Path Finder and Leopard

We get a lot of questions regarding Path Finder and the upcoming Mac OS X 10.5, codenamed "Leopard". Will the new Leopard Finder make Path Finder obsolete? Is Path Finder compatible with Leopard? How well does Path Finder integrate with the new Leopard desktop? I will try to address those concerns and shed a bit more light on our development status regarding OS X 10.5.

We were glad to hear a lot of people coming back to us after the WWDC'07 Keynote with encouragements. Some folks were a bit anxious about Path Finder's future and it seems that the keynote calmed those fears. I have a feeling that this happens nearly each time when the next major OS release is near.

Peering into the future

Let us reveal something that is probably going to be surprising to you: We didn't really have any concerns about Path Finder's future. Why? Because we think that Finder and Path Finder are targeted to different types of audience. Finder is designed to be as minimalistic, self-explanatory and easy as possible. Something that your grandma can use without asking you twenty times where to click. Path Finder is designed with power users, administrators and geeks in mind. I personally see it like a Finder Pro version. Some features can (and should) overlap for sure, but initial design goals are so different at their roots, that the purpose and functionality of both programs will never really be same. Integrated Terminal, Console, ability to view invisible files, change permissions as root and other types of similar actions are clearly an overkill for an average Mac user that only wants to organize photos and documents in his home directory. The rest is just work. There's nothing impossible to implement, it's usually just a question of time and priorities.

We started to test Path Finder on Leopard immediately after WWDC 2006. Testing a programm on an unfinished OS is a tricky business. If you encounter a bug you can't know for sure if it's yours or it's in the OS and is going to disappear by itself in the next OS build. So each bug should be tested a second time on the following OS build to make sure it's worth fixing. Path Finder also uses several third-party frameworks, such as Omni frameworks, RBSplitView, etc. whose developers needed to do the same kind of work as well. This work is still in progress, but Path Finder 4.7 has come a long way and only minor Leopard bugs remain as of now (and again we should see if it's still reproducible on the latest OS build :) ).

So, how well does it actually work?

Ok, ok, a bit more juicy details now. Path Finder's Desktop is correctly displayed in all Spaces, clicking on files on it will bring PF's browser window as usual. There's no problems with Stacks - PF and Stacks don't interact that much in fact. You can drag and drop items from and to Stacks as you would do with any other program. The only thing is that Stacks have a "Reveal in Finder" button, but I don't think it will be used all that often. Concerning Time Machine, it is based on an underlying OS technology that Path Finder will be able to leverage as well as Finder already does. Time Machine doesn't rely on Finder to know what and when has changed (it's actually rather vice a versa), so there's no concerns about this, it should work without any problems if you leave Finder running and use PF as your main browser.

You've probably heard a zillion times by now that Leopard has a lot of cool technologies, like Core Animation, that developers can use. We're of course very excited to adopt those technologies. It requires some work however. First you need to learn how to use it, then you need to adapt your code to the changes, make architectural decisions, etc. It's also a good time to clean, pretty up, and rewrite bits of our own code.

As for the new upcoming features, really, that's the most easy and fun part of all. When the code is all shiny, new and cool, major bugs are kind of ironed out, adding new features becomes the most exciting part of the development process. So rest assured that we're as much excited about the upcoming release of Leopard as you are, we just need to do our homework first :) And then we're going to have some real fun that we hope you're going to profit from as well :)

And now I'm going back to explaining my mom how to print (her recent question: and who's pushing that big gray "print" button on the printer itself then?? how come computer? when? OMG!). I would never install Path Finder on her account, sigh :)

Bonus: here's how Path Finder looks like on the latest Leopard's build: