96 MACWORLD JUNE 2019
WORKINGMAC MAC BECOMING MORE LIKE iOShas defined the Mac for
decades. And yet, with iOS,
Apple chucked all of that out for
an app-centric view of the world.
As a Mac user, I have
struggled with iOS’s attempts to
prevent me from thinking in
terms of documents rather than
apps. And to a certain point, this
was the right thing to do. iOS
started out denying any
possibility for files and folders to
be relevant, and that extremism
was unreasonable for a lot of
use cases. But today’s iOS provides a bit
more balance, thanks to the Files app and
various cloud services. I can manage files
when I need to on iOS—and forget about
them when I don’t.
Contrast that with my Mac, when I
receive a file that I’ve transferred from an
iPad via AirDrop. The file pops into the
Downloads folder. I need to copy it to the
right location, requiring me to open a new
Finder window, navigate to the proper
folder, then go back to the Downloads
folder (or a pop-up stack in the Dock, if
there aren’t multiple files), and drag and
drop. I’m often opening multiple Finder
windows to drag things around and view
projects I’m working on. Sometimes they
overlap and hide one another, so I open a
new Finder window... only to later discover
I’ve got five windows viewing the same
folder scattered across my desktop.
This is the way it’s always been, more
or less—but all of a sudden it’s started to
feel archaic. I value my Desktop as a
collection of in-progress files, and some
manual organization feels useful, but for
the most part using the Finder feels like
fiddly non-work, like rearranging your desk
or reorganizing your bookshelf as a way to
procrastinate before getting back to your
actual work.
Using iOS has made me appreciate its
more app-centric view. To access my
current story list on the Mac, I generally go
to the Finder, make a new window, and
click on a shortcut in the sidebar to view a
particular Dropbox folder. Yes, I could
place an alias out on the desktop, or use a
tool like Default Folder to force the default
view of BBEdit’s File → Open command toThe app-centric view of iOS provides a more efficient way
ofworking with files.