
Snow Leopard screenshots show interface tweaks - twampss
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/02/23/snow_leopard_screenshots_show_interface_tweaks.html
======
DLWormwood
> A new Put Back option in the Finder's Action menu automatically returns a
> trashed item to the folder where it came from.

Meh. OS 9 and earlier had "Put Away" which did this and more. It also ejected
drives, dismounted network volumes, and allowed the user the temporarily store
files pulled out of folders on the desktop. You know, in line with the
_original metaphor_ of user at a desk the user manipulated documents and
folders on.

(Yes, I'm still grumpy from how Apple screwed up the "spatial" nature of the
original Finder.)

~~~
jwilliams
Finder has to be the weakest part of the OS X experience at the moment.

~~~
tmilewski
Very much agreed.

~~~
unalone
Finder's being ported to Cocoa might be a sign that Apple's looking to fix
things? I hope so.

I haven't noticed recently because now I use Quicksilver to browse everything,
and it's incredibly more efficient. I wish Apple would just make Quicksilver a
built-in feature of their OS.

------
tmilewski
"While it's rumored that Apple is keeping some more significant interface
changes close to its chest at this time..."

I sure hope so because I see no reason to get it with, basically, only those
changes.

~~~
herval
the reason is probably "let's not release all the revolutionary UI stuff we
had thought at the same time, so we can send a dozen other felines with minor
enhancements, one every year".

------
herval
Two features I miss from Win/Gnome/KDE world: cut+paste and merging of folders
(when you move something to a folder which has another with the same name, you
actually override it in OSX). It's probably just me. Meh...

------
amichail
Is it just coincidence that both Snow Leopard and Windows 7 are focusing on
performance improvements?

~~~
bep
Vista didn't fit in netbooks. They had to make the improvements or support XP
for more time.

~~~
amichail
So why is Apple also working on this? Do they want to build netbooks?

~~~
unalone
Think of it from Apple's point of view. Right now, you're leagues ahead of the
competition feature-wise. You have all the publicity. Your competitor launched
an OS that got mocked for ripping off of you, then got criticized for breaking
in a lot of really simple, stupid ways. Meanwhile, your last release added an
enormous heap of features, unified all of your various features under a
single, ultrasimplistic interface.

The smart move isn't expansion. Apple covers more space than any other company
and any other out-of-the-box operating system. Now they're ahead, and they can
spend time working on the little details, emphasizing perfectionism. They can
slim down and make things faster and more enjoyable. They _could_ add more
features, but right now why bother?

When you look at the things Snow Leopard _is_ adding you get a good idea of
Apple's plan. They're rumored to be making Quicktime Pro free, which means
suddenly it becomes as powerful as Preview (which is an incredible, overlooked
application). They're possibly adding support for other video codecs out-of-
the-box, which means they're doing the one thing Quicktime ought to have done
from the beginning.

Meanwhile, this new Stacks view gives them spatial navigation from the Dock
with an Apple twist, which is excellent. I used a stack that used the list
view for navigation and gave up on it because it was too ugly and didn't let
me drag. Now, you can browse your computer with a single click on your Dock if
you want to. That's excellent. It begins to provide an alternative to the
Finder, and while it's not solving the real problems, it solves the main one
of "let me get to my stuff quickly and attractively".

At the same time, they're refining their applications. iMovie gets the
features that 08 lost. iPhoto increases its consumer focus. GarageBand's big
new thing isn't the lessons but the refined interface, which has made it one
of my favorite OS X applications. Pages gets fullscreen mode, Keynote gets
themes, Numbers gets extensibility.

They've got a huge featureset. Now they can focus on making it all elegant and
streamlined, even more so than it is now. I'm very excited for this release
for that reason. I suspect it'll be a delight to use.

~~~
micks56
I didn't know about all of those features.

The big one I did know about is Grand Central, software that takes advantage
of multi-cores. It is supposed to spread the load across the cores in your
processor. That is the feature I am waiting for.

Building that now makes sense to me. I have a dual core processor that barely
uses the second core. Plus my dual core will soon be on the low end of cores
per processor.

~~~
unalone
I'm not a huge developer, so I'm not certain of how Grand Central will work
out for the end user. It does sound promising, though.

