Aqua To See Leopard Refresh?

[BillyShears]

True, but consider if instead of going to the Apps folder, you drag it to the dock... From there on out, it's always 1 click away.

Yeah, that was my point exactly. I may have been unclear, since I didn't quote the full part I maybe should have. SiliconAddict was saying Windows' Start menu was easier to use "out of the box" than the OS X way, since there's no way to easily list all your apps.

I was saying it's virtually the same number of clicks if you don't use the dock at all. So Windows isn't easier to use that way.

If you *do* use the dock, the OS X way is better, especially since the most commonly used apps start in the dock, and it's easier to add an app to the dock. (Also the OS X way, I think, is more intuitive, since it treats apps as files.)

 

[SpaceJello]

SPACES ICON!

If that is any indication of Apple's new GUI scheme, I am afraid that I will scream. Funny how I was quoted for my critique of the Time Machine icon, but no one talked about the Spaces Icon. Look at it on the dock next to the other icons, it's a sore sight. That's not good design, it's big, clunky, no consistencies, no scheme, nothing.

I said it once before, i will say is again. It's UGLY!

Really Apple, I think that this is THE most strategic time to update OS X, especially with Vista's release. If there is a track record, we KNOW that it will take Microsoft years to catch up and update Vista to whatever Apple dishes out as the new Aqua. This definitely plays to Apple's advantage.

The Core Animation is promising. If you come up with some amazing animation on the OS X without annoying all of us, Leopard will look billion years ahead of Vista.

And kudos for finally coming up with time machine to save us from accidental deletion misery or uninstalling applications woes (especially ones with loads of preferences left behind).

 

[lorductape]

Yeah, that was my point exactly. I may have been unclear, since I didn't quote the full part I maybe should have. SiliconAddict was saying Windows' Start menu was easier to use "out of the box" than the OS X way, since there's no way to easily list all your apps.

I was saying it's virtually the same number of clicks if you don't use the dock at all. So Windows isn't easier to use that way.

If you *do* use the dock, the OS X way is better, especially since the most commonly used apps start in the dock, and it's easier to add an app to the dock. (Also the OS X way, I think, is more intuitive, since it treats apps as files.)

in all fairness, pc has that too, just drag it to the desktop

 

[lorductape]

SPACES ICON!

If that is any indication of Apple's new GUI scheme, I am afraid that I will scream. Funny how I was quoted for my critique of the Time Machine icon, but no one talked about the Spaces Icon. Look at it on the dock next to the other icons, it's a sore sight. That's not good design, it's big, clunky, no consistencies, no scheme, nothing.

I said it once before, i will say is again. It's UGLY!

Really Apple, I think that this is THE most strategic time to update OS X, especially with Vista's release. If there is a track record, we KNOW that it will take Microsoft years to catch up and update Vista to whatever Apple dishes out as the new Aqua. This definitely plays to Apple's advantage.

The Core Animation is promising. If you come up with some amazing animation on the OS X without annoying all of us, Leopard will look billion years ahead of Vista.

And kudos for finally coming up with time machine to save us from accidental deletion misery or uninstalling applications woes (especially ones with loads of preferences left behind).

well, remember, with the dashboard, you dont have to have the icon on teh dock. i just use f12 and a hotcorner. im hoping spaces will be the same. i agree about the icon

 

[Clive At Five]

in all fairness, pc has that too, just drag it to the desktop

uh... in all fairness, Macs have that too.

The point is having a system to easily launch programs without cluttering your desktop. With the dock, the most-used apps are one click away. With the Start Menu, the most used apps are 3+ clicks away.

-Clive

 

[lorductape]

uh... in all fairness, Macs have that too.

The point is having a system to easily launch programs without cluttering your desktop. With the dock, the most-used apps are one click away. With the Start Menu, the most used apps are 3+ clicks away.

-Clive

i know that, but it the way it was said was like pc's didnt have anything like the dock. plus, pc's have quick apps launchers. im not advocation them or promoting them, but i can't lie abotu them

 

[Clive At Five]

in all fairness, pc has that too, just drag it to the desktop

And actually, now that I think about, it's not that easy... If you drag an icon from the Start Menu to the desktop, it will be removed from the Start Menu. Likewise, if you drag an executable to the desktop, launching it will bring up error messages because it won't be able to find its associated dlls and whatnot. You have to make a shortcut to the desktop which is another couple steps.

Point is, Windows isn't as easy to use out-of-the-box.

-Clive

 

[Clive At Five]

i know that, but it the way it was said was like pc's didnt have anything like the dock. plus, pc's have quick apps launchers. im not advocation them or promoting them, but i can't lie abotu them

The Quicklaunch Toolbar is the least consistent device in Windows. Mine will frequently resize itself, drop icons, and corrupt shortcuts to the desired programs. On top of that, the icons are tiny and easily confusable with the system tray icons.

So yes, a comparable tool exists, but niether is it stable nor well-implemented.

-Clive

 

[MrCrowbar]

I use Quicksilver on the Mac for apps that don't run all the time. I only have the essential apps like mail, firefox, skype, textedit, finder, ical and activity monitor displaying the cpu history in the dock icon. I don't have them as startup items, cuz i don't like waiting minutes before beeing able to do anything after reboot. Usually I boot (damn bootcamp... makes you reboot) within 20 seconds, then click all the icons on the dock and go take a dump or whatever. I just recently made an automator script that opens and hides all those apps (I open this one with quicksilver obviously).

At work my windows desktop is usually full with notes and apps, and I have 2 screens on 1280 x 1024... it's always a pain to minimize all windows (win+d) to reach the icon, then having to sort out the 50 items in the task bar...

 

[thejadedmonkey]

I'm not going to stop using OS X but I think I will start to use Windows for the strengths it does have.

Thats exactily why I use OS X when I write websites and have 5 plus instances of Notepad open at once, plus IE, Firefox, PS, and (addictively) AIM.

 

[thejadedmonkey]

SPACES ICON!

If that is any indication of Apple's new GUI scheme, I am afraid that I will scream. Funny how I was quoted for my critique of the Time Machine icon, but no one talked about the Spaces Icon. Look at it on the dock next to the other icons, it's a sore sight. That's not good design, it's big, clunky, no consistencies, no scheme, nothing.

I said it once before, i will say is again. It's UGLY!

Really Apple, I think that this is THE most strategic time to update OS X, especially with Vista's release. If there is a track record, we KNOW that it will take Microsoft years to catch up and update Vista to whatever Apple dishes out as the new Aqua. This definitely plays to Apple's advantage.

The Core Animation is promising. If you come up with some amazing animation on the OS X without annoying all of us, Leopard will look billion years ahead of Vista.

And kudos for finally coming up with time machine to save us from accidental deletion misery or uninstalling applications woes (especially ones with loads of preferences left behind).

The spaces icon may simply be a spaceholder for the real icon. Remember when spotlight was previewed, it had a dock icon which they got rid of. Spaces may be the same way.

 

[johnnyjibbs]

I'm up for more animated things as long as they are practical and we need to try to reunite the user interface a little, considering Apple keeps introducing hybrid versions - we've currently got a mixture of brushed metal, grey gradient, aqua pinstripes and gradient white (e.g. Mail and Spotlight).

Any kind of cheap glossy black look will not go down well in my book and I'm not keen on the recent iTunes widgets, which look distinctively more Windows-esque in style.

However, I have a feeling the days on blue gobbules are numbered...

Personally, I like the slightly 3D look to things, although brushed metal is looking a little tired (I like Safari, but have always hated the metal Finder). I'd imagine Apple is developing a proper 3D interface, however, to match Vista and the like, even if the widgets look more flat. Hopefully Apple will come up with something that doesn't look too crap.

Have faith... but customisable would be good too.

 

[timswim78]

It would be nice if Apple finally offered a few UI choices for OS X. How different can your computer be, if your UI theme looks like every other Mac?

The black should look good. I have the Zune theme on my Windows XP machine, and it looks pretty slick.
http://www.zune.net/en-us/meetzune/device.htm

 

[grahamtearne]

What is with all this 'drag applications folder to the dock' all about?

Am I the only one that has my finder windows to open in the applications folder itself? When I first got my mac I couldnt work out why I would want to go to my home folder. I never use it. Basically just has my application, music, movies folders etc which are always on the left anyway. So I went to finder preferences and set it to always open new windows in the applications folder, and it is so much better than the start menu.

Click the finder and boom there is ALL of my apps. With the sidebar having quick navigation to my documents folders and such. So much nicer than the start menu.

The only advantage i can see of dragging the app folder to the dock is to get that 'start menu' feel by using right click....but with all this suggestions of having it there to just take you to your applications folder, may i ask you whats wrong with just setting up the finder to open your applications folder?

Ive got 4 people to convert and they wasnt fond of the finder opening the home folder, so i told them to make it open there applications folder and they now love the finders way of working.

Graham

 

[Me1000]

look who's late to the party!

I think apple needs to offer a better way to have different themes!

if not they need to make 2 new themes and itunes looking one. and a pretty aqua one...

 

[bousozoku]

What is with all this 'drag applications folder to the dock' all about?

Am I the only one that has my finder windows to open in the applications folder itself? When I first got my mac I couldnt work out why I would want to go to my home folder. I never use it. Basically just has my application, music, movies folders etc which are always on the left anyway. So I went to finder preferences and set it to always open new windows in the applications folder, and it is so much better than the start menu.

Click the finder and boom there is ALL of my apps. With the sidebar having quick navigation to my documents folders and such. So much nicer than the start menu.

The only advantage i can see of dragging the app folder to the dock is to get that 'start menu' feel by using right click....but with all this suggestions of having it there to just take you to your applications folder, may i ask you whats wrong with just setting up the finder to open your applications folder?

Ive got 4 people to convert and they wasnt fond of the finder opening the home folder, so i told them to make it open there applications folder and they now love the finders way of working.

Graham

You're not the only one. I start with /Applications and have several frequently used folders in my sidebar, though they were in my Favourites before Finder windows had a sidebar.

I believe that things were set up for the home folder for one of two reasons. UNIX users start there and they were trying to be document-centric. The latter is a theme the tried to use years ago with OpenDoc.

Different people use different techniques, probably depending on when they started using Mac OS X and what was available then. When I use Windows, I probably use it a lot like I did when the "new" interface came with Win95.

Anything Apple can do to enhance that experience with 10.5 will be good.

 

[inkswamp]

I think what this user means is something actually on par with Remote Desktop, not VNC. VNC is old school tech, and send every pixel to the remote machine.

I've used Windows and Macs extensively and, from my experience, Windows' Remote Desktop and VNC are equivalent (except of course the Windows version is proprietary.) In fact, I find Remote Desktop on Windows to be a little annoying as it doesn't actually send you the exact screen but its own representation of it. I've used both methods and VNC is fine, even sending every pixel.

 

[puckhead193]

i wonder if you can customize it more, like what shape shifter does

 

[inkswamp]

There's a way to make it consistent from app to app. Windows does it. They underline the letter that activates the menu. That's consistent, and no memorization is necessary.

That's not consistent at all. That's a kludgy interface convention that gets you around being consistent. Consistent means that alt+w and alt+c do the same function in all apps (or generally to same.) There don't seem to be any guidelines and it's all very loose which tends to mean you have to memorize tons of shortcuts to make this useful. The GUI was supposed to have gotten you out of that command line-era need to memorize arcane options and shortcuts like that.

 

[iMacZealot]

I don't see why Apple would want to incorporate features from the Windows desktop into Mac OS. Apple originally came up with the idea of the file folder, edit folder, and all of those. The start menu is a ripoff of the classic Apple Menu: a list of applications. While Apple always kept the Apple menu down to just mainly applications, the Start menu has been (and continues to grow) cluttered with so many things. If you look at the start menu of Windows 2000 and the Apple Menu of Mac OS 9, it's a lot easier to find an application in the apple menu than the start menu because it's all applications and not cluttered with documents, recent documents, office templates, search, run, shut down, etc.... It took you two clicks either way, but it takes longer to hunt for an application in the Start Menu. Apple then found a much easier way to organise you desktop and menus: the dock. The dock simply requires one click, and instead of showing all of your applications, you choose what's in your dock. Sure, you can say that windows has the desktop, but that, too, is cluttered. Borrow someone's mac and try finding iTunes. It's easy. You just look at the bottom of the screen (or side) for the iTunes icon and click once. It's effortless. Now borrow someone's PC and try finding iTunes. You have so many columns of places like My Computer and My Network and nearly every application and readme documents and so many other things that it takes much longer to find an application on the Windows desktop. The task bar doesn't do anything, either, and has gotten really cluttered since XP. There are so many icons beside the clock that it even takes a long time to find something like wifi status, which requires absolutely NO effort to do in the menu bar. The other thing about the task bar is that it tries to be a dock with all these icons by the time, but it's just a hassle to try and find that tiny icon for whatever app you're looking for. Even the icons on the Mac desktop make more sense. Since apps don't waste the entire screen and desktop icons are on the right, if you need something from your hard drive while you're working on something, you can just click on Macintosh HD and go without minimising the application, look for My Computer, find the file, and open up the app again from the task bar. The windows desktop is simply cluttered and a chore to maneuver around and also tries to imitate a lot of what Apple's done. It'd be a very poor choice to incorporate aspects of the windows desktop into Mac OS, and I also don't think we really realise enough how good the Mac OS interface really is.

 

[BillyShears]

That's not consistent at all. That's a kludgy interface convention that gets you around being consistent. Consistent means that alt+w and alt+c do the same function in all apps (or generally to same.) There don't seem to be any guidelines and it's all very loose which tends to mean you have to memorize tons of shortcuts to make this useful. The GUI was supposed to have gotten you out of that command line-era need to memorize arcane options and shortcuts like that.

We must have different ideas of what "consistent" and "memorize" mean. I think it's consistent to indicate the shortcut key with an underline, in the same way it's consistent that a button always serves the same purpose or a text box always serves the same purpose. In other words, something is consistent when it acts as is expected.

It's certainly non-ideal. Each menu is different. Generally alt+f opens a "file" menu, but then there are things like alt+b, which would be different depending on what app you're in. It's non-ideal, but it's still consistent.

Furthermore, what is the alternative? OS X doesn't really have a solution. I can't remember what key it is, but you can press one key and then press the left/right arrows until you get to the menu option you want. That's even less ideal.

I'd also say keyboard shortcuts are different from app to app because each app is different. What kind of standards could be set? "File", "Edit", "View" and "Help" are the only real "standard" menu items, and they generally seem to follow some de facto standard on windows (Alt+F/E/V/H)

I also don't see how this requires memorization. You keep saying that you need to "memorize" the shortcuts, but you clearly don't: you just need to look at the underline to see which letter corresponds to which menu item. That seems to me like exactly what GUIs are designed to do.

Memorization would suggest there would be no visual indication of what to do, for example in the command line you would have to type "app -h" to get a rundown of the options available. Clearly that's not the case with underlined menu items.

 

[dale.albiston]

Yeah, but not in the same way they work on Windows. There is Command-O to do file->Open, and so on, and so on. There is also a facility in the system preferences to assign custom keystrokes to menu items. There is also an option to turn on full keyboard menu navigation (Ctrl-F2 will do about the same thing as pressing the Alt key in Windows - the arrow keys then work, but it's not the series of letter things that Windows has).

the ctrl+F2 thing sounds what I'd use, the actual keyboard shortcuts (ctrl+o, ctrl+c...) are useful but being able to open the menus and explore is also a help. glad this feature is here.

 

[Shintocam]

Yes! WAY YES! The Program Files menu is way better than having to open a finder window to open an application/program, and the dock is just intrusive and breaks the whole "smoothness" of the Desktop.

I wish Apple would take on the enterprise market but I think the OS X UI is one thing that needs to first be fixed in order to work for the enterprise mkt. The current OS X UI does not lend itself well to an enterprise/integrated/feature rich world where UI conventions need to be more consistent, intuitive, etc. This is where Windows XP/Vista excels. Take browsing for networks for example in OS X, or setting up file sharing, printers, etc. The OS X UI for these things is HORRIBLE-designed, inconsistent, etc.

Actually, there is something I found out a while back that may do what you want. Open Finder, and then drag the Applications folder to the Dock - right of the divider bar. An alias for the Apps folder will be created on the dock. Then, click and hold the Apps folder icon in the dock and the folder will spring open giving you a listing of all the apps. Subfolders will have an arrow to the right which allows for another menu to pop out. This works for the documents and pictures folder too....I love it.

 

[spinko]

Bring on a new interface. I'm getting tired of Aqua

 

[brianus]

We must have different ideas of what "consistent" and "memorize" mean. I think it's consistent to indicate the shortcut key with an underline, in the same way it's consistent that a button always serves the same purpose or a text box always serves the same purpose. In other words, something is consistent when it acts as is expected.

It's certainly non-ideal. Each menu is different. Generally alt+f opens a "file" menu, but then there are things like alt+b, which would be different depending on what app you're in. It's non-ideal, but it's still consistent.

Furthermore, what is the alternative? OS X doesn't really have a solution. I can't remember what key it is, but you can press one key and then press the left/right arrows until you get to the menu option you want. That's even less ideal.

I'd also say keyboard shortcuts are different from app to app because each app is different. What kind of standards could be set? "File", "Edit", "View" and "Help" are the only real "standard" menu items, and they generally seem to follow some de facto standard on windows (Alt+F/E/V/H)

I also don't see how this requires memorization. You keep saying that you need to "memorize" the shortcuts, but you clearly don't: you just need to look at the underline to see which letter corresponds to which menu item. That seems to me like exactly what GUIs are designed to do.

Memorization would suggest there would be no visual indication of what to do, for example in the command line you would have to type "app -h" to get a rundown of the options available. Clearly that's not the case with underlined menu items.

I totally agree. The Windows method gives me all the visual cues I need to quickly activate a menu item, without having to memorize the shortcut, or use the mouse to find it -- on OS X, for example, the only way to discover a keyboard shortcut is to click on a menu to open it, at which point you might as well just click on the item you were lookig for rather than memorize the shortcut shown next to it.

This is something they should implement, maybe not in the same way as Windows, but perhaps as an option under "Universal Access" -- they could justify the Windows-copying as aiding "accessibility" (which indeed it would), while helping us pro users at the same time. It needn't be underlines either; I imagine Apple could come up with a less intrusive and more appealing approach. But the general idea is good, and long overdue.