The Space Toast Pages

Matthew Rasmussen's journal of journals on various topics of interest, published here, there or somewhere since 1999.

Mac OS X Interface Criticisms

For the statement of purpose, skip to the end. Let's get into this...

• Slow interface elements. When you click on a menu in Windows XP, there's often a "meh" moment where it hesitates before opening. As far back as System 6, clicking on a Mac menu meant, menu: now. Two Mac interface elements have always been painfully slow, though: Dashboard and Spotlight.
• Dashboard. Great idea. Bad execution. I always found Dashboard unusably slow on my G5, but figured I'd use it all the time when I got an Intel. I was half right. It's about twice as fast. Which means it can still spend 10 seconds thinking about nothing of apparent difficulty before letting me type a word into my dictionary. I only have six widgets. Dashboard needs to be rewritten from the ground up for instantaneous speed.
• Spotlight. Far too ubiquitous in the system. If I want to find a file, I go to the Finder and hit the standard key combination Command-F. If I want an address, I go to Address Book. If I want an email, I go to Mail. If I hit Command-Space, anywhere, any time, it's by accident. Usually, I don't even mean to open the Help menu. Lurking behind either accident is a judder as the Mac thinks hard about opening... a search box.
• The default Finder window. What IS all this crap? The titlebar is half an inch tall. I've got a search box which, if I click on it and begin typing, MAY start searching in the current folder, or may jump out to the whole disk. It may decide to do Contents or File Name. If I "x" out of it, it will dump me back to list view when I was in column view. There's a gear-widgety thing that I've never used; it does nothing but duplicate the File menu. Most of the stuff on the left makes sense, but once again I've got search; can we just pick a place for search and leave it there? The bottom of the window is another quarter inch tall, and empty except for one line of text that could fit a dozen times in all the wasted space up top. Finally, there's a little tic-tac in the top right that hides all the useless stuff -- as well as the useful stuff in the left-hand pane.
• Disk Images. I'm old enough to remember copying between two disks on a Mac Plus with no hard drive -- using "Eject" instead of "Put Away" so you could drag and drop a file from one disk to a greyed-out picture of the other, and spend the next several minutes swapping disks physically. Why do I bring this up now? Because the virtual disk concept is lost on all but the most propellerheaded users. Look at your mom's computer: she's still got every installer and .dmg file she ever downloaded. She doesn't get that you download a file, the file becomes a "disk," you copy from the "disk," then you "eject the disk," and delete the file. (No mom, deleting the disk image won't delete the copy of Firefox you just installed...) Applications shouldn't have installers and outside-the-bundle files in 2010 anyway, but that's a much wider abuse of the Application concept in modern graphical user interfaces.
• One-click application opening. Have we forgotten how to double click? How often do you accidentally begin the slow loading of a large application because it's next to the one you wanted on the dock? Here's a consistent workflow: Hover reveals nothing new but indicates that the object can act; Click hilights the object and reveals options; Second click performs the default action. (In an application's case, starting up.)
• Dot-3 file extensions. What kind of teletype-era UNIX cancer is this? The file NAME is the file NAME. Nothing. More. The file TYPE is the file TYPE. You had this solved in LisaOS, never mind in the first version of the MacOS that was written when I was four. Two hidden pieces of data, each more than three characters long: The file type, and the file creator. The whole point of a graphical user interface is that the file system shows us -- with it's graphics-ical things -- what type of file we're dealing with. Which leads us to...
• Thumbnail icons. Unless the image the file contains is not much more complicated than an icon, an icon-sized preview is unlikely to reveal much of value to the eye at a glance. Below a certain size, say about that of your fist at arm's length (your thumb thumbnail is far too small), images become jumbles, like a big table of numbers. My text documents all have thumbnail icons. They all look the same. Their icons do not reveal the file type or creator, which was supposed to be the point of an icon. It's possible we need to abandon miniature icons in their entirety.
• No application should ever steal focus from another application. Period. If I open three applications and then click back on the one I was working in, I should never be ripped back out of it. If I insert a CD, iTunes has no right to demand my attention whenever it gets around to deciding what the CD is.
• The jumping icon on the dock is much too annoying for developers to have access to it. Too many abuse it. Progress finished? So f***ing what? Leave me the hell alone. Apple's own Software Update abuses it, constantly demanding attention until it's allowed to tell the user that, eventually, a restart will be required.
• The Finder vs. the open and save dialog. The special view of the file system in the open/save dialog made beautiful sense when we could only have one application open at a time. That was twenty years ago. There's no more need to duplicate the functionality, especially in a truncated manner. How should we decide where a new file is saved to? We click Save, and the top Finder window pops up with the file awaiting a name.

And briefly noted:

• If an application is going to take more than half a second to open, I should be able to tell it to stop.
• It's easy to browse FTP servers from the Finder, and it feels like a natural use of the filesystem. So why is it read only after so many years?
• Safari Command-arrowkey navigation doesn't work when a text box is hilighted. The page itself gets to decide when a text box is selected.
• Connecting to and rebuffering an internet stream locks up the entire iTunes interface with a modal dialog.
• *Sorting in column view. I'm asterisking this one because I understand it's finally been implemented in Snow Leopard. The trouble is, we should have been able to sort Finder columns the same ways we can sort Finder lists a long, long time ago.

I was making Hypercard games when I was ten on a Mac Plus. I learned Animation:Master when it was Playmation on a Quadra. I was modding Escape Velocity with Ray Dream Designer and ResEdit on a 60Mhz Performa. I won most of my film festival awards for a 12 minute short animated on a 500Mhz G3 iMac bubble. I freelanced after college with a G5 tower. I remember Strata, KPT, Aldus and Fractal Design, and I'm old enough to remember the MCP when it was just a chess program! I may know what I'm talking about.

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