The spatial finder was really 2-3 promises:
• Every time you opened a given folder, it always opened in the same, physical place on the screen. Same size, same spot, same view options. Always.
• Only one instance of a folder could be open at once. If you tried to open more than one copy, it would bring the previous one to the front, instead.
• the act of opening a folder would always consistently draw an animation zooming from the icon you'd double-clicked on, to the final open copy of the folder.
Of these 3 promises, the first one was the insanely-great, "magical" one. It ends up tapping into a really powerful aspect of human memory. It has to be absolutely consistent on the OSes part to work (nobody can EVER move your cheese), but if it is consistent like that, then it feels like it unlocks a weird superpower, because you can always find things instantly based on where they are, physically. It's like going from O(log(n)) to find something to just O(1).
It's like having a "cluttered" (but personal) toolshed, where nobody else would have moved anything around. If you have that guarantee, you don't need to waste time "searching" for something, because you know exactly where you put it when you left it there.
Humans for some reason all have extremely good memories on this front; some are better than others, and there's probably some "learning differences" science on this, but as far as I can tell the floor for this capability is really, really high. Even those of us who are "bad" at this are really, really good.
--
The second item, "only one instance open" is the one that had genuine downsides. Opening multiple views of the same document is a very useful paradigm, which I do all the time in code editors, and in photoshop.
Something that could have been a great compromise, which I think apple really dropped the ball on, would have been having a much stronger separation between two concepts, that in OS X are (practically speaking) really blurry/similar: a "folder view", and a "file browser".
A folder view would have retained all the "spatial finder" behaviors, but a file browser would have looked dramatically different, and allowed you to have all the benefits of opening multiple document views, without the confusion.
The problem with multiple "actual folder view"s being open is you never can tell which one is the master copy for setting the position/view-settings/size. One of them is, but the OS doesn't give an indication. So it really screws with that positional memory thing - you'll have one on the right side of the screen, and have another on the left side, and your brain will "pin" both of those in your memory, but when you go looking for the one that was ephemeral, you can't find it, because the one that got stored was the other one.
• Only one instance of a folder could be open at once. If you tried to open more than one copy, it would bring the previous one to the front, instead.
• the act of opening a folder would always consistently draw an animation zooming from the icon you'd double-clicked on, to the final open copy of the folder.
Of these 3 promises, the first one was the insanely-great, "magical" one. It ends up tapping into a really powerful aspect of human memory. It has to be absolutely consistent on the OSes part to work (nobody can EVER move your cheese), but if it is consistent like that, then it feels like it unlocks a weird superpower, because you can always find things instantly based on where they are, physically. It's like going from O(log(n)) to find something to just O(1).
It's like having a "cluttered" (but personal) toolshed, where nobody else would have moved anything around. If you have that guarantee, you don't need to waste time "searching" for something, because you know exactly where you put it when you left it there.
Humans for some reason all have extremely good memories on this front; some are better than others, and there's probably some "learning differences" science on this, but as far as I can tell the floor for this capability is really, really high. Even those of us who are "bad" at this are really, really good.
--
The second item, "only one instance open" is the one that had genuine downsides. Opening multiple views of the same document is a very useful paradigm, which I do all the time in code editors, and in photoshop.
Something that could have been a great compromise, which I think apple really dropped the ball on, would have been having a much stronger separation between two concepts, that in OS X are (practically speaking) really blurry/similar: a "folder view", and a "file browser".
A folder view would have retained all the "spatial finder" behaviors, but a file browser would have looked dramatically different, and allowed you to have all the benefits of opening multiple document views, without the confusion.
The problem with multiple "actual folder view"s being open is you never can tell which one is the master copy for setting the position/view-settings/size. One of them is, but the OS doesn't give an indication. So it really screws with that positional memory thing - you'll have one on the right side of the screen, and have another on the left side, and your brain will "pin" both of those in your memory, but when you go looking for the one that was ephemeral, you can't find it, because the one that got stored was the other one.