come on Andy, give up the goods, how did you do it? that looks so useful!

Jeff Croft said on June 3, 2004 9:05 PM

It seems so obvious! Hopefully you aren’t the only one thinking of this…

Jeff

Jonathan Baldwin said on June 3, 2004 9:12 PM

Bizarre - I was talking to someone about how I wished the Finder did this just the other day…

Jon Hicks said on June 3, 2004 9:21 PM

It needs to be done. Pathfinder has a useful breadcumb trail navigation tool, but tabs make sense too.

Daniel J. Wilson said on June 3, 2004 9:35 PM

KDE’s Konqueror allows you to do this, but the tabs aren’t spring-loaded so it really isn’t very useful. If Apple were to implement this, I’d like to see spring-loading and a way to detach a tab to become its own window.

Aaron Egaas said on June 3, 2004 9:39 PM

oh man, I feel so stupid, it didn’t occur to me that the image is a photoshop. Its been a long night/day

Tim Uruski said on June 3, 2004 9:49 PM

Good idea Dan, making tabs tear-off to form new windows… coupled with crazy spring-loading and such… Hopefully Apple lifts this idea.

Vanhalle Jean-Christophe said on June 4, 2004 8:13 AM

Some times ago there were talkings about how mozilla could replace operating system’s classic file manager. At that moment i thought the idea was just the expression of some fanatic’s fantasms. Quite stupid and irrelevant i thought. But now that i see it with tabs.. this would be really usefull.. and.. i.. i just want this to be done now : )

Allen said on June 4, 2004 12:31 PM

Mac OS 10.4 “Tiger” have made some usability revisions to finder. Here’s the article. Hope it’s as good as Andy’s suggestions.

Nick said on June 4, 2004 1:54 PM

I’d want them to be “tear in” as well though (something I wish Safari currently did) so I could drag tabs across windows. I think in a Finder-type app that functionality would be even more useful.

Brian Andersen said on June 4, 2004 9:06 PM

Who knows, it might actually be implemented in Tiger ;)

I know for sure that I’ll be glued to the WWDC stream ^^

Anton said on June 4, 2004 10:23 PM

Hmm… I feel as if I’ve seen this somewhere before…
I’m not sure.
Still cool though. Very cool.

But, re: the “tearing” effect…
Please jump in and correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that whole concept held under a patent by Adobe?
I mean, isn’t that what Macromedia got in trouble for - having the ability to “tear” one tab group and drop it onto another tab group? Or, is the that related strictly to palette items, and not whole windows.

btw… First-time commenter, long-time lurker. Hi all.

Matt said on June 5, 2004 1:11 AM

Ugh. Please, no! Apple have already done enough to make the Finder into a pretty average file browser instead of the elegant and intuitive system it once was pre OS X (with the ‘one folder, one window’ system of the original Mac OS).

Tabs work well with web browsers; making it easy to store and switch between pages of information. But the OS X Finder, with its spring loaded folders and left column of favourites, already has enough methods navigating and managing your files. I just think adding tabs is adding yet more bloat, whether you would choose to use them or not.