Snow Leopard Adds Minor Often Requested Tweaks: Put Back, Stack Folder Navigation

[xUKHCx]

Oh. Disregard my other comment, then. I was referring to Trash restoring.

I personally like the "one click, it's gone, too bad" mindset. If you're storing files in the Trash that you don't want trashed, why are you storing them there? What's wrong with you?

As explained in lots of detail in the other thread, this is a great benefit to OS X and if you are of that mindset why don't you jsut remove the .Trashes folder and really have no safety net.

Anything to aid some simple human mistakes that we all make is a benefit and too be honest it was a long long time coming.

So what was wrong with Edit/Undo to put the deleted files back to where they were?

Ever tried "command z" to undo deleting a file?

Only works on the last finder command. I always check the Trash before emptying it and it can be several hours before you might notice an error.



So glad that Put Back is finally coming to the OS. Is it only for files/folders that you put in the Trash or is it system wide?

 

[lucasgladding]

trash the stupid "cover flow" feature in finder and give us "tabs" instead....that would be awesome

honestly, who uses cover-flow in finder????
I don't see any advance or a real benefit for the user in cover-flow-finder......
and to those who say:" ...just putting features in for the sake of adding something..." refering to mircrosoft,
this is just what apple did with this stupid cover-flow-thing in finder...

I use Cover Flow in the Finder all the time. I wish it would load previews faster, but it's great when looking for an image or PDF whose name you can't remember or never knew (when the files were emailed or physically delivered to you). I typically don't use it when looking through organized folders, but it's great for browsing search results. I definitely wouldn't relegate it being only eye candy. In combination with QuickLook, I would say Cover Flow is my favourite new feature in Leopard.

That said, I would also love to see tabs added to more applications in the OS - maybe even as its own class in Cocoa so any developer could easily include it in their applications. I know there are ways to do it now, but it could be included like NSToolbar.

 

[elppa]

Do Quicktime and iTunes Movies playback in the Dock?

That was another feature dropped in Leopard?

Two things looking at the Images from the Italian forum linked to earlier:

Quicktime is no longer part of Internet and Network in System Preferences.

Stacks have little arrows, presumably to scroll up and down.

http://a2.s3.p.quickshareit.com/files/screenshoton20090212at1058ampngdfe66.png

Great... now maybe they can get around to fixing the stuff that REALLY needs fixed.

like the ***** finder. and the damn dock.

is it too much to ask that the finder always behaves the same way? like, i don't know... windows?

Windows Explorer isn't as consistent and cohesive as you make out.

 

[cecemf]

 

[11800506]

All I want in OS X is the Dock folder to work just like 10.4's. So I can click on a folder and it opens up the finder window. no stacks no grids. I mean, the option to.

I know this is from awhile ago, but can't you just drag a folder into the Dock and then right click it and set "Display as" to Folder instead of Stack? As far as I know that seems like what you want.

Edit: Ok, I feel stupid, that doesn't do anything different. Never mind

 

[ziggyonice]

trash the stupid "cover flow" feature in finder and give us "tabs" instead....that would be awesome

honestly, who uses cover-flow in finder????
I don't see any advance or a real benefit for the user in cover-flow-finder......
and to those who say:" ...just putting features in for the sake of adding something..." refering to mircrosoft,
this is just what apple did with this stupid cover-flow-thing in finder...

Wow you are pretty passionate about not liking Cover Flow... I think it's pretty useful sometimes, primarily with a large display.

 

[Jayomat]

I typically don't use it when looking through organized folders, but it's great for browsing search results. I definitely wouldn't relegate it being only eye candy. In combination with QuickLook, I would say Cover Flow is my favourite new feature in Leopard.

OK it's fun to use cover flow to flip through your download or picture folder. But where is the real benefit for the user? Has cover flow ever improved your workflow? And if so, by which means?

 

[TheZA]

Not excited such, but those are two features I would actually use (and to be honest expected already).

But you're crazy if you think 10.6 is just some 'hobby' or side story for Apple. Do you think they are just doing it for fun? When they say stability and performance, it just means they are tightening up the entire experience - unifying things that should never have gone astray. You don't notice an of these things, but they are important. If 10.6 solidifies everything, it will be very worthy.

Everytime they introduce new features (which they have done for a while) in an OS update, they just add more things to their ultimate 'to do' list while neglecting many things on the list currently. I see 10.6 as, "right, let's address everything we can" - once again resetting as much as they can back to a pristine state. A put back command and drilling a stack were obviously things on this to do list, as I hope a lot of other small things are.

Everything done in 10.6 will lay foundation for the new features they will introduce in 10.7. In fact you could say 10.6 exists BECAUSE of 10.7. Without 10.6 there will be no 10.7 (and I don't just mean numerically).

I wish more developers would put this kind of care into their products instead of just hammering out more features on the surface to appease the public image.

So cool, I'll skip it and go right to 10.7. Maybe they should have delayed 10.5 and put all the stuff for 10.6 into 10.5 and really kicked Microsoft's ass to the ground. How much of a performance improvement is 10.6 really going to be over 10.6? Incremental at best. And yeah, yeah, I'm sure it will be better able to use dual core, and more things will be Cocoa, and all. How much of that advantage will have to wait until you get a new machine anyway? I've heard it said that the more technically knowledgeable you are the more you will appreciate the improvements coming in 10.6. Maybe to a small handful of users, but most home users are both the technical administrators and the users of their systems, and unless a new release is a big proformance booster, or unless it really has more useful features (like, arguably, Time Machine, Spaces, and, yes, the look of Leopard vs. Tiger) it isn't going to be worth it to a big chunk of home users. Users like me.

 

[ziggyonice]

Can anyone tell me: Is it pronounced QuickTime X, as in "ex" or "ten"?

 

[Jayomat]

Wow you are pretty passionate about not liking Cover Flow... I think it's pretty useful sometimes, primarily with a large display.

i can do the same by just opening "preview" and using arrowkeys to flip thtough my files.. what more can cover-flow do? Im not passionate about not liking it, but i wanted to point that out because i don't like people saying that most windows features are "eyecandy" while apple's doing the same and getting the props for it

 

[clmason]

I wish OS/X had an "Invert Selection" option, like Windows seems to have always had.
So that, for example, if you went into a folder with 100 items, and you wanted to keep 2 of those items and trash the other 98, you'd only have to select the 2 items you want to keep, then "invert selection" and delete.

Well, you can do almost the same thing. Just hit cmd-a to select all then cmd-click on the two you want to keep and they are unselected. Then drag to trash or cmd-delete.

 

[jackfrost123]

Please apple add:

a. Ctrl X functionality, just do it, you look foolish for not impelementing it, everyone else has.

b. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, ADD MERGE FOLDERS OPTION WHEN COPYING AND PROMPTS, TO REPLACE, NOT MOVE, OR KEEP BOTH FILES IN CASE OF FILE DUPLICATES, AGAIN THIS BY FAR A FEATURE OF ADVANCED OS, THE LINUXES HAVE IT, WINDOWS DO, we have so much data around we want to merge and choose what to copy or replace, WE ARE NOT IN THE DAYS WHEN YOU WOULD JUST REPLACE ON FOLDER WITH THE OTHER, there has to be flexibility. APPLE IT WILL BE CRIMINAL IF YOU DON'T ADD THIS. IT MIGHT EVEN BE A DEAL BREAKER FOR A LOT OF PEOPLE.

c. add the ability to resume a copy if one corrupt file can't be copied not terminate abruptly, again, please.

Sorry for the large text.

 

[BenRoethig]

Awesome, now there's a need to buy Snow Leopard!

I'm still clinging on to the hope that you won't have to.

 

[gmcalpin]

honestly, who uses cover-flow in finder????
I don't see any advance or a real benefit for the user in cover-flow-finder......

While I would LOVE to have tabs, also, I do use Cover Flow now and then. It's REALLY useful for finding one image in a folder full of hundreds of them (especially if I don't know the filename).

 

[wallaby]

Please apple add:

a. Ctrl X functionality, just do it, you look foolish for not impelementing it, everyone else has.

b. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, ADD MERGE FOLDERS OPTION WHEN COPYING AND PROMPTS, TO REPLACE, NOT MOVE, OR KEEP BOTH FILES IN CASE OF FILE DUPLICATES, AGAIN THIS BY FAR A FEATURE OF ADVANCED OS, THE LINUXES HAVE IT, WINDOWS DO, we have so much data around we want to merge and choose what to copy or replace, WE ARE NOT IN THE DAYS WHEN YOU WOULD JUST REPLACE ON FOLDER WITH THE OTHER, there has to be flexibility. APPLE IT WILL BE CRIMINAL IF YOU DON'T ADD THIS. IT MIGHT EVEN BE A DEAL BREAKER FOR A LOT OF PEOPLE.

c. add the ability to resume a copy if one corrupt file can't be copied not terminate abruptly, again, please.

Sorry for the large text.

Don't be sorry, these are huge flaws that OS X desperately needs to address, a. and b. especially. I've coped with 10.4 and 10.5 since my transition from Windows (namely because of Quicksilver and Exposé), but oh lordy would these additions save me time.

 

[clmason]

Don't be sorry, these are huge flaws that OS X desperately needs to address, a. and b. especially. I've coped with 10.4 and 10.5 since my transition from Windows (namely because of Quicksilver and Exposé), but oh lordy would these additions save me time.

What the heck is "ctrl x" functionality???

 

[jackfrost123]

Don't be sorry, these are huge flaws that OS X desperately needs to address, a. and b. especially. I've coped with 10.4 and 10.5 since my transition from Windows (namely because of Quicksilver and Exposé), but oh lordy would these additions save me time.

Hey buddy, glad we agree, these would be godsent, and it's such a shame because windoze and linuxes have implemented them like a piece of cake. I wonder how there are not more people voicing their need for these except the few post you see here and there. It's inexcusable to claim you have the
"world's most advanced os" that won't give an option of cut and paste and merging folders, it's like the dark ages to overwrite a same name folder, or have to manually select which files to copy, keep or overwrite....

sadly I see no indication that they are even working on this...

 

[jackfrost123]

What the heck is "ctrl x" functionality???

It's cut and paste as in windoze or linux, select files "command x" (cut)them, and go to the folder you want and command v (paste) them there, moves files from one place to the other.

 

[lucasgladding]

OK it's fun to use cover flow to flip through your download or picture folder. But where is the real benefit for the user? Has cover flow ever improved your workflow? And if so, by which means?

I'm not talking about browsing my downloads or pictures folder. I'm talking about browsing the assets folder for a design job to find an image whose name I don't know. It is much easier to find the image based on a large preview than it is from the filename. Oftentimes stock photos arrive with the filenames that came from the image catalog, so the filenames are meaningless in this case. I can see an argument that this and QuickLook are redundant, but the extra time provided when moving from image to image makes it easier to spot the right file when simply holding down the arrow key to navigate the folder. On the other hand, QuickLook provides a larger, isolated preview. With a large display and Cover Flow, at least the skewed image can be visible over dozens of selections.

The time saved isn't much in individual cases, but it adds up over time. In any case, this type of interface is where the Mac OS is headed. Everything from the animated rearranging of tables on the iPhone to the new NSCollectionView in Leopard gives additional information to the user. Apple knows little things like this add polish to the system. CoreAnimation and its' uses are very practical in many cases.

Regarding Windows, I don't think MS only focuses on eye candy. I'm just speaking in defense of Cover Flow. Apple uses metaphors to the real world to help users feel at home with the system. MS obviously has some great designers and engineers. That said, I always walk away from Windows systems with a headache .

The last thing to note is that a Cover Flow style view is relatively easy to implement from a development standpoint. I don't think much was foregone to implement the view for Leopard. If something takes a few hundred lines of code, can be reused, and sells machines for the initial wow factor, I don't see any problem.

 

[Eric S.]

So glad that Put Back is finally coming to the OS. Is it only for files/folders that you put in the Trash or is it system wide?

Hopefully it won't just be the trash. Its main use, for me, is to drag files to the desktop as they're needed, then select and "put away" (as it used to be called) when done working with them. I almost never have to recover something out of the trash.

 

[Manderby]

There are some other things that I actually miss much more than "put back" and "stack traversal" but it's nice to hear that they are working on the Finder.

I added a little photoshopping to show what kind of finder window I would really, really like and finally forget the old-style (OS 9) windows which I still use the most. This edited window includes the whole folder-tree, the computers I access the most, own links and a very useful "go parent"-button. I know, it looks a little like Windows. I know, lots of people use the Finder differently, but I would really appreciate if I were able to customize my Finder to this.

Furhter more there are some other things in Finder which would simplify my daily work a lot, but as this is not on topic, I put it a little hidden for those interested.

- Remember the state of any window (view, size, position, symbol-bar, ...).
- Add a "go to parent folder" button.
- Fix the list-view selection (clicking an item outside of the name should NOT select it, but use the rectangular selection tool as it was in earlier Finder days)
- Make it more compact, I did not bought a big screen to waste space.
- Auto-resize the columns of the list view, no horizontal scroll bar.
- When opening multiple files at once, open it in the order in which they are displayed (for example opening all images of a folder ordered by name with preview).
- Column view: ALWAYS show the whole tree back to the root. This is very annoying in save-panels.
- I miss the old "Slideshow" feature where you can display ANY number of objects full screen at once and navigating very convenient using the keyboard. QuickLook-fullscreen is poor compared to that feature.
- Create new folders in the folder you selected or the selection is in.
- Show only other computers which I visited. I don't want to see computers I have not access to.
- Be less picky when performing a drag-and-hold-to-pop-up-folders and accidentally moving out of the window.
- Cut, Copy, Paste.
- Automatically delete .DS files when copying folders to FAT
- Moving Items to a CD or DVD ready to burn should not show the symbolic link icon, a lot of users get confused.
- Maybe Full FTP, but there are excellent applications for this.

Anyone else experiences the strange waiting time of up to several seconds till the content of a folder (on the local harddrive) is displayed when opening it? It's very annoying.

 

[clmason]

Hopefully it won't just be the trash. Its main use, for me, is to drag files to the desktop as they're needed, then select and "put away" (as it used to be called) when done working with them. I almost never have to recover something out of the trash.

I doubt they'll do that, because that will mix up everyone who when they drag a file to the desktop expect it to be copied there.

For example if you put in a cd today and copy a file or folder to the desktop, you're make a copy (and meaning to.) You don't expect it to disappear when you eject the cdrom. This is the OS 6 type behaviour which made sense in the time of floppies and when many people didn't have hard drives. Not sure it makes sense today.

 

[fleshman03]

Please, please, please. Cut and paste. That's all I want (other than performance improvements, obviously).

Now that made me laugh. Good 1 !!!

 

[Jayomat]

I'm not talking about browsing my downloads or pictures folder. I'm talking about browsing the assets folder for a design job to find an image whose name I don't know. It is much easier to find the image based on a large preview than it is from the filename. Oftentimes stock photos arrive with the filenames that came from the image catalog, so the filenames are meaningless in this case. I can see an argument that this and QuickLook are redundant, but the extra time provided when moving from image to image makes it easier to spot the right file when simply holding down the arrow key to navigate the folder. On the other hand, QuickLook provides a larger, isolated preview. With a large display and Cover Flow, at least the skewed image can be visible over dozens of selections.

The time saved isn't much in individual cases, but it adds up over time. In any case, this type of interface is where the Mac OS is headed. Everything from the animated rearranging of tables on the iPhone to the new NSCollectionView in Leopard gives additional information to the user. Apple knows little things like this add polish to the system. CoreAnimation and its' uses are very practical in many cases.

Regarding Windows, I don't think MS only focuses on eye candy. I'm just speaking in defense of Cover Flow. Apple uses metaphors to the real world to help users feel at home with the system. MS obviously has some great designers and engineers. That said, I always walk away from Windows systems with a headache .

The last thing to note is that a Cover Flow style view is relatively easy to implement from a development standpoint. I don't think much was foregone to implement the view for Leopard. If something takes a few hundred lines of code, can be reused, and sells machines for the initial wow factor, I don't see any problem.

i didn't ment to accuse you of speaking in more favorable tone of mac compared to windows. just wanted to point out that untill now, i couldn't see aby benefit in cover-flow-finder..but i can see your point. it's true, browsing a masse of pictures is more effective and actually fun in cover flow.

i just would like to see some improvement in "everyday situations for non designers" or it should be made more easy to switch, just like hitting space to enter preview mode. also, i'd love to be able to keep the "icons" while using cover flow...

 

[addicted44]

As was mine. This forum should have a sarcasm detector on it somewhere...

"Hooray" for adding a feature Windows has had since 1995.

Now can we get Finder to actually ****in' cut and paste?

File Cut and paste is a terrible idea (especially on a nice Unix machine). It makes no sense, and has no meaning. Windows is a system built on ad-hoc measures, so it might be okay there.

The Finder is not meant to be used in that way at all. If you feel the need for it, you are doing it wrong, simple as that.