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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
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've already tried a few freebies to maximize the windows (Stoplight...), none of them would work at 100%.
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.
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.
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 :-(
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.
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.
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.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/8pejm/i_love_my_mac_a...
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.
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.
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.
/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.
What would you do?
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.
Technically, these files belong in the user-specific ~/ directory and not the package itself, according to the ADC specifications, if I'm not mistaken.
The third one sounds like it sucks though.
The third is not a software problem.