Raskin always talked about that idea of the GUI-as-airport (not the product, the place). I have qualms with it, but anyone care to add to that idea?
I wonder if the GUI can be more or less split into simple "slop space" and "closets" for all things, apps, docs, etc. A studio metaphor. I suppose it's too un-tidy for the computer to handle -- probably too complex to handle for the metaphor's own sake.
Or perhaps a building metaphor? Core, skin, fit-out. Walls, and floors all under one roof? Eh, methinks I'm being a bit too literary with this.
Having used 10.1 since the weekend it was released , I can honestly say I think Apple has done a pretty good job of making this OS truly usable since the initial release. I didn't use X before 10.1, though I had chances to tinker around with it on other people's computers. The reason was pretty simple - it lacked polish. The interface wasn't flexible enough, there weren't that many good shareware widgets out there to address said problem, and the OS itself was pokey on all but the fastest Macs.
I think those issues were all resolved within a month of 10.1's release. The release itself provided the added stability and speed increases, as well as some minor additions in terms of workspace flexibility. Then came all the great shareware tools (something we didn't get much of with the legacy Mac OS until it was very mature (old)). TinkerTool allowed me to place the dock where I needed it and customize the way in which certain applications displayed fonts. Windowshade X does the obvious...brings back the ability to assign various window-reducing behaviors (including our long-lost favorite) to any window's title bar or minimize button. And there's even a Teminal script out there that allows you to remove the Dock's background texture and / or make it more transparent.
In short, interface-wise I now find OS X to be just as comfortable a working space as I found OS 9 to be, and more so in certain respects. I never thought I'd learn to like the Column Viewer for example, but now I use it all the time and not because I'm forced to but because I like it. My only gripe is that Finder windows still don't remember all of their size parameters correctly (mostly as related to column widths). That and it doesn't allow you to sort by type within a column (or even all columns by default). But these are relatively minor things in my mind.
Obviously improvements need to be made still. The afore-mentioned (and often requested) Spring-loaded folders will be a *very* welcome addition to the Finder. Some method of visually labeling folders would be nice too as having more than a couple in the Dock at once makes for an obvious problem design-wise / visually. I also think a more radical approach could be taken with the Dock. Perhaps the ability to have it use two sides of the screen rather than one...I could put all my app icons along the bottom left of the screen and all my folders and documents along the bottom right for example. Or even allow (upon preference selection) the folders and documents to "slide" across the bottom left corner so that the Dock forms and "L" This would mostly be useful for freeing up space for Adobe-style Toolbars. Naturally such ideas have their drawbacks too (I'm just thinking up examples of how it could be more flexible) but such changes could work for some people - people with 20+" screens for example. Or multiple screens (even better if we could "split" the Dock)!
As for the Control Strip and Apple Menu everyone used to bitch about, I don't miss them one bit (and I used the Apple menu all the time for launching apps and accessing extensions (what are those?? ). I do miss the basic "Find File" application and its simplicity. Sherlock sucks, plain and simple. The indexing features are terribly inflexible and drag-ass slow, and as far as web searches, I'd rather use Google. I find what I need 90% of the time (on the first try) anyway.
As far as Services, I honestly haven't found much use for them. I don't know if this is simply a matter of old habits dying hard, or if perhaps they are superfluous. Can someone explain to me why I'd rather use Services to send and email or open a screenshot vs. the tools that were meant to perform those tasks? I think I'm missing something because to me it just seems like an equally time-consuming way to do things I already do - just using a different procedure.
All in all, I think OS X has matured into a much more usable product. It still has to be polished in some areas and perhaps re-evaluated in others (file systems and such) but overall I think Apple has given us and our developers something very good to work with. For me, Office X is responsive, stable (so far) and has some nice additions...especially where graphing and image display are concerned. And, though I haven't used it much yet Illustrator 10 also has some nice additions which previously would've been difficult to implement under OS 9.
I think we've come a long way since March, and that we're still moving at a good clip towards something even more elegant and user-friendly and useful (given recent leaked builds of 10.2, Photoshop 7 and others). I for one see a lot of promise and commend Apple for putting a lot of effort into making this system work better and better with each update (minor or major). They still have some serious work to do but the point is their work is showing. We're not just left hanging the way we were with the 500Mhz fiasco (though that was more MOT than Apple, even though they put themselves in position to be harmed by MOT).
In short, I'm a couple Adobe releases away from not even giving OS 9 a second thought. Did I mention I've not had one kernel panic or forced restart since installing 10.1? Definitely don't miss that....
<strong>all I want is for Apple to take chances and make inroads in UI design. they haven't. they put a gumdrop them on platinum and stuck a huge icon dock at the bottom of the screen.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
Let me join BuonRotto in reminding everyone of the incredible outrage that met such relatively small things as the removal of the Apple menu and the menubar clock. There are still folks claiming they can't be productive in OS X without spring loaded folders; hell, there are people claiming they can't be productive without an Application Menu and a Control Strip (IOW, without absolutely everything they were used to in OS 9). Severing all ties with the old Mac Desktop metaphor would have left the platform stillborn: everyone (exept a few forward-thinkers like you and Raskin) would've hated it, would've refused outright to have anything to do with it. Apple would then have had to embark on a long and costly backpedaling process ... provided they survived long enough to complete it.
What I've heard leads me to think that Apple's UI designers are very much open to introducing new metaphors into the personal computing experience. The MacNN thread Syn alluded to had some very interesting and intriguing glimpses into what Apple might do five or so years down the road. It simply isn't the time yet. They need to get their hardware situation in order, getting their desktops competitive with PCs again; they need to migrate a large user base as quickly as possible, in the process asking developers to unlearn years of knowledge in order to embrace a better way of doing things. They need to combine new, stronger hardware with a polished, industrial strength OS to refresh their current market share and to expand into new areas. Once that groundwork has been laid, it will be time to begin to move everyone into the next phase.
That said, I don't think there's a great deal left to be done with the GUI, not as long as we're still using alphanumeric keyboards and mice. The "innovations" MS is planning to bring into Windows are basically aimed at turning the desktop into a web portal, in which the distinction between local, user-stored content/apps and central, MS-stored content/apps will be (deliberately) obfuscated. Innovative maybe, but decidedly not where I want to go today (or tomorrow).
<strong>That said, I don't think there's a great deal left to be done with the GUI, not as long as we're still using alphanumeric keyboards and mice. The "innovations" MS is planning to bring into Windows are basically aimed at turning the desktop into a web portal, in which the distinction between local, user-stored content/apps and central, MS-stored content/apps will be (deliberately) obfuscated. Innovative maybe, but decidedly not where I want to go today (or tomorrow).</strong><hr></blockquote>
Specifically, the last morsel of Blackcomb I saw was primarily a web-site layout (sidebar especially -- no problem with that per se) that was driven by a sort of hunt-and-peck approach to computer intelligence: there were a bunch of buttons which spawned other areas of buttons to narrow down what it thought you wanted to do. It was essentially all wizard-driven. Very poor design from the standpoint of user control.
In our cousin thread on features wanted in 10.2, someone pointed out how the BeOS Tracker worked with metadata. In the future, I'd like to see perhaps this idea mirrored or flipped such that we have a handful of specific "trackers" or Finders for certain kinds of data, with a general find/search tools being what our current Finder evolves into (i.e., integrate Sherlock among other things). The idea here is that Apple provides solutions for things like music like what iTunes is now, plus pictures, movies (Hm, maybe QT 6 with a search/browse function linked to your Movies folder in the filesystem), etc. However, the idea would be that any app worth its salt could do this. So Photoshop 8 could manage your pictures folder and such. And other apps (3D apps, web editors, whatever) would manage their own data. All would have to be linked 4 ways: 1. the generic "Finder" app, 2. drag-n-drop, 3.cut and paste and 4. Services/scipting (which is also something I think should be tied together).
I agree completely that Microsoft's idea of "GUI innovation" is more laziness / greedy than anything else. The whole active desktop concept is a joke...the worst sort of marketing gimmick. And I'm sure whatever additions they've got planned for it are equally pathetic. They basically want to make the web your interface for everything (because it frees them up from actually having to design anything), and then naturally, they want to control the web and all the information that flows through it.
They aren't designing their interfaces to make computing easier, they're making interfaces that help to collect their users' information easier. OS X trounces any version of Windows that I've seen, in so far as GUI ingenuity. More stable than any Windows OS I've used too - by far.
Per usual, Micro-shaftware is about as elegant as a sewer rat on crack, with the obvious exception of Office X which as far as I'm concerned is the only thing MS does right. Mac BU is a company unto itself IMO. Not to hijack the thread or anything. Just displaying the "AI Spirit"
This is exactly what rm-rf /etc alluded to a while ago in the threads I pointed out at the Macnn forums... However, it seems to me there are only a handful of us interested in such features, the threads gathering the most posts on Macnn are threads discussing the importance of being able to interact with the background of icons...
I think the problem here is not Apple, it's the mac user base... They just don't seem to care about such features. They're prepared to petition to have the control-strip back, but most of them don't grasp the importance of such features...
And this is why Apple has got geniuses working around the clock, and why we are just end users. Apple should simply decide that the time has come for us to discover something new. But the "conservatives" quite probably wouldn't allow that... sigh...
<strong>This is exactly what rm-rf /etc alluded to a while ago in the threads I pointed out at the Macnn forums... However, it seems to me there are only a handful of us interested in such features, the threads gathering the most posts on Macnn are threads discussing the importance of being able to interact with the background of icons... </strong><hr></blockquote>
I enjoyed ol? rm-rf /etc dreamy interface visions too.
Too bad the faucet got cut off. I don?t know about everything he said, or how much was true, but the philosophy behind his UI visions was thought-provoking. It makes one wonde just how secretive Apple is about even the philosophy behind their work, let alone the work itself.
Apple?s UI team definitely has a number of agendas, and not all of them visible.
Anyay, I get the feeling a number of ideas epoused by rm-rf /etc either were or will turn out to be genuine, but have been delayed to be implemented in 10.2 or 10.5.
By the way... anyone else note the ?Find? button in the toolbar in the leaked 10.2 screenshots...? Not ?Sherlock,? but ?Find??
[quote]Apple's Sherlock will return in a much more powerful form... There is now a background Sherlock demon which indexes every document upon saving! File find has been decoupled from Sherlock! Search field is back and it is much like the field in Mail.app and iTunes, it starts to display results even before you've finished typing the key words, quite stunning. Indexed 7200 files in home directory < 2 minutes, although I'm not sure if these were partially indexed and the index was only updated... Instant matches to your documents in the finder window! Rudimentary support of grep syntax in search field...
Sherlock.app now features an interface more in tune with OS X. Gone are the icon wells replaced by a sleeker toolbar! Far more sites, the Reference section now supports Encyclopaedia Brittanica and OED (Brit NeXTers should be happy...). Much faster app launch time, and more responsive UI. Shopping features are beefed up also..<hr></blockquote>
Couldn't there be a way for Apple to implement some of the great little UNIX toys we've inherited into the OS's functionality? I mean, I always use "find ~ -name "nameoffilehere"" from the terminal when I'm looking for a particular file. It's faster and it just works. There are a ton of other options that can be added too. This is a tool that's already there, but needs a GUI front-end. I'm sure that's what their doing with the "find file" option. But what about the other things? There are hundreds of things under the surface that are never going to be used by 95% of the user base if they are not brought to the forefront. Just bringing these features out would be a major step forward.
Isn't "grep" a unix-y kind of Sherlock at least as far as the indexing goes?
And dammit, I just tossed those screenshots of 10.2, but I'll take your word for it.
Nice to have a Finder that can find things! Moving Sherlock more exclusively towards 'net searches and shopping is fine by me. I understand the desire at one time to blur the boundaries of the internet and the local machine, but it was, after all, not much of an internet search as much as a web search. The other kinds of internet searches are taken care of from apps like the Address Book, iTunes, the Finder (for network drives at least -- let's hear for the Network Browser), etc.
Hint to Omnigroup: perhaps a toolbar item to open Sherlock or do a quick search with it in the future? For that matter, how about Apple adding a few quick Sherlock searches to Services. Of course, scripting already can do this, and if services were combined with scripting, it would already be taken care of.
I can see it already, when you press the "find" button in the toolbar:
the window transforms itself in a blank window, changes dimensions, and displays the results of your search real-time... You're even able to save your search, but the contents aren't saved, only the query is... ie if you looked for all .movs over 20MBs in size, everytime you opened the query, the results will be up to date...
Oops, that's the BeOS...
Seriously though, this is quite possible already with the built-in UNIX locate (check the app Xlocate on versiontracker), all you need is to make the database update itself everytime a file is saved, and hack a few features around it...
Of course, we're assuming a lot considering there already is a "Find" button on the finder toolbar; it opens Sherlock of course.
I eventually found this thread's sister on MacNN, and mentioned that a kind of traditional Finder that simply displays the filesystem in some graphic form would still be useful to many, like how a terminal/console app is useful to many today. It wouldn't be there for everyone, but the power users.
The trick is with the idea of multiple Finders/browsers/trackers is to limit their number, plus the decision to either integrate them into their target applications like iTune's browsing feature is up to debate. Photoshop has a file browser now, would other third-party apps that replace or improve on the basic Apple ones provide their own kind of browser, or would there be a plug-in for those apps to use the built-in browser, an API to create a browser (there sort of is one now), or would it be a separate app? It comes down to what Apple and developers can agree on.
I guess the spirit left because rumors only really circulate around unreleased products. And though we're all eagerly awaiting each new update to OS X, the meat and bones are all there, and it's the little tweaks and subtle advances that are of interest now - details which can't really be substantially backed up as being possible because there aren't teasers offered in developers notes, at conferences, or in the general buzz that surrounds an imminent launch.
I don't know about everyone else, but I'm still pestering Apple fairly regularly via the OS X feedback form, looking for little tweaks - I desperately want an option of color banding in list and column views, as in iTunes. It makes life so much easier when you're going through folders and folders of FCP material.
I agree that Sherlock needs a major overhaul. The reason I don't really use it because it's hidden away as an application. I prefer Google for internet searches (and have a search shortcut in OmniWeb), and always have a terminal open for finding stuff. I think Apple would be advised to find a way to integrate the various parts of Sherlock into the Finder.
Oh, and one of my favorite shareware apps right now is LaunchBar, which makes finding files so much easier!
<strong>And though we're all eagerly awaiting each new update to OS X, the meat and bones are all there, and it's the little tweaks and subtle advances that are of interest now</strong><hr></blockquote>
We sometimes try to make threads about these little tweaks we'd like to see, but they get side-tracked and we talk about XP vs. OS X or NeXT vs. Apple and such.
I kept a laundry list of this stuff that now I can't find. Maybe we could try with a thread just with bullet points, no explanations or editorials.
PS: Launch Bar is sweet stuff. The other shareware I use is DropIcon for converting all my old pictures' icons into the 128 x 128 ones. Makes cataloging and browsing much easier.
For instance, I'd love to see a simple graphical representation of how full a disk is. This is available with the BeOS' OpenTracker:
I could think up a hundred little things that'd make every day usage of the OS more pleasurable... However Apple probably wouldn't incoporate them... Maybe it's time for an Open-Finder, what has Apple got to lose?
[quote]Maybe it's time for an Open-Finder, what has Apple got to lose?<hr></blockquote>
I would readily support opening everything behind the interface, but I feel that if Apple open sourced the whole thing, the Finder interface could get nasty very quickly.
If the Finder were to be opened in some capacity, Apple would either have to keep the Finder interface closed or, preferably, manage public input in a tightly-controlled fashion. I would love to see more of the innovations and refinements that come from the Mac community work their way into Apple products; just not at the whim of software engineers.
True, but it's only an app, and the level of intergation woth the system is not nearly as high as that of the Finder.
I think that if an Open-Finder effort is properly organized, along with the lines of the Open-Tracker, ie only one codebase, it could work out to be pretty interesting. Apple could incorporate whatever they wished in their regular codebase, and geeks could use the full-blown Open-Finder. If one looks at the state of the Tracker for an example, it has lost almost nothing since the source was opened. Localisation was done by hobbyistst, and many features, such as the above live icon, have been added...
One thing that I haven't heard much talk about is the Speech capabilities in OS X. I think that Apple should focus on that a little more.
Just imagine a computer that, when you turned it on for the first time, greeted you with a voice and allowed you to speak responses into it? That would surely make a good impression upon the user.
What Apple should do is work closely with IBM and license ViaVoice, or a subset thereof, and implement it into the OS. It would be really nice if i could use the correction features in, say, Microsoft Word without having to do anything except to install Word onto the computer if it wasn't there. The system should also fully support voice navigation to the point where a keyboard and mouse would be unnecessary for normal usage.
<strong>One thing that I haven't heard much talk about is the Speech capabilities in OS X. I think that Apple should focus on that a little more.
Just imagine a computer that, when you turned it on for the first time, greeted you with a voice and allowed you to speak responses into it? That would surely make a good impression upon the user.</strong><hr></blockquote>
You'll be able to do this when iListen for OS X comes out in the near future. Admittedly, it'd be more convenient if Apple integrated it into the OS, but...
Comments
Raskin always talked about that idea of the GUI-as-airport (not the product, the place). I have qualms with it, but anyone care to add to that idea?
I wonder if the GUI can be more or less split into simple "slop space" and "closets" for all things, apps, docs, etc. A studio metaphor. I suppose it's too un-tidy for the computer to handle -- probably too complex to handle for the metaphor's own sake.
Or perhaps a building metaphor? Core, skin, fit-out. Walls, and floors all under one roof? Eh, methinks I'm being a bit too literary with this.
What was the Amiga workbench like?
I think those issues were all resolved within a month of 10.1's release. The release itself provided the added stability and speed increases, as well as some minor additions in terms of workspace flexibility. Then came all the great shareware tools (something we didn't get much of with the legacy Mac OS until it was very mature (old)). TinkerTool allowed me to place the dock where I needed it and customize the way in which certain applications displayed fonts. Windowshade X does the obvious...brings back the ability to assign various window-reducing behaviors (including our long-lost favorite) to any window's title bar or minimize button. And there's even a Teminal script out there that allows you to remove the Dock's background texture and / or make it more transparent.
In short, interface-wise I now find OS X to be just as comfortable a working space as I found OS 9 to be, and more so in certain respects. I never thought I'd learn to like the Column Viewer for example, but now I use it all the time and not because I'm forced to but because I like it. My only gripe is that Finder windows still don't remember all of their size parameters correctly (mostly as related to column widths). That and it doesn't allow you to sort by type within a column (or even all columns by default). But these are relatively minor things in my mind.
Obviously improvements need to be made still. The afore-mentioned (and often requested) Spring-loaded folders will be a *very* welcome addition to the Finder. Some method of visually labeling folders would be nice too as having more than a couple in the Dock at once makes for an obvious problem design-wise / visually. I also think a more radical approach could be taken with the Dock. Perhaps the ability to have it use two sides of the screen rather than one...I could put all my app icons along the bottom left of the screen and all my folders and documents along the bottom right for example. Or even allow (upon preference selection) the folders and documents to "slide" across the bottom left corner so that the Dock forms and "L" This would mostly be useful for freeing up space for Adobe-style Toolbars. Naturally such ideas have their drawbacks too (I'm just thinking up examples of how it could be more flexible) but such changes could work for some people - people with 20+" screens for example. Or multiple screens (even better if we could "split" the Dock)!
As for the Control Strip and Apple Menu everyone used to bitch about, I don't miss them one bit (and I used the Apple menu all the time for launching apps and accessing extensions (what are those??
As far as Services, I honestly haven't found much use for them. I don't know if this is simply a matter of old habits dying hard, or if perhaps they are superfluous. Can someone explain to me why I'd rather use Services to send and email or open a screenshot vs. the tools that were meant to perform those tasks? I think I'm missing something because to me it just seems like an equally time-consuming way to do things I already do - just using a different procedure.
All in all, I think OS X has matured into a much more usable product. It still has to be polished in some areas and perhaps re-evaluated in others (file systems and such) but overall I think Apple has given us and our developers something very good to work with. For me, Office X is responsive, stable (so far) and has some nice additions...especially where graphing and image display are concerned. And, though I haven't used it much yet Illustrator 10 also has some nice additions which previously would've been difficult to implement under OS 9.
I think we've come a long way since March, and that we're still moving at a good clip towards something even more elegant and user-friendly and useful (given recent leaked builds of 10.2, Photoshop 7 and others). I for one see a lot of promise and commend Apple for putting a lot of effort into making this system work better and better with each update (minor or major). They still have some serious work to do but the point is their work is showing. We're not just left hanging the way we were with the 500Mhz fiasco (though that was more MOT than Apple, even though they put themselves in position to be harmed by MOT).
In short, I'm a couple Adobe releases away from not even giving OS 9 a second thought. Did I mention I've not had one kernel panic or forced restart since installing 10.1? Definitely don't miss that....
<strong>all I want is for Apple to take chances and make inroads in UI design. they haven't. they put a gumdrop them on platinum and stuck a huge icon dock at the bottom of the screen.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
Let me join BuonRotto in reminding everyone of the incredible outrage that met such relatively small things as the removal of the Apple menu and the menubar clock. There are still folks claiming they can't be productive in OS X without spring loaded folders; hell, there are people claiming they can't be productive without an Application Menu and a Control Strip (IOW, without absolutely everything they were used to in OS 9). Severing all ties with the old Mac Desktop metaphor would have left the platform stillborn: everyone (exept a few forward-thinkers like you and Raskin) would've hated it, would've refused outright to have anything to do with it. Apple would then have had to embark on a long and costly backpedaling process ... provided they survived long enough to complete it.
What I've heard leads me to think that Apple's UI designers are very much open to introducing new metaphors into the personal computing experience. The MacNN thread Syn alluded to had some very interesting and intriguing glimpses into what Apple might do five or so years down the road. It simply isn't the time yet. They need to get their hardware situation in order, getting their desktops competitive with PCs again; they need to migrate a large user base as quickly as possible, in the process asking developers to unlearn years of knowledge in order to embrace a better way of doing things. They need to combine new, stronger hardware with a polished, industrial strength OS to refresh their current market share and to expand into new areas. Once that groundwork has been laid, it will be time to begin to move everyone into the next phase.
That said, I don't think there's a great deal left to be done with the GUI, not as long as we're still using alphanumeric keyboards and mice. The "innovations" MS is planning to bring into Windows are basically aimed at turning the desktop into a web portal, in which the distinction between local, user-stored content/apps and central, MS-stored content/apps will be (deliberately) obfuscated. Innovative maybe, but decidedly not where I want to go today (or tomorrow).
<strong>That said, I don't think there's a great deal left to be done with the GUI, not as long as we're still using alphanumeric keyboards and mice. The "innovations" MS is planning to bring into Windows are basically aimed at turning the desktop into a web portal, in which the distinction between local, user-stored content/apps and central, MS-stored content/apps will be (deliberately) obfuscated. Innovative maybe, but decidedly not where I want to go today (or tomorrow).</strong><hr></blockquote>
Specifically, the last morsel of Blackcomb I saw was primarily a web-site layout (sidebar especially -- no problem with that per se) that was driven by a sort of hunt-and-peck approach to computer intelligence: there were a bunch of buttons which spawned other areas of buttons to narrow down what it thought you wanted to do. It was essentially all wizard-driven. Very poor design from the standpoint of user control.
In our cousin thread on features wanted in 10.2, someone pointed out how the BeOS Tracker worked with metadata. In the future, I'd like to see perhaps this idea mirrored or flipped such that we have a handful of specific "trackers" or Finders for certain kinds of data, with a general find/search tools being what our current Finder evolves into (i.e., integrate Sherlock among other things). The idea here is that Apple provides solutions for things like music like what iTunes is now, plus pictures, movies (Hm, maybe QT 6 with a search/browse function linked to your Movies folder in the filesystem), etc. However, the idea would be that any app worth its salt could do this. So Photoshop 8 could manage your pictures folder and such. And other apps (3D apps, web editors, whatever) would manage their own data. All would have to be linked 4 ways: 1. the generic "Finder" app, 2. drag-n-drop, 3.cut and paste and 4. Services/scipting (which is also something I think should be tied together).
Good idea? Bad idea?
They aren't designing their interfaces to make computing easier, they're making interfaces that help to collect their users' information easier. OS X trounces any version of Windows that I've seen, in so far as GUI ingenuity. More stable than any Windows OS I've used too - by far.
Per usual, Micro-shaftware is about as elegant as a sewer rat on crack, with the obvious exception of Office X which as far as I'm concerned is the only thing MS does right. Mac BU is a company unto itself IMO. Not to hijack the thread or anything. Just displaying the "AI Spirit"
[ 12-27-2001: Message edited by: Moogs ? ]</p>
I think the problem here is not Apple, it's the mac user base... They just don't seem to care about such features. They're prepared to petition to have the control-strip back, but most of them don't grasp the importance of such features...
And this is why Apple has got geniuses working around the clock, and why we are just end users. Apple should simply decide that the time has come for us to discover something new. But the "conservatives" quite probably wouldn't allow that... sigh...
<strong>This is exactly what rm-rf /etc alluded to a while ago in the threads I pointed out at the Macnn forums... However, it seems to me there are only a handful of us interested in such features, the threads gathering the most posts on Macnn are threads discussing the importance of being able to interact with the background of icons...
I enjoyed ol? rm-rf /etc dreamy interface visions too.
Too bad the faucet got cut off. I don?t know about everything he said, or how much was true, but the philosophy behind his UI visions was thought-provoking. It makes one wonde just how secretive Apple is about even the philosophy behind their work, let alone the work itself.
Apple?s UI team definitely has a number of agendas, and not all of them visible.
Anyay, I get the feeling a number of ideas epoused by rm-rf /etc either were or will turn out to be genuine, but have been delayed to be implemented in 10.2 or 10.5.
By the way... anyone else note the ?Find? button in the toolbar in the leaked 10.2 screenshots...? Not ?Sherlock,? but ?Find??
Interestin?.
hehe, hadn't seen it until now... check this out from rm-rf /etc's great <a href="http://forums.macnn.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=39&t=002568"; target="_blank">thread</a>:
[quote]Apple's Sherlock will return in a much more powerful form... There is now a background Sherlock demon which indexes every document upon saving! File find has been decoupled from Sherlock! Search field is back and it is much like the field in Mail.app and iTunes, it starts to display results even before you've finished typing the key words, quite stunning. Indexed 7200 files in home directory < 2 minutes, although I'm not sure if these were partially indexed and the index was only updated... Instant matches to your documents in the finder window! Rudimentary support of grep syntax in search field...
Sherlock.app now features an interface more in tune with OS X. Gone are the icon wells replaced by a sleeker toolbar! Far more sites, the Reference section now supports Encyclopaedia Brittanica and OED (Brit NeXTers should be happy...). Much faster app launch time, and more responsive UI. Shopping features are beefed up also..<hr></blockquote>
could this be it?
[ 12-28-2001: Message edited by: SYN ]</p>
And dammit, I just tossed those screenshots of 10.2, but I'll take your word for it.
Nice to have a Finder that can find things! Moving Sherlock more exclusively towards 'net searches and shopping is fine by me. I understand the desire at one time to blur the boundaries of the internet and the local machine, but it was, after all, not much of an internet search as much as a web search. The other kinds of internet searches are taken care of from apps like the Address Book, iTunes, the Finder (for network drives at least -- let's hear for the Network Browser), etc.
Hint to Omnigroup: perhaps a toolbar item to open Sherlock or do a quick search with it in the future? For that matter, how about Apple adding a few quick Sherlock searches to Services. Of course, scripting already can do this, and if services were combined with scripting, it would already be taken care of.
the window transforms itself in a blank window, changes dimensions, and displays the results of your search real-time... You're even able to save your search, but the contents aren't saved, only the query is... ie if you looked for all .movs over 20MBs in size, everytime you opened the query, the results will be up to date...
Oops, that's the BeOS...
Seriously though, this is quite possible already with the built-in UNIX locate (check the app Xlocate on versiontracker), all you need is to make the database update itself everytime a file is saved, and hack a few features around it...
[ 12-28-2001: Message edited by: SYN ]</p>
I eventually found this thread's sister on MacNN, and mentioned that a kind of traditional Finder that simply displays the filesystem in some graphic form would still be useful to many, like how a terminal/console app is useful to many today. It wouldn't be there for everyone, but the power users.
The trick is with the idea of multiple Finders/browsers/trackers is to limit their number, plus the decision to either integrate them into their target applications like iTune's browsing feature is up to debate. Photoshop has a file browser now, would other third-party apps that replace or improve on the basic Apple ones provide their own kind of browser, or would there be a plug-in for those apps to use the built-in browser, an API to create a browser (there sort of is one now), or would it be a separate app? It comes down to what Apple and developers can agree on.
I don't know about everyone else, but I'm still pestering Apple fairly regularly via the OS X feedback form, looking for little tweaks - I desperately want an option of color banding in list and column views, as in iTunes. It makes life so much easier when you're going through folders and folders of FCP material.
I agree that Sherlock needs a major overhaul. The reason I don't really use it because it's hidden away as an application. I prefer Google for internet searches (and have a search shortcut in OmniWeb), and always have a terminal open for finding stuff. I think Apple would be advised to find a way to integrate the various parts of Sherlock into the Finder.
Oh, and one of my favorite shareware apps right now is LaunchBar, which makes finding files so much easier!
<strong>And though we're all eagerly awaiting each new update to OS X, the meat and bones are all there, and it's the little tweaks and subtle advances that are of interest now</strong><hr></blockquote>
We sometimes try to make threads about these little tweaks we'd like to see, but they get side-tracked and we talk about XP vs. OS X or NeXT vs. Apple and such.
I kept a laundry list of this stuff that now I can't find. Maybe we could try with a thread just with bullet points, no explanations or editorials.
PS: Launch Bar is sweet stuff. The other shareware I use is DropIcon for converting all my old pictures' icons into the 128 x 128 ones. Makes cataloging and browsing much easier.
For instance, I'd love to see a simple graphical representation of how full a disk is. This is available with the BeOS' OpenTracker:
I could think up a hundred little things that'd make every day usage of the OS more pleasurable... However Apple probably wouldn't incoporate them... Maybe it's time for an Open-Finder, what has Apple got to lose?
edit: Belle glad to see you here!
[ 12-30-2001: Message edited by: SYN ]</p>
I would readily support opening everything behind the interface, but I feel that if Apple open sourced the whole thing, the Finder interface could get nasty very quickly.
If the Finder were to be opened in some capacity, Apple would either have to keep the Finder interface closed or, preferably, manage public input in a tightly-controlled fashion. I would love to see more of the innovations and refinements that come from the Mac community work their way into Apple products; just not at the whim of software engineers.
[ 12-30-2001: Message edited by: BuonRotto ]</p>
I think that if an Open-Finder effort is properly organized, along with the lines of the Open-Tracker, ie only one codebase, it could work out to be pretty interesting. Apple could incorporate whatever they wished in their regular codebase, and geeks could use the full-blown Open-Finder. If one looks at the state of the Tracker for an example, it has lost almost nothing since the source was opened. Localisation was done by hobbyistst, and many features, such as the above live icon, have been added...
An Open-Finder is but a dream, unfortunately
Just imagine a computer that, when you turned it on for the first time, greeted you with a voice and allowed you to speak responses into it? That would surely make a good impression upon the user.
What Apple should do is work closely with IBM and license ViaVoice, or a subset thereof, and implement it into the OS. It would be really nice if i could use the correction features in, say, Microsoft Word without having to do anything except to install Word onto the computer if it wasn't there. The system should also fully support voice navigation to the point where a keyboard and mouse would be unnecessary for normal usage.
<strong>One thing that I haven't heard much talk about is the Speech capabilities in OS X. I think that Apple should focus on that a little more.
Just imagine a computer that, when you turned it on for the first time, greeted you with a voice and allowed you to speak responses into it? That would surely make a good impression upon the user.</strong><hr></blockquote>
You'll be able to do this when iListen for OS X comes out in the near future. Admittedly, it'd be more convenient if Apple integrated it into the OS, but...