First, you CAN save mail messages to the desktop... just do a Save AS on any piece of mail, and it is automatically put into a TextEdit document. Very spiffy... headers, pictures, formatting, links and all. Drag and drop would be nice, but SaveAs has a quick keyboard hot key...
As for our "druthers" (wish list), well, you're gonn wish you hadn't asked, by the time I get through. I keep a running log of stuff, which I will eventually see if Apple wants to bother looking at. Of course it is basically a complaint list. It goes without saying that I love Mac... if I didn't, I mean if I didn't think the plusses outweigh the negatives, I wouldn't bother documenting them. So here they are, so far (and I'm sure this is just the beginning):
[Note: I see that all my formatting has been lost, when I pasted in the following. No bolded or red headings, no italics, no nothin'. Wade thru it only if you care to, duh.
These are my continuing complaints about OS X (Tiger)
MAJOR complaints:
"You cannot define keyboard shortcuts for ... opening an application."
Cannot open a folder or volume, nor navigate through its contents, by "click-and-holding" on its icon. (This can be done on folders in the dock, but should work all across the computer. Shame on Apple for not implementing all the features of that fabulous Sys 7.6 program, PopUpFolder!)
Unable to change the label colors. The colors are way too bold, very distracting when they show up in a list, especially when the entire name is colored now (instead of the icon). And they are confusing organizationally, in that the bold colors in a list makes them look like items have been selected. Either give us very light pastel colors, or allow us to customize the colors, as in sys 9 (once again, we lost a good sys 9 feature). When you select a label in list view, a colored dot appears to the left of the icon; great, why can't it stay there, and forget the bold-colored line all the way across the listing? That would be a compromise... but I say go with light pastel or customizable.
Windows don't automatically refresh when an action is taken on an item in it. For example, an open window has an item that has been trashed, but will continue to show the item as being where it no longer is, until the window is refreshed by reopening it, or by clicking somewhere else and then coming back to click on the item. But how are supposed to always know to re-click something because it is lying to us? Similarly, change a filename in a window list, and it takes forever for it to alphabetize and move into place. Also, get a message saying you can't put a file on the desktop, because another file with the same name exists... so you change the name of the existing file, then drag the new file onto the desktop again... it will STILL tell you the other file exists, even though you have changed its name already... the workaround: try several times... eventually the Finder gets off it's cell phone and pays attention.
The Help and its search field is woefully inadequate.
1. The simplest and most intuitive key words often yield no results. Try figuring out what the function keys are for, for example, by searching on the key words "function keys" (duh). Or say you want to start from the beginning to learn the basics about your Mac... I can't think of a better word to type in, than "tutorial." It yields nothing very informative. "Learning" isn't in the index; use it as a search word and it takes you only to "Learning to use Mac OS X," which is a great title, but the skimpy information just tells you to go explore on your own! "Getting started" yields nothing. "Organization" yields some promising Help links, but it is not the most intuitive word one might think to use to start learning from scratch.
2. Specific words, even specific programs used by the Mac (installed with OS X) aren't listed in Help! Example: iTunes Helper. It is a program listed as a startup item, so I wondered what it is--but it is not even so much as listed in Help; searching on "iTunes Helper" yields no results. Another of countless examples: What is the meaning of that little gray arrow in the Status column of mail? It took me half an hour to sleuth this out. You'd think there'd be something in mail Help to explain all the symbols in the Status column. Not so! If you search on "status" you get about 30 articles! Search on "Status column" (the most logical), you get 9 results, and "arrow" gets 15. But NONE of the listed results include the words "status" or "status column" or "status symbols" or "status icons" or "arrow" or anything intuitive. You have to search through each result, reading each item until you find some mention of an arrow. You'd think ANYthing important enough to appear in a column of a window ought to be easier to figure out than that.
3. It seems incredulous not to have at least the most basic of tutorials, as we did in days of old. What about defragmenting the hard drive? We've all heard about its importance, but you won't find any form of that word in the Help; do we no longer need to defragment? Even if that were the case, shouldn't the Help address it? Ask about any kind of maintenance...nothing!
4. Search on "couldn't save" and get nothing; search on "could not save" and get 26 hits. It can't even understand "couldn't" means "could not"???
5. Time after time, the most intuitive key words come up with nothing. Case in point:
I want to know how to fill out the search fields in Find (which look like those in Spotlight), but I can't find out anything at all about how to fill in the search fields, not even after more than half an hour searching HELP. In particular, if you want to search for files with names that include either of several key words, how can you specify whether you want it to use either "and" or "or"? I'm absolutely certain that I saw this on a some kind of search I did a while back. Up popped a window where you could select AND or OR. But now I can't figure it out.
Example:* Say I want everything that contains VICKIE or DANIELSEN or SHELTON.
Finally, I decide to put Boolean into the search field (after employing it didn't work), figuring that even if it doesn't use it, it will mention it. Indeed, "Boolean" is listed with the remark, "See searching." There is nothing under "Searching" that discusses how to fill in search fields, and no mention whatever of "Boolean" that I can find.
The search windows on Mac are now quite complicated--but it seems the more support is required, the more it dwindles. Am I bitter? Of course, who wouldn't be?
The moving Trash can. Why do I have to play dodge ball every time I try to drag something to the trash. The trash acts like it's trying to test my skill as it moves back and forth when my cursor comes close. Crazy, annoying time-waster!
Finder. 1. Windows always open small, with tiny, narrow columns (in column view), so that EVERY time I open a window, I have to tediously resize the window, then resize the first column, then resize the next column, then resize, resize, resize. . . . What a tedious, time-consuming bore.
2. More moving objects that you have to dodge. This is crazy! If you go to drop something into one of your aliases in the sidebar of a window, and if that window happens to be partly off your screen, the window will pop up, fully onto the screen, until you drop the item and then pop back down to where you had it when you're finished. It does this even when no icon is hidden because of the window being too far off the screen (which it isn't). All this does is make it hard to drop the item onto the right icon. Time after time I drop it into the wrong place, then have to guess where it went, go find it, and move it into the right place. If the window would just stay still and stop trying to be so "helpful," things would be a lot easier. After all, if someone slides a window down out of the way, so far it hides some of their icons, well then let them move the window back up again. Don't punish the rest of us with a moving set of icons that we have to play dodge-ball with. We are not at a Cony Island shooting gallery! Same goes for the perpetually moving Trash can.
3. Bring back WindowShade. Good grief, what were they thinking??? I don't like "minimizing" a window by having it disappear off my screen, and then I have to go mousing over to the dock, find an icon, and click to have it come back. I want the window to SHADE up, without it's title bar moving, so that all I have to do is double click on the title bar to have it "unroll" again. Too many good things were lost in an attempt to look fancy and slick--or whatever the motivation was.
4. Cursor should automatically position over the preferred button in a dialog window. We shouldn't have to mouse around to get to the button. Sys 9 worked just fine this way, but now we have extra mousing to do. For example, when I click yes to save, I should be able to just click again to have it saved, and not have to mouse over to the Save button. Cursor should automatically position over the highlighted button. Bring back the old, it was better! (If there is a preference to fix this, I haven't seen it yet.)
5. Arrrgh! Column View windows open with absurdly narrow columns--EVEN when there is nothing in the half-dozen columns it presents. So the column with stuff you are trying to read is so narrow you cannot even begin to read the file names. Now try grabbing an item with your cursor and use the spring-loaded feature to drop something into a folder just one folder deep: it is impossible. The next folder opens to reveal a dozen folders in a column that won't open large enough to see which folder you should drop the item into. OS X has been out for years now, but we are still--in this computer age!--having to live with goofy quirks like this. ESPECIALLY when there is nothing else in the next 6 columns, the window could open the columns WITH stuff in them wide enough to be of service.
Unable to position icons where I want them. For example, a glorious thing about old systems was that you could tuck an icon up under the main menu bar, so that only the filename would show. That way, you could have just the letter W showing as your icon for Word, for just one example. You could click that spot to open the program, or drop things onto the icon. But in X, no way. Gone are the dozens of little places I could click for things, across the bottom of the main menu bar. Huge, glorious convenience lost. There seems to be a dedication to gaudy icons that can only be put where Apple says they can be put.
Goofy filenames. It seems absurd to have to look at a filename with the middle cut out of it. If you are going to abbreviate, do it at the end. Or if you think we might want to see the end, have a preference for how we want filenames abbreviated. Or make views open wide enough to see the full names, at least up to a reasonable maximum. Time and again, I can't figure out what a file is, because only several letters appear, and then an ellipsis, and then several more letters, not any of which can be deciphered or provide a clue as to the file name. I could know the file name if I could just see the full beginning of the name, without those darned ellipses. If the title would expand when the cursor is held over them, it wouldn't be so bad maybe, but we don't even get that unless we click on each individual item. I would MUCH rather have the old short filenames than longer ones that can't be deciphered without additional clicking or dragging windows open farther. I imagine the reason for this new method is because a person might need to see the end of a filename in order to differentiate it from other filenames whose beginnings are identical. But I am unimpressed. If that's the issue, well, how often does it happen? Rarely. So make people do the harder work in those rarer instances, not in the regular all-day-long instances.
The "Find" window. (1.) The button bar should be customizable. It is an unnecessary hassle to have to keep clicking more windows to check what we want to search in. Should be able to just click on boxes without having to open the "Others" first--and then not even be able to see what's clicked, with the one button reading "Two others" or "Seven Others." Plus, we cannot even drag and drop a folder we want searched, without having to open and close another window first. Still another good OS 9 feature we have to do without in OS X.
(2.) Bring back the old OS 9 Find. It was simple, easy to use, and didn't overwhelm us with info. Good grief, ordinary Command-F Find acts just like Spotlight. Give us a simple Find, and if we want something more intense, that's what Spotlight is for. It is ridiculous to try to type a word into the Find field, only to have the computer rush on out to round up 33,000 results as soon as you have typed the first letter of the word. But you have to wait for it to finish finding the thousands of files that have that one letter in them before you can finish typing the word. What a pain in the butt. The old Find worked much better. At least give us a preference for hitting Return when we are ready, and keep this silly horse in the corral until we're ready to put it to work.
Smaller complaints (but still very annoying):
If a dialog box asks a "yes" or "no" question, then the choices ought to include "yes" or "no." Or I might settle for "Cancel" in place of the "No," but "Okay" for yes? Never! This is one of the goofiest little things about the Mac, and I have never understood the weird rationale, if one exists. If, for example, the question is, "Do you want to Save before closing?" then one of the options ought to be "Yes." Or perhaps "Save." But I mean, what does "okay" mean? ...That whatever the computer wants to do is okay with me?? This bashing of English grammar is so inappropriate for Mac customers who like to pride themselves as being a notch brighter than Windows users. At the very least, shouldn't we respect foreign users enough to keep the dialog boxes accurate and sensible? [I since heard this discussed; people were saying the Mac says exactly what it wants to say in dialog windows, and I'm told the Windows operating system is the confusing one. Okay, fine. But I still don't understand why a simple Yes or No question doesn't have Yes as a choice, and I still don't understand how "Okay" answers a Yes or No question.
Can't change the Finder font to something more readable and pleasing.
Can't make a Trash alias.
Aliases are not in Italics. I liked the old way of being able to tell at a glance what items were aliases. Now I have to look at the icon and hunt for the little arrow. This is only a small complaint.
Re specific applications & features:
Note: some of these complaints might not be valid, in that perhaps some of these things might be remedied through customization and I just haven't figured it out yet. But surely some are not "just me" and could use a fix.
Text Edit:
1. Color palate should be in the tool bar. (Maybe it can be put there? Need to research.)
2. Can't figure out how to indent. A button in the toolbar would be useful. (See Outlook Express.)
3. The "Save" dialog box should automatically fill in the first few words of the document, prehighlighted. (See MS Word.)
4. Can't set a preference for margins. OS X is annoyingly wasteful of space on almost all its windows, yet when it comes to TextEdit, it is parsimonious. For the eyes, we need another eighth or three-eights of an inch of white space to the left and right of the text--without having to change it manually for each document. Even after searching Help, I cannot find a way to permanently set margins for all new documents. All I see is how to change them for a given document. If we CAN set a preference for margins on new documents, then how? And why isn't Help clear about it?
5. Does not automatically open text files created by other applications, such as Word. I am expected to open my thousands of Word documents manually from now on, if I choose not to install Word in Tiger and rely just on TextEdit? There should be a preferences for (a) automatically opening and (b) capturing those files as TextEdit--or at the very least, just to open them, without having to execute a command. Further, the Help gives no clue that we can drop and drag onto the TextEdit icon (such as one in the Dock) to open foreign documents. (As stated elsewhere, Help is often woefully inadequate!)
6. I don't see how to turn a word into hypertext, as can be done in Mail. Should be available in TextEdit too.
7. Please show dotted lines to indicate pages. I hate going over onto a second page for just the very last word of a document. Having a visual indication of page breaks would avoid that.
8. I haven't discovered a way to indent a portion of the written text. Loved the way Word allowed you to just hit the tab key to indent a highlighted body of text.
9. Urgent. Another important feature of Word that would be easy to do and be a great help: Pre-fil in the first few words of the document as the title in the Save dialog box. Once you get in the habit of naming your file up front in the document itself, it is a real time-saving convenience.
Mail. It's off to a great start but glaringly needs some tweaking.
1. I should be able to drag any message to the desktop, but I can't. [I have now learned I can "SAVE AS" to get mail into a different document and onto the desktop. This is a great feature, but dragon droppings would be nice too.
2. I should be able to add hierarchical folders to the side bar (and drag messages into them), but I can't.
3. I should be able to SELECT any attachments I want (one, some or all), and drag them to the desktop (or anywhere else), but I cannot. I can drag a picture from within the body of the email, but not from the list under the arrowhead, which would be the easiest place to be able to select random files and then drag them together.
4. The slideshow function is great! A minor improvement would be the ability to exit with a double click anywhere on the screen, without having to mouse down to the little button.
5. A GREAT enhancement would be that we could, during the slideshow of attachments, hit a hot key to mark the pictures we like, and then when we exit the slideshow, have the selected ones automatically saved to a folder.
6. Put a Flag button in the tool bar, so we don't have to navigate the pull-down menu to flag a message. [Oh, I see there is a keyboard hotkey for the flag, which is nice.]
7. When I use the drop-down menu to add a "Bcc" or "Cc" line for adding an address, it should disappear again, not start showing up on all my future email blank pages. If we want it to stay there, we should have a preference for that (or be able to "customize" it). The drop-down should only be for an occasional use, an occasional departure from normal preferences. So, when used, it shouldn't stick.
8. I don't see numbers to tell how many total pieces of mail are in the InBox, not even the number selected. I miss that. It is helpful to keep an eye on how many emails are piling up.
9. A real convenience would be to have the Save and Slideshow buttons (but especially the Save) appear at the bottom of an email message as well as at the top as they do now. I have to scroll through the pictures first to see if I want to save them, then I have to scroll all the way back up to the top to hit Save. A "floating" Save button at the bottom of the email message would be a great feature.
iPhoto: I mainly want it for slideshows. But if you've ever used any commercial cataloging or slideshow program, you know iPhoto is pretty much the pits by comparison. But since it seems every slideshow program has at least one or two features the others don't have (arrgh!), I checked it out....
Incidentally, I love the cube transition. I generally prefer a simple, consistent slide transition (doncha hate those PowerPoint presentations where somebody has discovered the transitions!), but the cube is elegant and can be inserted, instead of the simple default transition you've selected, wherever you are changing subjects in the slideshow. Cool.
Can't close the top window bar on the slideshow window. Who want's people to preview the slides they'll see in the slideshow? Not me!
Can't find any filenames of the pictures... can't look one up. I think this might have changed in a later version, to which I'm about to upgrade.
Forces me to have two copies of every picture, because it imports them against my will. Shades of iTunes. This reason ALONE is reason enough to abandon iPhoto. I don't like my pictures going into some house of mirrors and getting lost, with me never knowing quite what's happening to them--even if it is a copy of the original. And it is a bore whenever yo have two sets of photos... what do we need now, a sync program to make sure we're keeping both sets the same? Who needs the hassle.
Almost impossible to sort slides in that silly long window that only holds one row of pics. Try doing any rearranging, like dragging a slide from the end of the slide show to the beginning. Can you say 7.68 miles of slide dragging?
Can't play music from anywhere on computer. Has to be in iTunes.
This is ridiculous. Can't just drag any song into the slide show. Gotsta go thru iTunes. Can you say Bill Gates?
Won't export to full-screen QT movie. So you need small movies if you post to the web, but who needs em on one's own home computer? I didn't buy a 20" flat screen so that iPhoto's exported QuickTime movies will fill up only half my screen. The slideshow played from within iPhoto will fill my screen, but I want my movies portable, not locked up in some program... and the QT movie will only make a small movie, ... bad enough, plus then you have to look at that QT interface during your slideshow movie. No Thanks.
Takes forever to export (and then to inferior product). I had a slide show the length of only a single, ordinary song, and iPhoto took as long to export it to a QT movie as my commercial program takes to export a 30-minute slide show to a QT movie; and IT'S QT movie is total full screen on playback. The puny QT movie produced by iPhoto, even though small on the screen, performed badly... kinda of jerky.
Slideshow settings and transition effects you set in iPhoto are not included in slideshows you share over the Internet. What a bummer. If I wanted to put slideshows on the internet, I'd want them to look their best.
I still haven't figured out whether I can dump the slides out of iPhoto, once I've put them into a slideshow. Don't want my pictures in there... don't understand why they end up in so many places in there.
I don't like the notion of my slide show being buried somewhere in this program where I can't get to it, except to click to run it. I wanted to email the file to a friend in Denver, so she could watch it on her iPhoto contraption, but alas, I find no file, not even using Spotlight, that holds my slideshow. Dump the program and you've dumped your slideshow, unless you've exported it. I even tried temporarily trashing all preference files I could find, and it STILL showed up with all my pictures and the slideshow. So I couldn't even spot a preference file to send my friend, that might contain the slideshow.
iTunes:
[Later note added up front here: I have trashed iTunes. Never liked it for several major reasons stated below. Now I see I have to reinstall it, even if I never use it as my player, because iPhoto, for example, is just one of the programs that won't work without iTunes--if you want to play music with your slideshow. Before I can put a song with my slideshow, I have to first put it into iTunes. Arrrgh! Apple has become about as bad as Microsoft. Everything is geared to make Apple more money. ALL of these Apple programs have much better counterparts out there, and I'm basically sticking with them. And the commercial products aren't like a house of cards, where every individual item is forcibly tied to the other items. Anyway, must of the following re iTunes no longer affects me, now that I stopped fooling with it; but they may be useful suggestions for others.]
1a. How can I "refresh" the library? Say I've deleted some music files (stored outside iTunes music), now there is an entry in the library for a song that doesn't exist. Is there an automatic way to refresh? (And no, I do not want to go looking up every file I trash and delete it manually from the library; and no, I do not want to do my deleting from within the iTunes library. I do lots of management work on the files themselves.
1b. Similarly, how do I update the library when I've ADDED music to my music folders? Sure, I could PLAY them all, so iTunes would capture them for the library, but that would be a silly procedure. I could drag all new songs into the library, but it is a fallible system to rely on remembering to do that with every single new song without fail. Must I simply drag all my music folders onto the library before I go to bed and hope it will figure out which ones I already have, or would I end up with most things duplicated?
2. Do I have this right?: iTunes wants to COPY my music into its own folder, meaning if I let iTunes have its way, I would have 240 gigs of music instead of 120 gigs, right? This sounds crazy, given how much memory music takes. Why COPY? Why not just either move it into the iTunes folder, or leave it out, one or the other? Ideally, am I right to suggest the best thing is to have Tiger on a 200 gig disk in order to keep the 120 gigs of music in the iTunes folder?
3. Can I drag a hierarchy of folders of music into the iTunes music folder, without iTunes going apoplectic? If I have to keep all my music LOOSE (unable to keep my special folder system of organizing), then I am not interested in iTunes! The search feature is great in iTunes for SOME things, but nothing in the world can beat being able to browse actual files and folders expertly arranged. In iTunes you can't see the forest when you want to, for the trees. I could never rely on one long list of files for browsing--having to do that would be like horse & buggy days!
4. iTunes says it can check for duplicates, but it really only checks for duplicate TITLES. I want it to be able to know the difference between SONGS, and if the songs are of different lengths, then they cannot be the same song, so should not be listed as duplicates--or, and this would be better, flag them.
5. Everything is sluggish when iTunes runs. I have plenty of space and about 333 megs of RAM, yet with 28,000 songs in my iTunes library, the whole computer bogs down while iTunes is running, and iTunes itself is so lethargic that it is too horribly annoying to run. Who wants to wait a full 20 to 60 seconds for every click to do something. (That colorful, perpetually spinning little cursor was pretty at first, now I hate it!) See next item....
6. Why not allow multiple iTunes libraries? Then we could have several collections to choose from, and only need to use one at a time (a smaller one, not the whole 28,000 songs) to speed things up? Or is simply buying a truckload of additional RAM the answer? I don't see Help addressing this issue, and I know I'm not the only one for whom iTunes makes everything sluggish.
7. Can't drag a song file onto the player window and get it to play. There isn't even an "Open" menu item in the File menu! So it looks like there is no way to play a song that comes across my desk without iTunes forcing me to somehow "import" it... like I'm gonna want to keep tabs on the song forever more. Just let me play the darn thing!
8. We should be able to read entire Comments without having to open the Info window. Hold the cursor over a comment field, and the full text should appear (like it does in the MaxOSX forums). Or, if not that, we should be able to scroll the message with cursor or scroll knob on mouse (better, anyway, than it works now by pretending we are gonna edit the field).... but not have to open a window.
Stickies. Once again, we lost a good feature in X that we had in sys 9, namely the WAY a stickie note collapsed when you window-shaded it. Once a stickie window has been collapsed into its title bar, we should be able to resize the title bar to exactly how we want it. Then when we double click the title bar to expand it, it should remember its original window size and position. This makes the difference between a really snazzy, useful thing, and an annoyance. You want to be able to have a neat, organized row, or stack of collapsed stickies, but you want to be able to read and work in the window without having to resize it, once you open the windowshade.
Dictionary. What a great thing! A couple of enhancements: When there are multiple entries, each time you click on one, and read its definition, the other entries should still be there (preferably at the end of what you're reading) so that you can click on the next one without having to keep going back to the back arrows to inspect the various word in the list that are nearly alike. Example: search on the word fusa, plural for an animal in Madagascar.
Safari. The Find presents results in an endless loop instead of stopping when it has found the last occurrence. Example: you do a Find on a web page for, say "Davidson." You keep finding "Next" until you finally realize the word really appears only 9 times, but you've had to glance at the results 27 times because it keeps finding the same ones over and over again. It is NOT easy to recognize when it starts looping, because if you're looking for the word in a certain context, you might not have to glance at it carefully enough to recognize you've seen it before. And besides, why should a user have to do all that work when a little slap on the wrist of Safari could make it pay attention and to its work right. Also, I have not yet been able to figure out why the highlighting color that the Find uses is a light gray, about the same color as the the typed words... very hard to spot it on the page when Find has found something. I've checked every preference I can think of, have have not specified light gray highlighting anywhere. Also, the colors aren't changing to show which hyperlinks I've visited and not visited, so every time I go back to a page, I have to hunt all over again to see where I've been or left off. Again, I've checked all my prefs to try to correct this.
Typos (fyi):
Not a biggie, just a simple typo, in case anybody wants to know... In Mac Help, the word in red (below) is missing in this quote: "What's it called on my Mac? Your Mac and Mac OS X include many of the same capabilities as a Windows computer. If you're not sure what it's called on the Mac, here's a list of Windows and Mac terms to help you find what you're looking for:"
