Things Apple forgot in OS X

I

IslandJordan

Registered
There are a few things I have found kinds of anoying that Apple didn't include in OS X, and that I haven't seen anywhere else in these message boards, so if you could ask Apple for them, that'd be swell.

1) Smart Scrollers. They gave 'em to us. Got us used to them, and took them away! How could they!??

2) Contextual dock. I wanna be able to drag FOLDERS to the dock, and THEN, drag items INTO the folders. That'd be cool, wouldn't it?

3) An email server that supports newsgroups. Oops.

4) An email server that supports multiple email accounts owned by one user. For instance, I have an Earthlink account AND a Boston University account. I want to be able to SEND an email from either of those accounts without logging out of the finder completely!

5) Spring loaded folders. Okay, they've talked about that one already, but it is still a must-have!

6) Apple needs to bring the focus back to the desktop. The sneaky devils some how managed to get us to forget about the desktop as a handy "throw anything here" feature. Well, they can take my life, BUT THEY CAN'T TAKE MY FREEDOM! Have an icon of Macintosh HD on the desktop, for the love of Pete. We've delt with it since the beginning of the Mac OS... it is what makes us Mac users! Bring it back!

7) Okay, what the dilly yo? What happened to Themes and other desktop customization things. Suuure, I can change my desktop pattern and stuff, but there are no sounds, etc.

8) How 'bout giving ALL beta testers who submit over 10 VALID feature requests a FREE copy of the Final Version. I mean, I'll pay for the 10¢ CD and the shipping... I'll even pay for the time it takes to burn the code. Charge me $10. But we spent a lot of time messing up OUR systems to make the new OS better. Okay ?

9) Tell them to give the nice, poor college student (namely, me) his money back for paying for a BRAND SPANKIN' NEW iBook Graphite just WEEKS before releasing the NEW iBooks for the same friggin' price!

Yeah, so that's all. Does anyone know Steve Jobs' email address?

Thanks!

Jordan
 
sjobs (at) apple.com (not typing the whole thing together so that spam robots don't pick it up, although I am sure he gets his share of spam)

Anyway, he does read all emails and he replies to several everyday. I wrote to him and he replied personall in under 12 hours. How many CEOs do that?
 
Originally posted by holsenb
How about a restart menu item without having to log out?!
Click to expand...

Hold down the option key while in the Special menu...

Or, from the terminal:
<pre>restart -r now</pre>
 
Get a clue. You say these things and you are using OSX? Why? Stick to the Launcer and big buttons. ;)

MAIL doesn't support NNTP news because it's a mail app. News should be handled by a good NNTP client like newswatcher. Although I hate it's news functions, Outlook Express for OSX would be great. BTW Mail.app is a mail CLIENT not a server. Just little details that sound like nails on a chalkboard to a nerd like myself.

Mail does support multiple accounts. You can't switch between them very easily but you can send from them no problem.

I have Earthlink and a mail account at the ISP that I work at. (hey I've had Earthlink for 4 years. I'm not giving up my address). I dialup using Earthlink so I set the outgoing SMTP server to mail.earthlink.net and I can send from either account. It's that simple.
 
So, I guess I don't understand. I need to send mail from Earthlink AND from 2 people on the BU account. My roommate doesn't have a computer, and I want him to be able to send an email from mail.app with HIS name on them, without having to go in and change the preferences, and without having to restart the computer.

How would I do that? As far as I know, there is only one Outgoing Mail server you can enter. How do I enter multiple accounts?

I think having a news and a mail server in one app is very nice. I think people would forgive apple if they put a news server in the application, even if it was called just Mail.

Thanks.

Jordan
 
Originally posted by IslandJordan
8) How 'bout giving ALL beta testers who submit over 10 VALID feature requests a FREE copy of the Final Version. I mean, I'll pay for the 10 CD and the shipping... I'll even pay for the time it takes to burn the code. Charge me $10. But we spent a lot of time messing up OUR systems to make the new OS better. Okay ?
Click to expand...

do you have any idea how many duplicate feedback reports apple gets? Sure, they're all valid... but they're also identical.

what I think would be a lot more cost-effective all around would be getting $20 off or so from the final release if you purchased a copy of the beta. That won't be too big a sacrafice for apple, I wouldn't think, but currently they don't have any plans of that sort.

Originally posted by mashima
Mail does support multiple accounts. You can't switch between them very easily but you can send from them no problem.
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Mail app supports multiple INCOMiNG accounts very easily... but only one outgoing email address. If you want to switch between mail addresses you have to go into the Preferences. You don't need more than one SMTP setting, but if there's support for multiple incoming accounts, there should be support for multiple outoing addresses as well. I don't want to have to switch my preferences every time I want to reply to an email sent to one of me secondary email accounts (which are usually set up for a reason; I don't want to reply to one of those messages with my primary address).
 
Originally posted by IslandJordan
My roommate doesn't have a computer, and I want him to be able to send an email from mail.app with HIS name on them, without having to go in and change the preferences, and without having to restart the computer.
Click to expand...

Remember OS X is a multiple user machine/ Create a (MacOS X) account for your flatmate. Load up mail (from within their account) put in their details.
 
Originally posted by IslandJordan
My roommate doesn't have a computer, and I want him to be able to send an email from mail.app with HIS name on them, without having to go in and change the preferences, and without having to restart the computer.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Remember OS X is a multiple user machine/ Create a (MacOS X) account for your flatmate. Load up mail (from within their account) put in their details.
Click to expand...

Good call E. You can set up accounts for everyone at your school if you want to!

While we're on the subject of multiple users, can my room-mate have their own Classic app preferences too? It seems like everyone(with an account) has read-write access to the MacOS 9 folder. Is that true?
 
Originally posted by J5
While we're on the subject of multiple users, can my room-mate have their own Classic app preferences too? It seems like everyone(with an account) has read-write access to the MacOS 9 folder. Is that true?
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The preferences of everything in Classic is stored in the original OS9 preferences folder. So you cannot use OSX multiple users for that now. Maybe you could configure OS9 to use its own Multiple Users, but then you would have to log in seperatly to use OS9.

Classic will be gone i a couple of months, so why bother. I say X only from now on. ;)

DJ
 
Originally posted by The DJ
Classic will be gone i a couple of months, so why bother. I say X only from now on. ;)

DJ [/B]
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Yeah I am trying to keep all of my work in OS X native. Just about managing to.
 
Classic will be gone i a couple of months, so why bother. I say X only from now on. ;)

DJ [/B][/QUOTE]

I love OSX and would dearly love to stick with it for everything but I can't as I have an Epson Stylus 760 printer. If I want to print anything, I have to re-start using OS9 - this is becoming more and more of a pain and consequently, I'm using OSX less and less. A shame but I need to print regularly :-(

Tom.
 
where is the multiple desktop support?

i'm a heavy linux user, and one of my favorite things about it is the ability to have mulitple desktops- no more 9 windows opened on 1 desktop. (i hate clutter.)

i was pretty excited to start running mac os x, but i'm on the verge of giving up on it & going back to linuxppc because of this. ):

wendy
 
Somebody asked about multiple desktops. If Apple doesn't include it - there are several NextStep managers are being ported. All rumors of course.

I agree with the original post except you CAN place anything on the desktop. It is as functional as it was under Sys 9. X's desktop folder is per user. I do not know if it is still a union with the desktop folders on other drives - that would be nice.

Apple should keep the HD and trash off the desktop. They are easier to access from the dock.
 
Originally posted by wck
where is the multiple desktop support?

i'm a heavy linux user, and one of my favorite things about it is the ability to have mulitple desktops- no more 9 windows opened on 1 desktop. (i hate clutter.)

i was pretty excited to start running mac os x, but i'm on the verge of giving up on it & going back to linuxppc because of this. ):

wendy
Click to expand...


You can have multiple desktops in the current PB, although its real basic and not completely functional. Just create multiple copies of the Desktop.app and then lunch them and switch between them (put additional desktops in the dock to switch between them with ease)(you will need root for the initial copying). Its documented more in detail on this forum elsewhere. It may not be what you had in mind but it shows with a little more tweaking from developers you will get your full blown multipule desktops.
 
Err, I did this multiple desktop.app trick and it basically ate my filesystem.
I got all those invalid node zero things on my disk and I had to reinstall os 9. (But not x!)
So caveat emptor.
 
For my understanding you don't make any sense! Please post smarter issues and don't beg for free OS!
 
By multiple desktops, he's not referring to having multiple instances of the Desktop.app running; that doesn't get you anything beyond having the two of them stomp on one another's preference files.

The trick to which he (or was it she, actually? Don't remember, and can't see from this page, I'm afraid) is referring is basically emulating muliple monitors in software, and being able to quickly switch back and forth between which of the faux displays you're viewing.

Which basically just means being able to show or hide large groups of windows en masse. I started trying to hack together a few applescripts to perhaps at least be able to do this on a per-application basis, but I can't actually find anything willing to accept events asking it to hide or unhide things. The Desktop doesn't handle that, and individual applications don't handle it; you really need to talk to Aqua itself, but Aqua isn't an application to which you can pass events.

So I failed in my meager efforts, but would be incredibly enthused if someone was to get such a thing working. I also find the lack of this function to be quite crippling.



 
Agreed, having multiple copies of desktop.app isn't like having multiple desktops.

But, (if it worked) it solves some very useful problems.
First, say you want to "su" to do something, like changing the contents of /Applications.
Old way: log out, log in as root, log out, log back in.
This sucks. Apple should put little unlock buttons on anything you can't change as a regular user, because logging out and back in takes way way too long, especially when you factor in a classic startup. Better would be some sort of "su" mechanism -- spawn a new login instance (temporarilay) on top of the old one.

Enter multiple desktop.apps. You can make a double-clickable terminal script to open a new copy of "desktop.app" for any user (or root). Now, you have a temporary "login" as that user with which you can edit the filesystem, or spawn applications with that user's priviledges (say you want to run a disk utiliy, or something that requires root priviledges, but doesn't have an unlock button. Nicer is a good example.)

This would be really cool, except that they somehow do stomp on eachother. (though not the preferences, if you open them under different users.)

So, no, this doesn't solve the multiple workspace problem, but it solves another problem that really bugs me.

zach
 
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