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journal: mac
Ten Suggestions for Leopard
Hire John Siracusa.
Don’t get me wrong; Tiger’s a great operating system. It’s solid, stable, and full of cool goodies. However, there are a number of improvements or additions I’d like to see in Leopard. Here are ten of them--some small, some large--in no particular order:
1) Fix the Finder. Yes, I know. This has been beaten to a bloody pulp, and for good reason. The Finder definitely needs an overhaul. The two things that Apple must address are speed and consistency. As it stands, the Finder is rather prone to giving me the spinning beachball, like while performing a search. Connecting to servers or an iDisk can be painful; instead of popping up a dialog with a progress bar, the Finder will often hang for a few moments when connecting to my iDisk. As for the consistency issue, well, others have covered better than I can. The ability to apply keywords to documents via the Finder would be nice too.
2) Hire John Siracusa. See above. 
3) Pick a look already. Once upon a time, the Mac OS was a model of consistency. While today all applications work largely the same, it would be nice if Apple picked a consistent look. Perhaps the smooth look of Mail and iTunes is the beginning of a return to a somewhat consistent look?
4) Refine Spotlight. I wouldn’t mind seeing Spotlight have the option of searching through system files (I know this would likely slow Spotlight down, which is why I say have it as an option). Also, currently when I add a letter to the end of a Spotlight query, it re-runs the search instead of narrowing down the results I have. I would much prefer the latter of the two.
5) A highlight PDF annotation tool. This is a minor suggestion, but would be nice to see. The Oval and text annotations are great and all, but I would like to be able to highlight text as well. Also, why does Preview no longer play animated GIFs? Give me that too.
6) Bring back Scrapbook! In the meantime, we have the very good iClip, which mops the floor with the old Scrapbook.
7) Gee, I’d sure like the customizable system Preferences toolbar back.
8) Dock enhancements. No, I don’t want to see more menu items I’ll never even use. I want spring-loaded folders to work when I drag an item over a docked folder icon. I would like an option to lock the Dock so I don’t accidentally drag stuff out of the Dock. And whatever happened to minimize-in-place?
9)More appearance options. I’d like something more than Blue and Graphite accent colors. What if I want green? Or beige? OK, maybe not beige, but you get the idea. I’d like to be able to switch themes, even! I’m not holding my breath for this one, however.
10)Blow us away. Apple is a very innovative, very creative company. The worst thing they can do is be complacent, especially with Vista coming down the pipeline sometime next year and the Mac’s current momentum. I expect something awesome, and it’s practically a given to say that Apple could do it.
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22 | 895 |
| Nick | comments | views |
thinkback
I agree wholeheartedly with number 1. Finder needs to be fixed (or overhauled) Stat!
The rest seem to be personal preference more than anything else.
| UnnDunn | Sep. 26, 2005 | |
| 10:38 pm |
Apple should fix the file system. Right now, whenever I pug in a FAT32-formated drive, my Mac can read it (thank Apple for that!), but writes a ton of extra files and directories on the disk. This is useless and annoying as hell, especially if one later changes the contents of the drive on a Windows machine and the Mac has trouble reading it again. There should be an option “Do not write annoying junk on connected Windows drives”.
It should be possible to keep Spotlight from indexing external media using a few simple, “smart” options, eg “do not index volumes connected for less than x hours” (excludes backup drives that are connected only briefly, but indexes permanently attached volumes after the specified period), “do not index USB Sticks”, or “do not index external volumes except on command”.
I want Sherlock back, because it was faster and did respond much faster as Spotlight (on my 1.2GHz Cube)
A Finder which is able to write to FTP Server. Why only reading?
And I want a easy to use Unistallsoftware for every new installed program, like windows sofware
Why an easy to use unstallsoftware? The version on windows dos not allways work, and can make other programs inoperateble because it has removed dll. files they needs to. Just dump the application in the trash and delite it. That has a better rate of sucess than the windows uninstaller (or not)
I mainly agree with you, nick.
Perhaps the Finder is not able to write to FTP volumes because of the “annoying invisible junk files”
For a good uninstaller download “Desinstaller”!
Link: http://krugazor.free.fr/software/desinstall er/DesInstaller.php
* I would like trainable speech recognition. (Speakable items 2.0)
* And mulilingual speech output. (like speechissimo)
* Speakable Item/speech output Actions for Automator Scripts!
* Possibility to record a Voice/Video-Mail direcly in Mail.app
* A new Voice/Video/Text Blog-App (iLog) that records personal Diarys/Entries that can be published.
I would like to see file-stacks. This was an idea allready anounced earlier by apple but never got included into OS X. This would be a real cool feature because i want to browse my file-stacks on the desktop like in real world.
I think that file stacks is Microsofts word for them (they’re adding them in Vista). I think Apple called them Piles. Honestly I don’t understand why Apple hasn’t added them yet. The idea was thought of in 1992
| Sep. 27, 2005 | |
| 11:15 am |
It would be nice to have a fast way quit a program instead of just closing one of it’s windows. It would also be nice if it would let you use the entire screen for an application.
| Sep. 27, 2005 | |
| 11:39 am |
“It would be nice to have a fast way quit a program instead of just closing one of it’s windows. It would also be nice if it would let you use the entire screen for an application.
cmd-Q, File->Quit, right-click on Dock icon->Quit… What more exactly would you like to see them do? Only thing I can think of is to add another window button, but that seems needlessly confusing to me.
| Sep. 27, 2005 | |
| shempzilla | 12:21 pm |
I want to understand where Steve Job’s famous vision is headed so I can invest more wisely in my computers.
As much as we can speculate, this guy seems to be constantly changing where the computer is heading. Is he improvising or what?
| Sep. 27, 2005 | |
| moreApple | 8:18 pm |
“cmd-Q, File->Quit, right-click on Dock icon->Quit… What more exactly would you like to see them do? Only thing I can think of is to add another window button, but that seems needlessly confusing to me.”
What I find confusing is when you close a window the applicatoin is still running, and taking up system resources.
It’s also inefficient to have to go through multiple steps to close programs, especially if you just got through working with several different apps, or if you accidentally opened several instances of an application.
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| Sep. 28, 2005 | |
| 11:27 am |
Still running ≠ taking up system resources. If the program is idle, there’s no harm in it.
Cmd-Q is one step.
Mac OS X doesn’t do multiple instances.
| Sep. 28, 2005 | |
| 2:16 pm |
It’s also inefficient to have to go through multiple steps to close programs, especially if you just got through working with several different apps, or if you accidentally opened several instances of an application.
Um… how so? Hold down the Command key, hit tab, and start hitting Q on every application you want to quit. Even without doing it this way, how is it any less efficient on OS X to quit every program after the one before it exits, compared to Windows (keep hitting Alt-F4 or pushing the close button)? It’s not like you have to do anything special (besides save) before quitting something.
| Sep. 29, 2005 | |
| Arden | 9:50 am |
In Windows you click the little red X and the program is G-O-N-E gone, but if you click the little red jelly bean in OSX the (&#@ program is still there! You would think a company that preaches mouse use like Apple would have a one click method to get rid of an application.
Oh, and once you go to another app, and you close the window of the one you were working on, you can’t get back to it, the programs dissapears from everything except the memory.
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| Sep. 29, 2005 | |
| 11:12 pm |
Oh, and once you go to another app, and you close the window of the one you were working on, you can’t get back to it, the programs dissapears from everything except the memory.
... or the Dock, or the application switcher, or…
Anyway, this is really a matter of opinion. Some people like the Mac way, some prefer the Windows way. I can definitely see advantages to the Windows way, because it makes it easy to close everything (as you may have pointed out). But I also like the Mac way because it means applications will still be running, hence not have to launch again, if I want to access them after closing all their windows.
The disadvantage, of course, is that (almost) every window is tracked in the Dock^H^H^H^HTaskbar, since every window is basically a separate instance, so the Dock^H^H^H^HTaskbar can get quite cluttered quite quickly. (Um… why do I keep writing Dock instead of Taskbar? 
) Anyway, to each his own, right? It’s not like Apple’s going to change this behavior anytime soon.
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| Sep. 29, 2005 | |
| Arden | 11:29 pm |
1.
Oh sure; go post comments to Unndunn’s blog and ignore mine.
