[icerabbit]

I agree.

There should a be a shortcut or command to restore a file or folder to its original location, and, it should be possible to delete items per volume. Having volume trash cans available as an option instead of having a single systemwide trash can would be handy during cleanup sessions.

[XMattingly]

icerabbit said:

There should a be a shortcut or command to restore a file or folder to its original location, and, it should be possible to delete items per volume.

Yeah, it's not a huge deal right now but can definitely be an inconvenience. For example, many times I may want to clear some items off my keychain drive - which is only 1gb - without having to either delete everything from my hard drive, or pull everything out of the trash before I throw away trash from the smaller volume.

[kill953]

[quote name='XMattingly']
>

icerabbit said:

> There should a be a shortcut or command to restore a file or folder to its original location, and, it should be possible to delete items per volume.
Yeah, it's not a huge deal right now but can definitely be an inconvenience. For example, many times I may want to clear some items off my keychain drive - which is only 1gb - without having to either delete everything from my hard drive, or pull everything out of the trash before I throw away trash from the smaller volume.

Sorry, but I think it would be a pretty bad design decision on the part of Apple to clutter the Empty Trash interface in this way. If you need that advanced an option there are ways of achieving it using e.g. Automator and Terminal. The Trash folders are separate for each volume attached, but are made to appear as one in the interface for ease-of-use. Show invisible folders and you will find a .Trash folder for each user and on each volume. It is then a matter of creating an e.g. automator application to run a Terminal command (rm- Rf /.Trash/*) when you click it in e.g. the Dock.

A restore option could be useful, however.

[kill953]

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{quote:title=icerabbit wrote:}
I disagree that the (+) would be confusing if it maximized. It is all about logic, industry standard and standardizing it throughout the operating system & apps.

It would be confusing for long-standing Mac users as it has never done this before. Also, industry standard is rubbish - this is how it works for MDI UIs like Windows which don't have the equivalent of the menu bar but that is so it can overcome design flaws in that particular style of GUI.

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The (+) buttons' current implementation so far is very confusing and unpredictable.

And that is the crux of the problem - Apple has screwed it up in OS X. They need to fix the unpredictability of it due to a poor implementation, rather than change the design that Mac users have known for the past twenty odd years. E.g. The zoom button in Preview has never worked as you would expect it to in all versions of OS X.

There is certainly a place to add a keyboard modifier that would permit this to happen (e.g. in OmniWeb if you shift click the zoom button, it will maximise the window to full screen and that is very useful to be able to do), but it shouldn't be the default operation.

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Yes, windows allows you to tab between the buttons in dialog boxes and hit the first character. I think OS X could benefit from that as well. It saves time and mouse miles.

Full keyboard access. Tab to move the highlight between buttons and space to press them. Ctrl-F2 to select the menus in the menubar, arrow keys, to navigate around them and space to select. Ctrl-F3 to focus on the Dock, first letters or arrow keys to navigate, space bar to press. Etc. No absolute need to use first letters or underscores and the same mechanism is used to achieve the same actions in differing parts of the interface. Very consistent.

[fluxos]

Well, I couldn't agree more... These among other changes and glitches have made me stop using a number of Apple softwares.
iCal and Address Book were substituted with Contactizer Pro; Mail (which has serious unsolved problems with attachments containing special characters in files' names) was replaced with Gyaz Mail; Garage Band (which used to be absolutely dependable for quick sketches and now is a bag of bugs) was dropped; now I simply use Live 7 even for fast recordings; preview is, despite its feature improvements, a strange behaving app, but I haven't yet found a suitable substitute.
I believe its the price one pays for fast huge growth, but all in all other apps and the OS in general keep getting more interesting, though.

[maxonly]

iCal is my BIGGEST gripe! I hate the pop-up view/edit 'feature' Please Apple, bring back the option to have the drawer!

[Bookman]

Your take of Leopard as, at the same time, a "must have" and a "must avoid" is right on. I love many of the new features in Leopard (Spotlight improvements,
Quicklook, Guest accounts, and more), but there is a critical miss that has me avoiding it at work. The new version of Mail is broken where my work email is concerned. Under 10.2-10.4, Mail worked fine with Ipswitch Mail, but in 10.5, which implemented use of the IDLE command, it is broken. Apple says it's Ipswitch, Ipswitch says it's Apple. All I know is, under 10.4, things worked. Under 10.5, they don't, so I can't install 10.5 at work because I really prefer Mail for my email (and I really want to use the To Do feature in 10.5's Mail!). Other minor annoyances have to do with syching and MobileMe, but that's not really a 10.5 issue. I, too, am baffled by some of the interface "improvements" that Apple made. If you take a thing that works perfectly well (10.4) and for every feature you add, you break or unnecessarily change a working feature, can you call the overall result an improvement? For me, the jury is still out. (Fix Mail, and it's IN for "Yes.")
2¢ --Books

[XMattingly]

kill953 said:

Sorry, but I think it would be a pretty bad design decision on the part of Apple to clutter the Empty Trash interface in this way. If you need that advanced an option there are ways of achieving it using e.g. Automator and Terminal.

This is too complicated for an average user?

[tallscot]

>I disagree that the would be confusing if it maximized. It is all about logic, industry standard and standardizing it throughout the operating system & apps.

I really do hate Windows' handling of windows and prefer the Mac's method, though I like the choice of OPTION-clicking to make any window full screen.

The Mac's UI method is document-centric versus application-centric. I'm in Word in OS X and I have a document window open and it's just as big as my document, not bigger. This means I can see an Excel spreadsheet, behind Word, in Excel. I can easily refer to other documents in other applications in OS X.

Windows takes up the whole screen with my document and a big grey container window, if it's MDI like every single Adobe application, or a grey background for the window itself that is holding the document, like Word and IE. It's a real pain in Windows to refer to documents in the background because you have to manually move and resize the window that is in the front, constantly. It doesn't remember size and position very well. And MDI applications are a real pain with the application window behind the document windows.

So the thinking behind OS X's maximize button is it resizes the document window to the size of the content and nothing more. So if you have a Web page that is 600 wide in Safari and hit the green button, it makes the Safari window big enough to contain that 600 wide site. If you are in Word, it's big enough for the Word document and no more, etc.

So that's why the behavior changes in the same application, because different document sizes require different window sizes.

You can try this out by going to one Web site that is narrow and pressing the green button and then going to a wider site and pressing the green button again - the window will expand to encompass the wider site.

Again, sometimes we do want to have the current window full screen and OPTION-clicking on the expand button would do that in OS 9. I wish OS X did it as well. I also wish OS X let you size windows by their edges versus just the bottom right corner. Ironically, Apple's Pro Apps let you do this.

[pemulwuy]

icerabbit said:

I disagree that the (+) would be confusing if it maximized. It is all about logic, industry standard and standardizing it throughout the operating system & apps.

The () buttons' current implementation so far is very confusing and unpredictable. In Mail it Maximizes. In Safari it doesn't. In iCal it maximizes. In the Finder it doesn't. In Address Book it does nothing at all. In iTunes it jumps to the minimized state ... now what is up with that?? I hit () to get a bigger viewport, not less! In iPhoto it does. In TextEdit it does.

The reason I said:

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"The zoom button isn't intended to be a maximise button. Expecting it to maximise will be confusing and frustrating."

is because the zoom button is intended to toggle between a user-defined state (initially the app's default but subsequently the last size you set the window to) and the zoomed size (which attempts to fit the maximum content possible within the constraints of the screen size). This doesn't mean 'maximise' when the document content or page dimensions are smaller than the screen. This has been the norm on Mac OS for a long time. I absolutely do not want the zoom function to change to maximise across the board!

Much of the inconsistency you observe results from misunderstanding the function and metrics of the zoom. Documents generally toggle between the last size you set and a size to fit the content, as they should. Try it in Pages, or Keynote, or Photoshop (unless its broken in CS4!). For example, if you use the view menu in Pages to go up to 200 or 400%, then toggle the green zoom button, the document window resizes to fit the content, so it toggles larger. Reduce content to 75% or 50%, and it will toggle smaller to match the smaller page (above a practical minimum size, obviously). This is as it should be, because it is quite likely the user will want to drag and drop to or from another document window, so no need for the window to be larger than the content. In both cases, it toggles back to the last size you set. Finder windows also work this way, resizing to fit columns, or icons. Toggling Icon View respects the number of icon columns you have set via window size and expands the depth. This is long-standing Mac behavior.

But some apps don't behave well, MacBU don't seem to understand zoom, so Word is a pain. And Apple does a few idiosyncratic things as well. Often these make sense. iTunes has a special mini-player mode. Apps with single window interface (like Aperture) or a main window (like iPhoto or Mail or iCal) generally maximise on zoom, presumably because the content is almost always much larger than the screen (eg all your photos, all your mail). This isn't always desirable with a very large screen when subsets of the content are selected (a small album in iPhoto, for example, or a small folder in Mail) but generally makes sense. Cover Flow View in Finder seems to have its own metrics. In my view, TextEdit is just wrong, there is no reason for a text page with a few words on it to zoom to fill a 30" screen! ... presumably it is zooming to fit the 'infinite' page size of that app, maybe that is what people want when using it as a scrapbook or workpage. Address Book is a mystery!

Having said all that I wouldn't object if a modifier key or a fourth button (redyellowgreen+blue?) enabled consistent maximising across-the-board, then the green button wouldn't need so much per-app variation.

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... I actually prefer the very simple Copy to... and Move to ... buttons that bring up a dialog window to select the destination. Since the Finder annoys me so much I have actually gone back to using a dual pane file manager to shuffle data around.

Copy item to ... and Move item to ... would be handy for files and folders (ie in the File menu and the contextual menu).

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My Finder column view width comment was aimed at showing Folder names particularly, not file names which can be extraordinarily long, I agree. If I click on any of my drives, it shows some abbreviated folder names in the first column. Then the same happens in the consequent subfolders I go to. The little || at the bottom of the column isn't a bad thing to hit once in a while, but it gets long in the tooth when you have to do it all the time, because you have hundreds of folders with a name longer than 20 characters, all while I still have half to two-thirds of my Finder screen still available / blank on the right.

I do frequently navigate in deep folder structures and yes, horizontal scrolling could be an issue, but it would be minimal since the finder scrolls automatically with you. All I basically would like is an option in the Finder: "Enable folder name column width" or "Adjust column width to folder names" or whatever we would call it. Some columns would automatically be narrower; like the main hard drive > system > library ... which will aid in getting more columns on screen or compensate for the wider ones down the tree.

I like that idea as well.

Another liitle thing I'd like is an icon size slider (on the bottom right of the path bar as in Preview, and/or drag-able to the toolbar) obviating the need to cmd-J to Show View Options to do it ... and maybe a flip animation (as for Dashboard Widgets or the Office 2008 tool Palette) to see and change all the view options from the back of a Finder window, with a few extras like customisable transparency so windows I hadn't used for a while could fade a certain amount after a time period (again like the Office Palette, or that third party app I've forgotten the name of) ... oh, and the choice of Column View vs List on the lower pane of Cover Flow View.

Edit: Ok, Tallscot was thinking the same thing about the zoom button! And nice work on the Trash volumes example from XMattingly! The key to most of these ideas is making the interface clear and direct.

[Schneb]

soehn said:

I wish spotlight would start searching after one finishes typing in the word.

How would it know? I would be better if it started searching after you hit RETURN.

[Schneb]

abradacabra said:

No, no, no. The #1 annoyance is "More" submenu in contextual menu items in Finder.

I forgot about this!!! Just try activating a Finder Action you have made. You have to manipulate through 3 stupid levels!!!

[tallscot]

[quote name='Schneb']
>

soehn said:

> I wish spotlight would start searching after one finishes typing in the word.

How would it know? I would be better if it started searching after you hit RETURN.

I must have magic Macs because I have no problem at all with the performance of the instant results as I type in the Spotlight field. :)

[XMattingly]

tallscot said:

I must have magic Macs because I have no problem at all with the performance of the instant results as I type in the Spotlight field. :)

Yeah, the speed is beautiful in 10.5 compared to 10.4. Mine is at a point where I only have to type in a couple of characters of my commonly used apps and they pop up instantly.