Smart Folders Suck Ass
Rarely have I seen an interface or feature as useless or just downright broken as Smart Folders in the Mac OS X 10.4 Finder. Thought they might be handy, so I tried to make one. Here's what happened.
My goal was to create a Smart Folder that contained all my Final Cut Pro project files from the past year. In the Finder I clicked "command-f" to perform a search. A new window opened with some default search criteria pre-filled. I set the search location to "Home" and then set the "Kind" to "Others..." Next, I attempted to set up my "Kind" criteria to search for Final Cut Pro project files. Clicking the little arrow next to the text entry field brings up a list of document types. The list would seem to be rather exhaustive. It's huge. But the bad thing is that it seems to continually update, so as you begin to scroll through the list, it keeps jumping back to the top as the list is updated. Type-ahead find is also enabled, but again, even using type-ahead the list still jumps to the top. Too much typing and you'll get the beachball. All this makes the list of document types nearly unusable, or at least unreadable. Unless you know the exact name of the document type you're looking for, you'll be lucky to find it in this horribly broken drop-down. Fortunately I was able to correctly guess that the document type I was looking for was called "Final Cut Pro Project File." After typing this in, I got a list of all the FCP files in my home account. Okay. Great. Halfway to my goal, I saved the Smart Folder to the "Saved Searches" location and added it to my Sidebar (there are only three possible save locations for Smart Folders, by the way: Saved Searches, Desktop and Home).
My New Smart Folder: Let the Ass-Sucking Begin
(click image for larger view)
So, I had a Smart Folder that listed all my FCP files, but I wanted to narrow this a bit to include only those FCP files from the last year. No problem, right? I opened my Smart Folder and clicked the Edit button. Again I was presented with search criteria at the top of my window. For my second set of criteria I selected "Created Within Last 1 Years." At this point the Finder beachballed for about twenty seconds, then restarted. Fortunately — and I use the term loosely — when it came back to life it had actually preserved my Smart Folder and I was able to save it.
So, finally, after much effort, I had my Smart Folder of all FCP documents in my home account, created in the last year. Neat-O! I decided to see what I could do with this list. So I opened up my Smart Folder, and started poking around. The first thing I noticed was that the list was ordered alphabetically. There appeared no obvious way to reorder the list. It was just a flat list of files, and a long one at that. It didn't even show labels.
The Default Smart Folder View: Utterly Useless
(click image for larger view)
Fortunately, as it happens, switching to List view in the Finder window yielded a more useful view of my data, but it took me a bit of time to even realize I could do this.
It's a little confusing that the default view in a Smart Folder is really quite limited in its usefulness. Why do they use the Spotlight view for this? The standard list view is just as user-friendly and a thousand times more useful. It's hard to believe this is an Apple-designed interface.
List View: Finally Something Vaguely Useful
(click image for larger view)
In the end, I'm not sure how useful my Smart Folder will be. Honestly, I've rarely found myself wishing I had this sort of functionality, and the confounding and oftentimes irritating user experience that is Smart Folder configuration doesn't really leave me with much desire to come up with a use for it. Nor does it instill much confidence that this view of my data is accurate. If Smart Folders can cause the Finder to crash, can I really trust them to accurately perform their searches?
Smart Folders are a neat idea. But I really think they're just one more area where Spotlight needs a ton of work before they can really be of much use. I recently read a description of Smart Folders as "underused." Yeah, well, maybe that's less because no one knows about them and more because they just plain ol' suck ass.
My goal was to create a Smart Folder that contained all my Final Cut Pro project files from the past year. In the Finder I clicked "command-f" to perform a search. A new window opened with some default search criteria pre-filled. I set the search location to "Home" and then set the "Kind" to "Others..." Next, I attempted to set up my "Kind" criteria to search for Final Cut Pro project files. Clicking the little arrow next to the text entry field brings up a list of document types. The list would seem to be rather exhaustive. It's huge. But the bad thing is that it seems to continually update, so as you begin to scroll through the list, it keeps jumping back to the top as the list is updated. Type-ahead find is also enabled, but again, even using type-ahead the list still jumps to the top. Too much typing and you'll get the beachball. All this makes the list of document types nearly unusable, or at least unreadable. Unless you know the exact name of the document type you're looking for, you'll be lucky to find it in this horribly broken drop-down. Fortunately I was able to correctly guess that the document type I was looking for was called "Final Cut Pro Project File." After typing this in, I got a list of all the FCP files in my home account. Okay. Great. Halfway to my goal, I saved the Smart Folder to the "Saved Searches" location and added it to my Sidebar (there are only three possible save locations for Smart Folders, by the way: Saved Searches, Desktop and Home).
My New Smart Folder: Let the Ass-Sucking Begin
(click image for larger view)
So, I had a Smart Folder that listed all my FCP files, but I wanted to narrow this a bit to include only those FCP files from the last year. No problem, right? I opened my Smart Folder and clicked the Edit button. Again I was presented with search criteria at the top of my window. For my second set of criteria I selected "Created Within Last 1 Years." At this point the Finder beachballed for about twenty seconds, then restarted. Fortunately — and I use the term loosely — when it came back to life it had actually preserved my Smart Folder and I was able to save it.
So, finally, after much effort, I had my Smart Folder of all FCP documents in my home account, created in the last year. Neat-O! I decided to see what I could do with this list. So I opened up my Smart Folder, and started poking around. The first thing I noticed was that the list was ordered alphabetically. There appeared no obvious way to reorder the list. It was just a flat list of files, and a long one at that. It didn't even show labels.
The Default Smart Folder View: Utterly Useless
(click image for larger view)
Fortunately, as it happens, switching to List view in the Finder window yielded a more useful view of my data, but it took me a bit of time to even realize I could do this.
The View Switch: Good Thing I Remembered This
(click image for larger view)
(click image for larger view)
It's a little confusing that the default view in a Smart Folder is really quite limited in its usefulness. Why do they use the Spotlight view for this? The standard list view is just as user-friendly and a thousand times more useful. It's hard to believe this is an Apple-designed interface.
List View: Finally Something Vaguely Useful
(click image for larger view)
In the end, I'm not sure how useful my Smart Folder will be. Honestly, I've rarely found myself wishing I had this sort of functionality, and the confounding and oftentimes irritating user experience that is Smart Folder configuration doesn't really leave me with much desire to come up with a use for it. Nor does it instill much confidence that this view of my data is accurate. If Smart Folders can cause the Finder to crash, can I really trust them to accurately perform their searches?
Smart Folders are a neat idea. But I really think they're just one more area where Spotlight needs a ton of work before they can really be of much use. I recently read a description of Smart Folders as "underused." Yeah, well, maybe that's less because no one knows about them and more because they just plain ol' suck ass.
This entry was posted
on Thursday, January 25, 2007 at 1:18 PM.
You can skip to the end and leave a response.
3:15 PMHey Systems Boy, you should install MacFUSE and the Spotlight FileSystem from here:
http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/
Then hassle Apple that this is how Smart Folders should be.... :)
As Amit said in his talk at MacWorld, the problem with Smart Folders is that they aren't smart, and they're not folders. :)
4:21 PM
Nigel,
Yeah, the MacFUSE stuff sounds immensely cool. I may wait a few iterations before trying it, just out of laziness and lack-of-time mostly. (Have you tried it at all?)
Brilliant quote, though. Makes me want to change the article title.
Cheers!
-systemsboy
12:00 AM
Amit's demos were indeed quite eye-opening... The spotlightfs was rather clever, and looked more useful than what's currently available. I haven't tried it yet either... I heard they have package installers now too, after Jeff made some and posted on the lists and afp548.
1:30 AM
Cool. Will check it out. Thanks!
-systemsboy
12:22 AM
hey systemsboy, why is it that usernames show up in the comments view when you're *posting* a comment, but not when you're reading them?
anyway...
I've been trying out a whole bunch of things with FUSE, and if I wasn't moving to the USA soon, I'd be writing some dedicated filesystems for higher education.
It's really not that hard to write a filesystem that let you define a DropBox that when someone dropped a file into it it emailed the relevant lecturer with the date/time of submission, file size, and perhaps even entered all this info into a database.
Sure you can do a bunch of this stuff with Folder Actions, but this is much cooler... :)
1:51 AM
Nigel,
Yeah, that comment thing is annoying. As far as I can tell it's just a Blogger thing. Totally out of my control. That's why I always sign everything.
Anyway, I read about your new job and upcoming move and marriage. That's amazing. Congratulations!
Didn't realize the FUSE stuff was so powerful. Will definitely check it out.
Best of luck with the move. If there's anything I can do to help (though I'm on the other coast) just let me know. I'd be happy to.
-systemsboy
6:28 AM
BeOS really did Smart Folders, or "queries" as they were called, right. Even with thousands of files, it was immediate. And the ability to search comprehensively was impressive.
You could, for instance, choose to search for all emails with eBay in the title that had arrived in the past week and were unread.
Granted, you can do that in mail, but under BeOS, you didn't need to use their email program, you could use anything that liked their (open) file format.
And the same for just about every other file type, too.
Done right, it was awesome. I don't even use Spotlight, as it reminds me of how badly it has been implemented.
Matt.
11:36 AM
I've heard all kinds of dreamy reminiscences about Be. It sounds like it was really cool in many ways, and I often wonder why no one has picked up the BeOS metadata ball and run with it. I can see why a consumer-oriented company like Apple would want to sugar-coat something like that, though. Which is basically what they've done with Spotlight. Unfortunately, Spotlight doesn't quite jive with the geeks or with less hardcore users. There seems to be a sweet spot for the sort of user Spotlight pleases, and it's a fairly narrow range.
Oh well, here's hoping they do better in Leopard.
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