I don’t remember this behavior ever being standard in the finder…at least not without an extension or the likes…or maybe it has been so long ago in the past that I just simply don’t remember it ever being there.
Just curious.
JC
Thanks, Stephen. I’d never noticed that before. What a bizarre design decision! Does anyone (and in this context, I think I do mean “anyone”) know the reason?
Jeremy
That’s my point precisely. That functionality was there dating back to the 1980s.
I have had various discussions over the years with former Apple employees (from the 1980-90s) how Apple in modern times has violated its established (logical and intuitive) user interface guidelines in order to make the MacOS easier to understand for being migrating from iPhones. So, the MacOS has been dumbed down in order to cross-market and make the user experience similar across platforms. BUT, they’re different tools. My interaction with a can opener is different from my interaction with a coffee maker.
Yes, for decades whenever you double-clicked on a folder, it would open up in a new window, by default, regardless of views. It would be one thing if it was an optional setting, but Apple took it out. Just think of all the times you’ve worked in one folder and wanted to move files lower or higher in the folder hierarchy. The process now is crazy-stupid just to keep views “flat,” presumably because the iPhone interface is also flat.
In the old days, you could hold down the option key while clicking and it would close the original folder while opening up a new one. Again, it was an option, but clearly not wanted by most.
Think about the real world construct: you have two folders on your desk with papers in each that you want to review, and perhaps you want to reorganize letters and legal documents from one folder in another. You want both folders open at the same time to shuffle papers around. Imagine that everytime you opened one folder, the other folder would close on you without taking action on it?
Again, that’s only one interface issue. There are others. In fact, if you go back to Steve Jobs’ gushing over the OS X interface, you can see that much of what he gushed over is now gone.
I agree about the difficulties of syncing iPhone with iTunes. I tolerate syncing irritation because I dont trust the mess called iCloud
Is there something horrible about Catalina that my wife and I haven’t discovered since upgrading our four Macs as soon as it was released?
Thanks Al. We are so busy on a feeding program (10,000 meals this week alone!) that I have been a bit distracted. Really appreciate your help. It is going to be awhile before I can get to it. Stay safe all of you folks!
32-bit applications won’t run. For many of us, that’s a real problem, well worthy of the adjective “horrible”. If all the applications you use were already 64-bit, then of course the answer to your question is “no”.
Jeremy
Yes, now I remember. Of course, I went to Catalina knowing that. I’m not known for looking back, so for apps that I lost, I just moved on without lament. I understand that some people cannot, or feel that they cannot, do that. For those people, do you suppose that this mean never buying a new Mac?
This may not be horrible for everyone, but my experience started when I attempted to upgrade to Catalina on my iMac. I hadn’t realized there wasn’t enough space on my hard drive for that upgrade, so it stopped in the midst. From there, things went absolutely bananas. Within a day or so, I could no longer boot up. At the Apple Store, they were forced to wipe my computer and return it to me as a new device. They’d installed Catalina on the blank hard drive, much the same as if I’d just bought it. However, I then went to restore from my backups, but those had been created under Mojave.
Catalina accomplishes a radical revision of how it keeps data, creating two partitions, one for the “system” and the other for “data”. (I’m no guru; this is just what I learned and it may not be the most accurate way to express what Catalina does.). However, the old back up I had would not simply flow into this new format.
Without describing the mess that resulted, I proceeded to go backwards and reinstall Mojave with Apple’s chat help. (Don’t try using their phone help; we were in the midst of that process when our line was disconnected. Once that happens, you no longer can return to the tech you were working with; you have to start all over with someone new, even if you’re in the midst of a process. Use chat instead and you stay with one person until done.).
Once I got my computer re-wiped and Mojave installed, I was able to go to my back up and get that data recovered.
So, long story short: be sure you know that you can install Catalina before starting. Then, once you’ve done it, immediately–and I mean right now–back everything up. That will create a backup that works with Catalina and I think you’ll be okay.
Update. I upgraded both Macs to Mojave but see no reason to upgrade Safari … yet. No problems other than adjusting to some interface changes. I do find some of the repeated security reminders/update requests annoying but I think I have done them all. I had never put my user/docs in cloud and those settings were happily respected. I had to uninstall/reinstall XtraFinder as it is in a different place entirely. But everything else seems ok. Thanks for the advance reassurances.
If you do any customization of your Macs (like many of us did in the 1980s and 1990s), then it becomes harder and harder as Apple screws everything down tighter and tight. I use SIMBL to restore old functionality, but those hacks break under Catalina.
I don’t use iCloud either. Everyone is scared to death about having their data stolen, but they have no control over that data once they put it up on any cloud service. Once there, it is likely to exist in perpetuity, creating a permanent history of what we did, when we did it, where we were when we did it, etc. Do we, as a society, really want that?
I keep local back-ups to local files.
Those wanting to access old applications under old architectures may do so through emulation like SheepShaver and Mini vMac. The two primary reasons I do not upgrade are 1) because the OS becomes more and more like an iPhone (i.e., less capable and worse interface); and 2) because Apple continues to remove slots, requiring dongles, adapters, or docks to connect with older equipment. There is no backward compatibility with new Macs except through expensive, kludgy, third-party hardware solutions.