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First off, you can read the article in its entirety here.
Now, for some reason I always find myself suckered into reading these articles when they appear on digg. The top 10 Mac shareware apps, 10 Mac apps you don’t know about, etc. Usually the same stuff over and over again. This was a nice approach and kinda reflected some of the things that I mentioned that I would like to see appear in Leopard.
#1 - Windowshade
I’m a bit of a disadvantage for this article simply because I never used a Mac steadily before Tiger. I used 7.5 for awhile on an old Performa, but that was just for kicks. So, I know what Windowshade is, but never really saw the point of it. I think Expose does a pretty good job of what I like to do now and I’m super excited about multiple desktops in Leopard, so I think that I will be very happy and won’t need this feature at all.
#2 - Improved Trash
I can easily agree with this feature, although I wouldn’t have placed this as high on the list. It would be nice to be able to have a “Restore All Items” or just a “Restore Item” button like you have in XP and Classic. The size of the trash would be nice as well.
#3 - Map any F-key to an Application
This is certainly a niche request, I can’t see myself ever needing this. This is back from the days when every keyboard had buttons for email, browser, music, etc. I always found that very annoying. The first emachines tower that I had easily had 20 buttons along a separate row for various tasks, even one for eBay. I mean, let’s get real here.
#4 - Ejecting One Partition of a Disk
I had always thought I was crazy for wanting this feature, or that I was doing something wrong to not get it working. My external USB hard drive has two partitions on it and while most of the time if you are going to eject the disk you are going to unplug it, I always wondered why ejecting one partition ejects the whole disk. Fundamentally that’s not what I’m doing, I’m just ejecting one. Oh well. Would be nice to have a preference or be able to option-cmd-E or something to get a bit more control over it.
#5 - Internet Helper Preferences
The argument here is that all of your internet related preferences should be in System Preferences instead of in various applications, like Mail and Safari (which contains preferences for your RSS reader as well…go figure). At WWDC 2006 this summer, this came up as a very heated discussion in the Aqua feedback forum. The guy leading the discussion stated that the starting purpose was to make it more intuitive for the user to find the preferences and to just be able to set it in the application they are using. So if you switch to Camino for the best browsing experience in the world (and you should!), then you just set your default browser there. However, not all developers implement these preferences in the same way, if at all, and it’s just confusing, which is the valid argument here. We discussed this in the forum and I believe Apple heard our complaints pretty well. The guy at least said he would put it higher on the list of stuff to look at.
#6 - Tabbed Folders
Yeah, we don’t need this. We don’t need another launcher, there is enough going on with the Dock without this.
#7 - Appearance Themes
I have mixed feelings about this one. Coming from Linux and Windows, I got very used to being able to customize my desktop however I wanted. This isn’t as easy in Windows, but is very easy to do with Gnome and KDE on Linux (as well as the other 10,000 DEs out there). While I sometimes feel like I would like a tad more variety from Aqua, I’m generally very happy. If you could easily bundle all of your preferences, such as your sounds, Desktop, screensaver, selection color, etc into a “theme”, that would be kinda cool. But certainly not a huge selling point.
#8 - Print Finder Window
Really, did people use this? I won’t even bother with this one, I think I won’t lose sleep over it.
#9 - Put URL of downloaded files in Get Info’s Comments Field
This would be nice actually. I like the fact that you can see where you downloaded a file from in the Get Info panel already, but having it user editable, or at least where you could easily launch a browser from it, would be nice.
#10 - Flashing Menubar to Display Alerts when Muted
Sounds like something else that would annoy me. The damn Dock icons already bounce enough, I don’t need the screen flashing at me to let me know Software Update is done.
That’s just my thoughts on this article. Read it in more detail and leave your own thoughts below.
December 2nd, 2006 at 5:10 pm
Thanks for your very reasoned response. You clearly read the whole article, which is more than I can say about some of the diggers. A few responses to your comments:
1. Exposé is great, but it doesn’t accomplish most of what WindowShade allowed. Specifically, can you write text in one window while looking at something in a window directly behind it? For example, let’s say you’re writing an e-mail to someone and you want to describe the contents of your Network preferences. You can easily shade the e-mail composition window to see the contents of the System Preferences window, and then type in whatever you need to. When you’re finished, un-shade. Look at Adobe’s apps for another example. You can shade the palettes by double-clicking on their titlebar. This helps you look at the area of the document under the palette without having to go up to the View menu and select Hide Layers or Hide Tools, etc.
2. The list was not ordered by importance, as was noted in the first paragraph.
3. Certainly it’s nice to just press a single-button to perform a task, right? That’s why we have the eject button, volume-up, brightness up, and why Dashboard is mapped to F12 by default. Do you use any of those single-button keyboard shortcuts? I do, and it’d be nice if I could map other, often-used functions to single-button F-keys. Things that I do multiple times a day that require mousing down to the Dock. It would also help keep the Dock cleaner, because if you have something mapped to a single key, you don’t really need to keep it in the Dock for easy access. Do you keep the Dashboard in the Dock?
8. Yes, people used this. If you burn a CD with a bunch of files to give to a service bureau or other business, you (and they) want to know what’s on it. You could print the window, fold up the paper and put it in the CD case. And a lot of service bureaus and other print, web, photo design firms use Macs.
10. I understand that some people don’t want the screen or the menubar to flash. I’m not saying it should do that by default (which it doesn’t). There should be an option available for those who would find it useful.
I’m not saying these features are sexy or selling points, just useful. And those people who don’t want to use them don’t have to (just like I never use Speech Recognition, Font Book and FileVault).
December 2nd, 2006 at 6:06 pm
Thanks for your thoughts!
Even though I had read about WindowShade, I guess I missed the part about being able to type in the window. That could be very useful indeed. There was a little while there when I first started using Tiger that I thought the little Show/Hide Toolbar button did this, but alas, it doesn’t.
As for the rest of the stuff, the option to be able to do it is always nice, since you don’t have to use it.
Overall a very nice article and thanks for getting back with me.