Complete List of Mac OS X Snow Leopard Enhancements | Hacker News Reader

Complete List of Mac OS X Snow Leopard Enhancements

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Things I wish could be fixed with 10.6

- Cut and paste a file (no you can't with the finder)

- Maximize the windows

- This annoying audio "pop" I can hear when my Macbook's line out is connected to a hifi system and no sound is playing.

Add:

- Breadcrumb in Finder Windows. This is uber-annoying.

- Revamped open/save dialogs. What do you mean I can't right click to rename a folder in the save dialog?! What do you mean I can't search for a file in this folder?

Sadly the Finder has nothing on Windows Explorer.

Breadcrumbs in 10.5 are as easy as View -> Show Path Bar, or do you mean something else?

The Finder has at least something on Windows Explorer: one thing I always miss on Windows is the ability to drag a file or directory onto an open/save dialog and have the dialog immediately navigate to and select that file or directory. Saves you from repeatedly navigating the filesystem.

Slightly related: I recently discovered you can drop a file directly onto file upload fields on web pages without even opening the open dialog.

Personally, I find column view to be light-years ahead of Explorer, alone.

Wow. I find it near useless.

finder has breadcrumbs. cmd-click the folder name on the top of the window. or do cmd-up-arrow.

That's not really a breadcrumb bar, it's the ability to go up a folder…

you're saying that cmd-up-arrow sucks because you want cmd-click? fine. use cmd-click to see more than one at a time.

and wait a second, it's also showing, constantly, at the bottom of my finder windows. so, look through the preferences and enable that.

if you mean something other than every folder in the path to the current folder by breadcrumbs then you have to clarify.

You might or might not care, but your first two wishes can be achieved with third-party tools. Path Finder has cut-and-paste for files, and MercuryMover can resize windows to full-screen size.

But the lack of development of the Finder is one of the worst things about OS X. It's been rewritten in Cocoa for Snow Leopard but with only a few minor new features. Hopefully the rewrite is a harbinger of bigger improvements in the next version.

I'm just going to plug Path Finder one more time: it's completely replaced the Finder for me. Info at http://cocoatech.com.

I tried Path Finder and used it for maybe a month, but too many OS X applications are too tightly integrated with Finder and don't work with PF, such as Time Machine.

Also, PF is buggy. The latest build wouldn't show mounted DMG images :S

I'm hoping that the new Finder brings some improvements, we'll see.

Thanks I'll have a look at Path Finder but I'm always reluctant to add any apps interfering with the Finder.

I've already tried a few freebies to maximize the windows (Stoplight...), none of them would work at 100%.

Completely replaced? It handles the Desktop and SMB UI as well? Those are the only things I really dislike about the Finder, actually.

Yes, it does Desktop and networking. Try the demo and see if it meets your needs.

The replacement desktop is quite good, but their "solution" for the tired SMB UI was to do away with it entirely :D

You just get a list of servers. Selecting one presents you with a dialog box of available shares. Selecting one mounts it. No concept of "browsing" SMB networks exists in PF.

No concept of "browsing" SMB networks exists in PF.

That's great, because that's never actually worked for me anyway; I always have to type the IP address I know the share is on. Even then, if I'm on wireless (but not on 100MB ethernet, oddly), I only get one use out of it: if I close that Finder window or don't use it for a bit, the share is closed to me in fact, even though it appears to still be there until I try to use it.

The whole thing is terribly buggy and must be approached in an exact manner (FIRST "eject" any visible shares, THEN cmd-K to bring up the SMB window, type the IP (no hostnames, even though ping, etc works!), wait for about two minutes (literally), then immediately do the auth window when it comes up -- waiting a bit will require restarting the process -- and then immediately get or put whatever you need...). I used to blame Windows for this before the local Windows admin demonstrated that no local Windows machine had this problem. :)

Sorry, a bunch of irritation just leaked out, there.

Unfortunately, PF is even worse.

After typing an IP address, the dialog disappears (it appears that the mounting of a share has terminated abruptly), and 2 minutes later (also literally) when the SMB server has been loaded, a new dialog is presented with the list of shares :-(

I shall; thanks.

It's funny you say that because anytime I use Windows or Linux I am wishing for a Zoom button. It's quite rare for me to ever need any window to completely fill my screen. As someone else did mention the biggest issue with OSX's Zoom button is consistency but fundamentally I think it's a far better way to deal with window management. The best solution might be for Apple to simply offer it as an easily accessible configuration option in System Preferences. There's really no wrong or right way -- it's just what you're used to and how willing you are to change habits.

Are the first two items things you miss from Windows? They were for me, but I wouldn't want them added to 10.6...

The cut-and-paste thing is really a basic feature for me and I think it was working in Mac Os 8+, we already have a copy-and-paste. I can't understand why they couldn't implement the cut-and-paste.

I don't understand how you can't miss it, unless you "mv" everything.

The maximize thing is not entirely Windows, I remember seeing it on some Linux distros. I hate to see the clutter behind my windows, especially if I have a browser open on some webpage with a blinking ad.

I find it much harder to focus on the app on which I'm supposed to work if I have other stuff behind.

This is partly historical. When MultiFinder was introduced to System 6, the Mac's primary difference from the PCs of the era was an emphasis on mouse manipulation, instead of keyboard manipuation (via DOS's command line, mostly). It was expected for end users to use drag-and-drop to move information between applications, instead of using the clipboard. (Something that Apple themselves didn't fully come through with regarding APIs until System 7.)

Since drag-and-drop requires visible targets to work, and users were expected to have to see data from two or more apps at the same time, it was considered "rude" to take up the entire screen. (Even apps that tried to do so were constrained by the OS to provide a 4-pixel gutter around the edges of the screen so the user could always option-click the Finder to the foreground.)

The notion that you only do work in just one app was considered "missing the point" for multitasking, which is part of the reason the original "Switcher" metaphor for multitasking in the classic Mac OS was abandoned.

http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Switcher.txt

Upshot: Apple's UI designers seem to regret adapting the newspaper publisher's concept of the clipboard, and have been trying to invent workarounds ever since, probably because it's a form of "hidden state." (See iPhone 1.x and 2.x for a more recent example.) The only time in recent memory Apple acknowledged the validity of a clipboard model was when they tried to adapt it to a "publish and subscribe" dynamic system in System 7, only to give up when implementation and UI complexities with the concept rendered that unpopular.

I feel the same way about maximize. If you complain about it, someone who defends every Apple decision will say "why would you want to do that? It doesn't make sense."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=600389

Anyway, I downloaded something called Right Zoom that changes the behavior of the zoom button (which I find practically useless).

http://www.blazingtools.com/downloads.html

If you'd rather not use a proprietary program from a company that makes keyloggers, check out WrongZoom (downloadable link in the readme): http://github.com/spicyj/wrongzoom/tree/master

I don't defend every Apple decision... but this is more a case of history with Apple creating a windowing paradigm before Microsoft did...

http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/8pejm/i_love_my_mac_a...

You can drag'n'drop the file too.

And for blinking ads in the background try either Option-Command-H (Hide everything else) or Spaces.

Yes I know that's not the answer you want, but just in case it helps you or anyone else.

For some apps (ff for instance) holding cmd while clicking (+) maximizes like in windows.

There were the first 2 things for me as well. While it's true that no maximized windows is just a design paradigm to improve multi-tasking, it's inconsistent (Mail maximizes all the way. So does iPhoto).

As for cut and paste... that's essential.

But the VERY worst thing is the lack of folder merging. Copy and paste a folder to a directory with a folder of the same name, and the contents of the destination will be REPLACED not merged with the source.

How would you implement merging? (I'm not trolling, I'm asking for a solution).

The same way Windows does.

/folder1/file1.jpg

/me/folder1/file2.jpg

moving me/folder1 to /folder1 should result in

/folder1/file1.jpg

/folder1/file2.jpg

But on OS X, it only results in

/folder1/file2.jpg

Replace conflicting files, but not the folders themselves.

Now, you have version 1.0 of Cool.app, and version 2.0 Cool.app. 2.0 removes some files from the distribution, and adds some new. Cool.app is a bundle, i.e. folder that looks like file in Finder. Obviously, you want to replace the application completely instead of merging.

What would you do?

Packages are treated as individual files everywhere in the Finder UI, this wouldn't be an exception.

Right. But now we have another problem. Our Cool.app stores user documents in packages. We have "Work.cool", which is treated like a package in Finder. Now we send this document to a person who doesn't have Cool.app installed. Then we send him another version of this document. How would merge/replace work for him? Since he doesn't have Cool.app, ".cool" folders are not registered as packages, they look like folders to him.

I see one solution to this problem: let user decide what to do. Apple could add "Merge" button (or maybe a better title meaning "Replace files inside the destination folder with files in source folder") in addition to "Replace" in "what do you want to do" dialog. (Note that you can't simply name this thing replacing as in Windows, because it's really merging). This would also require some kind of comparison dialog to ask users what files to overwrite.

I think Apple just went with a simplest solution here instead of introducing the whole new concept of merging and new UI to users to potentially create a confusion ("hm... what should I do - what's Merge and what's Replace?"). I'm not sure if it's good or bad, but I personally never miss Windows-like merging mistakenly called replace.

The better thing to fix (unrelated to merging), I think is to put the replaced folder to trash instead of overwriting it, to allow users to undo their action (see http://daringfireball.net/2003/03/i_love_it_because_its_tras...). However, this creates a confusion again ("what's this thing doing in my trash, I didn't delete it")... UI is hard.

@dchest:

Technically, these files belong in the user-specific ~/ directory and not the package itself, according to the ADC specifications, if I'm not mistaken.

By removing some files from distribution I mean, for example, getting rid of some resources, like nibs or images, etc.

I guess the simplest solution would be to use metadata to identify a package as being a package and not a folder? That way it wouldn't matter what software was installed, etc?

I have to say I've used osx for years and I've never noticed the first two (and I use Windows every weekday as well).

The third one sounds like it sucks though.

The first two work as intended. They may not fit your preference, but to "fix" them you would have to convince the authors that they are broken.

The third is not a software problem.

That's actually eye-opening! I had no idea OS X lacked such basic features (and had such a "pop" bug).

Oh, thank the good lord:

  Date in menu bar.
  The date can appear alongside the time in the menu bar.

Seriously - This missing feature has driving me CRAZY - Windows XP has been able to do it since the beginning of time. Finally I can look at my screen and figure out what the date is without having to Click on the Time (or leave iCal in my Dock)

I've had this in Leopard for a long time. It's not obvious, but it's possible. See

http://lifehacker.com/software/mac-tip/display-the-date-on-t...

It is a welcome addition and blows my mind that it was never an option before. In the meantime, this link shows a hack to add it:

http://lifehacker.com/software/mac-tip/display-the-date-on-t...

I use iStat Menus for this: http://www.islayer.com/apps/istatmenus/

> Restore deleted items to original folders: If you put an item in the Trash, then change your mind, you can restore it to its original location. Just select the item in the Trash folder and choose Put Back from the File menu.

Well lookitthat! They finally got around to making OS X's finder behave like MacOS's finder, bringing it into the 1990s. I think I used this feature twenty years ago.

Apple claim they don't copy Microsoft. Why should they, they are busy copying themselves!

Yep. Bertrand Serlet's comments on stage pretty much summed up Apple's attitude: they love the Finder in Leopard. They either don't know or don't care about just how much the Finder has really lost, nor do they focus on major UI issues in the Mac OS X Finder (that have been documented extensively in many blogs and articles), issues that create daily frustration or confusion for many users.

I'd bet that even this Put Back feature will be a poor imitation of the old one, just like everything else. Scrollable stacks that can dive into folders? Please, Mac OS 8.5's pop-up windows were brilliant, scrollable windows that could do everything else that Finder windows could do, and it doesn't even look like Stack pop-ups can be resized.

It's a pretty big job, trying to reimplement every last little one of Mac OS 9's features on top of Nextstep.

It turns out that elegance of design and general usability concerns, combined with the need for new features, were more important than replicating every last feature of Mac OS 9 over the past decade.

If "Put Back" works on the desktop like "Put Away" used to, then, yes, finally a return to the good ol' days! I used Command-Y a lot back then...

Wow, it appears that they finally made an attempt to FTFF.

One feature I really, really, really wish someone would do would be to allow me to explicitly disable my DVD drive until I actually need it. This is partially a Finder problem, no doubt, but I would say that 90 percent of the time it spins up, it is unnecessary. I've looked into fstab alterations, but on Leopard when you open it up, you're greeted with a very ominous and threatening message:

IGNORE THIS FILE. This file does nothing, contains no useful data, and might go away in future releases. Do not depend on this file or its contents.

I am absolutely amazed that my brain was able to parse "FTFF" as "fix the fucking finder". A cursory Google search for it doesn't show any places I think I have ever been, but it actually was on Urban Dictionary. Wow... the internet has clearly affected me...

LOL at this paragraph:

"Boot Camp now includes HFS+ read support that enables you to access the files on your Mac OS X partition from Windows. It’s read-only to prevent PC viruses from affecting Mac OS X,"

these caught my eye:

Multi-Touch gestures in older Mac models.

Static analysis. (for Xcode)

Static analysis has been available outside of Xcode for some time now. Clang is a great tool.

http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/friday-qa-2009-03-06-usi...

I haven't tried valgrind yet but there is a little buzz about it.

http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/friday-qa-2009-06-05-int...

valgrind is available for the Mac?! Oh happy day! I was seriously considering installing a Linux VM on my MacBook Plus just to get valgrind....

Agreed, I'm definitely looking forward to the updates to xcode. I'm even more excited about OpenCL...

> Gamma 2.2. > The default gamma has been changed from 1.8 to 2.2

I've heard designers getting angry about this. Is there really such a big difference?

Enough to mess up color calibration for WYSIWYG workflows. (Though using ColorSync profiles is supposed to make this moot, not enough files contain such profiles, especially if they are Windows originated or unedited after camera capture.)

This seems to be a concession to web browsing. When visiting web pages, many Mac users complain about images showing up as too dark, when they appear "just fine" on Windows browsers. Safari was supposed to fix this, but third-party browsers like FireFox and Camino never bothered to deal with color correction, so this default is a work around, since so much work is done on the Web anymore. /-: (Funny how Windows users never complain about images appearing too bright or washed out. I guess Windows are used to problems dealing that OS. (-: )

(Not that this should 'ffect me much, I'm using a ColorSync profile on my home machine that changes the white point to a grey tinge to match the lighting in my apartment anyways.)

Too bright you mean. Gamma 1.8 is lighter than 2.2

I never could get the complaints straight myself. My personal Mac and the Macs at my former employer all religiously used color calibration, so we never had problems. It was mostly from end users, clients, and message boards was where I fielded complaints in the past.

Customizable Services menu and Service authoring from Automator is just awesome... but it's a long time coming! Most people don't even realize the menu is there.

Agreed. In the NeXT days, Services was a top-level menu that couldn't be missed. I always found it silly that they buried it in Mac OS X, especially considering that far less useful menus were not buried (such as Help).

I hope bootable ZFS is there somewhere. Sadly I don't see it in this list

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/06/09/apple_backtrac...

It's funny to see them market the fact that Mac OS X takes up less disk space. While this is true, I'm sure the only reason is because all bundled apps and frameworks no longer contain PowerPC chunks in their universal binaries.

Bertrand Serlet said something about compression in the keynote.

Also note that the largest part of application size is not in binary, but in resources (images, nibs, etc.)

Edit: also, all major apps are compiled with 64-bit support (and should run on 32-bit systems), thus it's minus ppc, but plus x86_64, which has a larger code size.

HFS+ in Snow Leopard has transparent compression for read-only files. I think that probably counts for more than stripping binaries.

Split View Terminal Windows. Awesome.

It was a feature of older Mac OS X versions, but mysteriously disappeared.

With all the 64-bit happiness: does anyone know whether the first Intel Core Duo (Yonah)-based MacBooks are still supported?

Phil Schiller said all Intel Macs, past and present, so I would say it's most likely that the 32-bit Macs are supported.

How about allowing us to set windows for when Time Capsule backs up files? I don't need to have backups run every fifteen minutes through the night.

Also, I'm never going to use Safari unless they make a bookmarks pane on the left as FF and IE do. Message to Apple: don't put being different ahead of being useful.

They mentioned during the keynote that the Snow Leopard family pack is only $49. Does anybody know if that is just for upgrades from Leopard? I have 3 Macs: 2 are running Tiger and 1 is running Leopard.

"For Tiger users with an Intel-based Mac, the Mac Box Set includes Mac OS X Snow Leopard, iLife '09 and iWork '09 and will be available for a suggested price of $169 (US) and a Family Pack is available for a suggested price of $229 (US)."

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/06/08/apples_mac_os_...

$29 for a single license of SL. $49 for the family license.

Also, it's important to note that Snow Leopard will only run on Intel Macs.

Those are upgrade prices from Leopard.

Previous OS X release discs allow you to do a clean install from a wiped hard drive, although they all were much higher priced ($129).

But no Java 6 as a default Java, and on 32-bit machines.

That is where PR people from FreeBSD or Linux should learn how to write. Not just "we were upgraded gcc to 4.3 and now we have x86_64 builds".

You mean like this: http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/904features/ ? Or this: http://www.kubuntu.org/news/9.04-release ?

P.S. FreeBSD and some linuxes don't exactly target the same kinds of users as apple. You know, the typical FreeBSD or Debian user probably cares about which version of gcc is default, and probably couldn't care less about photo editing software. Their PR seems adequate to me :D

No, I don't think those measure up. The Ubuntu listing is too short and too non-specific to be much good. They also overuse acronyms and pack them too densely (PSP, MP3..).

The Kubuntu listing is better than the Ubuntu page, but still not there. There's overuse of bullet points, which limit detail. Everything is generally too terse and badly-organized.

They rely on prior knowledge and don't explain what the improvements mean to the users. What is this? "The new plasma-widget-network-manager replaces the old KNetworkManager applet." What does that mean to me, a new Kubuntu user?

Apple does it better. They have nice delineation of features, so you don't have to go looking for information. It's also listed in much more detail, which is the main problem with the OSS lists.

Actually, looking at both pages, it seems like the Kubuntu people are doing something fundamentally different. They're listing new versions of software, briefly detailing the changes, and pointing to the software changelogs. Apple is talking about the OS as a whole and dividing it into parts. They're not saying "iChat updated to version X"; they're saying "iChat in Snow Leopard has features Y and Z."

FreeBSD team, for example, actually removed "Giant lock" from most important drivers, make memory allocation routines SMP-aware, replace default scheduler and they have been ported their codebase to more than one 64-bit architecture. It is not just recompilation with -m64 flag. But they failed to convince people that they are doing many thing much better as a server OS, and already have all that "innovations", except may be OpenCL.

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