July 9, 2003
What Panther should fix. (For me.)
Encouraged by the series of ‘What Panther Should Fix’ missives posted by Hadley Stern on his AppleMatters site, and the continually entertaining persnicketiness of the eminent Mr Gruber, I’ve been compiling my own grumpy list of things I’d like to see addressed when Panther finally pads into town later this year. I’m not asking for the moon. I just want to find out what happened to a few old school conveniences, because they obviously fell off the truck when OS X was first delivered. Here’s handful of things to chew on…
- Finder windows that update immediately after something happens in them. I don’t know about you, but having reasonably instantaneous feedback on whether something happened or not is pretty useful to me.
- A previously voiced complaint of mine is the lack of an easily accessible user option of specifying smaller, crisp, aliased text in Finder views (you know, like I can do in PathFinder.) The abuse of screen real estate is atrocious and wasteful in OS X. Hey Steve, sometimes things look better when they’re not fuzzy-edged.
- When font-smoothing (or anti-aliasing) is turned off, how about actually displaying the fonts using the proper character spacing? Some applications can apparently do this without any problem (Summary, BBEdit, and PathFinder come to mind…) but the Finder is notoriously snotty about having font-smoothing turned off. Time to get over it.
- Put the borders back on all windows, please. When multiple windows are stack on top of one another, there isn’t enough contrast to discern where one stops and another begins. I’d appreciate more of a boundary differentiating these overlapping areas. I would also like to be able to drag windows from any edge — something I became used to doing in OS 8. It looks like the new Finder in Panther starts to do this by adding a whole crapload of brushed metal futzing around the default view. But again, it goes away once you collapse the toolbar and sidebar components with that dinky little lozenge widget.
- A key modifier combination that would allow me to quit an application simply by clicking on its icon in the dock. (Similar to how the wonderful Process Manager control strip module works under OS 9.)
- When I create a new folder in the Finder, immediately select the name so I can start typing. Again, just make to do stuff like it did in OS 8 and 9. And don’t even get me started again on the whole getting used to a different keyboard shortcut to create a new folder thing, yeesh.
- Allow me to resize the ‘Search in’ list in the Find window so I don’t have to scroll to find the last folder or volume in the ‘specific places’ list.
- Bring back search criteria options such as ‘visibility’, ‘creator’, ‘type’, ‘label’, ‘custom icon’, ‘folder attributes’, and ‘comments’ — just like Sherlock 2 offered. Oh yes, and let me save preset criteria again.
- When dragging a file or folder into an open Finder window, dragging to the edge of the window to scroll the contents of the window is flaky and annoying to no end.
- When I get info on a folder, please tell me how many items are inside — not just the total size of the data. Hello? Apple? You do remember how to do this, right? If you want to make this window even more useful, take a cue from the way you’re currently handling Multiple Item Info windows. Split out the contents of the folder into the number of files, number of subfolders, number of invisible files, and Then add it all up for me.
- Remember when you used to be able to drag and drop an image out of your browser, or save something from a web page to disk, and the orginating URL of the item would be included in teh comments field of the Get Info window? I do. Sigh.
- And while we’re still on the subject of Get Infoing, wouldn’t it be nice if the disclosure widgets would keep the status of the last time they were displayed. Why do you keep collapsing the preview? Better yet, get rid of those cruddy looking disclosure triangles, and use those natty, low-profile tab buttons.
Give me a minute or two, I’m sure to come up with a few more…
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