Review by Kendall L. Vaughan

In recent years it has seemed that Apple has been shifting more attention to iOS. While this makes sense given that they have been getting better market share with iOS it is too bad that development of the Mac OS seems to be slowing down a bit. While Snow Leopard shows a lot of advancements from when OS X first came out it certainly is not a mature product. One of the biggest advancements has been spotlight which was announced in Tiger. Steve Jobs wasn’t exaggerating when he said that spotlight alone was worth the buying Tiger. While there have been some nice advancements to spotlight since then it still lacks one important feature in that there is no good way to tag files in the OS. With out tagging it is hard to find the file that you are looking for. I don’t see why there isn’t at least a tagging option under the save as menu. The save as menu has been designed to be so minimalist that they could easy take advantage of the room to add in some tagging features. A tagging cloud could also be an important addition. Also there has been this weird bug in spotlight for the longest time where it shows a folder icon for everything that is a group of items. It doesn’t matter if it is a playlist or an iPhoto event or whatever you just get this generic folder icon. The problem with this is that I will often have events, playlists, and regular folders that have the same name. If they all use the icon there is no way to differentiate them from the others.

When browsing the finder I find that I often want to go back to some place that I was at just a few hours earlier. It would be helpful if Apple brought Safari’s history feature over to the Finder. They already wrote this feature so it makes sense that they would bring it across since it would hardly even take them any time. Another feature that I think would take little time to write would be if Mac OS automatically relaunched all the programs that you had open the last time the computer was on. They already have this feature for the Finder why can’t it do it for other program windows as well? I also miss the sidebar icons that would expand when you would enlarge a window in Tiger. I don’t see why they took that feature out.

Some of the most interesting features to the Mac OS have never made it into a shipping release of Mac OS. They have been features in the beta versions only. The beta of Leopard let you grab random files to make a stack in the dock. If you drag random files in to the dock now you will get separate files for each item. This takes up lots of space in your dock and can make it smaller, a big problem if you have a small laptop monitor. The only way to put multiple files in to the dock is if they all happen to be in the same folder. This isn’t anywhere near as handy.

The Safari 4 beta had a feature that would display the tabs across the top of the toolbar area. This helped to make the toolbar smaller so that you could see more of the webpage. It also made it difficult to drag the title bar as their where few places to grab it due to having a close box and and handle to drag and move each tab. I really liked this solution and it could have been improved by getting rid of the close button on the tab. Most everyone knows about the Command-W shortcut and that is sufficient (if they don’t know that then they really should learn it.) I liked this implementation of tabs because if you only had one window open you could drag it into a group of other tabs. With Safari 5 there is no way to drag a single window into a group of tabs, you have to have two or more widows open to pull this off. This next feature dates waaaay back. In the original version of the Mac OS X public beta 10 years ago there was a features called single window mode the cleared out the clutter by only having one window open while single window mode was activated. This feature was apparently taken out because it confused people who didn’t know why only one window was open at a time. The way I see it is if we can have a caps lock key on our keyboard lets you type only capital letters at a given time then why can’t you have a key that lets you use only one window at a time? Perhaps it could light up just like the caps lock key can. I think there really needs to be a way to cut down on window clutter so it is worth putting a key on the keyboard that does that. Perhaps it could be on of the F5 and F6 keys that currently aren’t assigned a function? Also going back even further in time I have been told that managing fonts in Mac OS 9 was a lot easier due to their being only one fonts folder. If that could be easy again then it would be a big improvement.

I think it would make sense to merge many of their applications together. If you think about a lot of apps different functions they are mainly to browse the files and then do a few basic operations to those files. For an example iPhoto is basically the Finder for photos, iTunes is basically the Finder for music, video, podcasts, etc. What I could envision would be if you started with a window that looked like the Finder with the same filter bar that you have today that lets you pick the kind of file to filter by. Once you select the file the sidebar and the toolbar would match to match that particular type of file. In other words if you selected music the sidebar would instantly change include Genius, Playlists, store etc, the toolbar would instantly include the play button, rewind, fast-forward, etc. This basic concept was played around with in Windows XP but it only include some of the features that you would need. For an example you would select an image file and it would give you some options for making proof sheets but not a lot more. This feature was later removed in the next version of Windows. I don’t think that the feature was taken out due to it being a bad idea I think it was taken out because it only did a small amount of what people would expect a photo program to do. But imagine what it would be like if the Finder did all the basic features that you would expect of very basic photo navigating and editing software? Can you image how convenient that would be? You wouldn’t have to keep switching between several programs that all have the same basic function (searching for files) when you had to go search for a file there would one be one application to go to. The functionality would of course be limited to some extent. You wouldn’t want to turn the program into Photoshop. You would just want to include enough basic features to easily navigate files and to do some lite editing.

Also I think the it is time to get rid of the hierarchy concept. With the introduction of the iPad we can see that we don’t need to depend on this way of searching for files. iPad search works fine without having to go into a folder and then into another folder and then into another folder. I think the concept of collections would work as a fine replacement. The files shouldn’t need to be in a certain location on the hard disk in order to be grouped together.

There are also a lot of little fine tuning features that need to be addressed. Spaces have no way of being named just generically label by numbers. You can quickly bring all windows from different spaces into one but there is no way to put them back in the spaces where they originally came from. The background in Dashboard is very light which makes it look cluttered if any windows are open. I think the background should be darker. If there is any confusion to how to get back to the regular view then have a close dashboard button. Sidebars often get filled up with lots of smart folders, smart playlists etc. I think it would make sense to just have an option to show the active smart folder so that the rest of the space could be use for other items or to just show some blank space if you don’t want a lot going on, or to use use that space to make the icons larger like they did in Tiger. The rest of the smart folders could then reappear using a show / hide button like in iTunes 10.

And finally each version of Windows usually come with one or two features that would be nice to see on the Mac. The one feature that really stood out to me in Windows 7 was how you can search for applications in the start menu and then get a list of recent documents from that application once you hover the mouse over the application name. It would be nice to see this on the Mac with one big improvement. Often when I launch an application I usually open several documents at one time. I would be nice if there were some check boxes to click on to open multiple documents at the same time. Perhaps they could even have a way of showing if a file was part of a certain collection, playlist, album, photo event, etc and showing a related icon next to the file that is was a part of. By adding these additional adjustments they are not just taking an idea but building upon it.

I would wrap up by saying that OS 10 has come a long ways in the 10 years it has been out but Apple shouldn’t slow down. There is still a lot to be done.