- Cut and paste a file (no you can't with the finder)

- Maximize the windows

- This annoying audio "pop" I can hear when my Macbook's line out is connected to a hifi system and no sound is playing.

- Breadcrumb in Finder Windows. This is uber-annoying.

- Revamped open/save dialogs. What do you mean I can't right click to rename a folder in the save dialog?! What do you mean I can't search for a file in this folder?

Sadly the Finder has nothing on Windows Explorer.

and wait a second, it's also showing, constantly, at the bottom of my finder windows. so, look through the preferences and enable that.

if you mean something other than every folder in the path to the current folder by breadcrumbs then you have to clarify.

But the lack of development of the Finder is one of the worst things about OS X. It's been rewritten in Cocoa for Snow Leopard but with only a few minor new features. Hopefully the rewrite is a harbinger of bigger improvements in the next version.

I'm just going to plug Path Finder one more time: it's completely replaced the Finder for me. Info at http://cocoatech.com.

Also, PF is buggy. The latest build wouldn't show mounted DMG images :S

I'm hoping that the new Finder brings some improvements, we'll see.

I've already tried a few freebies to maximize the windows (Stoplight...), none of them would work at 100%.

You just get a list of servers. Selecting one presents you with a dialog box of available shares. Selecting one mounts it. No concept of "browsing" SMB networks exists in PF.

That's great, because that's never actually worked for me anyway; I always have to type the IP address I know the share is on. Even then, if I'm on wireless (but not on 100MB ethernet, oddly), I only get one use out of it: if I close that Finder window or don't use it for a bit, the share is closed to me in fact, even though it appears to still be there until I try to use it.

The whole thing is terribly buggy and must be approached in an exact manner (FIRST "eject" any visible shares, THEN cmd-K to bring up the SMB window, type the IP (no hostnames, even though ping, etc works!), wait for about two minutes (literally), then immediately do the auth window when it comes up -- waiting a bit will require restarting the process -- and then immediately get or put whatever you need...). I used to blame Windows for this before the local Windows admin demonstrated that no local Windows machine had this problem. :)

Sorry, a bunch of irritation just leaked out, there.

After typing an IP address, the dialog disappears (it appears that the mounting of a share has terminated abruptly), and 2 minutes later (also literally) when the SMB server has been loaded, a new dialog is presented with the list of shares :-(

I don't understand how you can't miss it, unless you "mv" everything.

The maximize thing is not entirely Windows, I remember seeing it on some Linux distros. I hate to see the clutter behind my windows, especially if I have a browser open on some webpage with a blinking ad.

I find it much harder to focus on the app on which I'm supposed to work if I have other stuff behind.

Since drag-and-drop requires visible targets to work, and users were expected to have to see data from two or more apps at the same time, it was considered "rude" to take up the entire screen. (Even apps that tried to do so were constrained by the OS to provide a 4-pixel gutter around the edges of the screen so the user could always option-click the Finder to the foreground.)

The notion that you only do work in just one app was considered "missing the point" for multitasking, which is part of the reason the original "Switcher" metaphor for multitasking in the classic Mac OS was abandoned.

http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Switcher.txt

Upshot: Apple's UI designers seem to regret adapting the newspaper publisher's concept of the clipboard, and have been trying to invent workarounds ever since, probably because it's a form of "hidden state." (See iPhone 1.x and 2.x for a more recent example.) The only time in recent memory Apple acknowledged the validity of a clipboard model was when they tried to adapt it to a "publish and subscribe" dynamic system in System 7, only to give up when implementation and UI complexities with the concept rendered that unpopular.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=600389

Anyway, I downloaded something called Right Zoom that changes the behavior of the zoom button (which I find practically useless).

http://www.blazingtools.com/downloads.html

http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/8pejm/i_love_my_mac_a...

And for blinking ads in the background try either Option-Command-H (Hide everything else) or Spaces.

Yes I know that's not the answer you want, but just in case it helps you or anyone else.

As for cut and paste... that's essential.

But the VERY worst thing is the lack of folder merging. Copy and paste a folder to a directory with a folder of the same name, and the contents of the destination will be REPLACED not merged with the source.

/folder1/file1.jpg

/me/folder1/file2.jpg

moving me/folder1 to /folder1 should result in

/folder1/file1.jpg

/folder1/file2.jpg

But on OS X, it only results in

/folder1/file2.jpg

Replace conflicting files, but not the folders themselves.

What would you do?

I see one solution to this problem: let user decide what to do. Apple could add "Merge" button (or maybe a better title meaning "Replace files inside the destination folder with files in source folder") in addition to "Replace" in "what do you want to do" dialog. (Note that you can't simply name this thing replacing as in Windows, because it's really merging). This would also require some kind of comparison dialog to ask users what files to overwrite.

I think Apple just went with a simplest solution here instead of introducing the whole new concept of merging and new UI to users to potentially create a confusion ("hm... what should I do - what's Merge and what's Replace?"). I'm not sure if it's good or bad, but I personally never miss Windows-like merging mistakenly called replace.

The better thing to fix (unrelated to merging), I think is to put the replaced folder to trash instead of overwriting it, to allow users to undo their action (see http://daringfireball.net/2003/03/i_love_it_because_its_tras...). However, this creates a confusion again ("what's this thing doing in my trash, I didn't delete it")... UI is hard.

Technically, these files belong in the user-specific ~/ directory and not the package itself, according to the ADC specifications, if I'm not mistaken.

The third one sounds like it sucks though.

The third is not a software problem.

  Date in menu bar.
  The date can appear alongside the time in the menu bar.

http://lifehacker.com/software/mac-tip/display-the-date-on-t...

http://lifehacker.com/software/mac-tip/display-the-date-on-t...

Well lookitthat! They finally got around to making OS X's finder behave like MacOS's finder, bringing it into the 1990s. I think I used this feature twenty years ago.

Apple claim they don't copy Microsoft. Why should they, they are busy copying themselves!

I'd bet that even this Put Back feature will be a poor imitation of the old one, just like everything else. Scrollable stacks that can dive into folders? Please, Mac OS 8.5's pop-up windows were brilliant, scrollable windows that could do everything else that Finder windows could do, and it doesn't even look like Stack pop-ups can be resized.

One feature I really, really, really wish someone would do would be to allow me to explicitly disable my DVD drive until I actually need it. This is partially a Finder problem, no doubt, but I would say that 90 percent of the time it spins up, it is unnecessary. I've looked into fstab alterations, but on Leopard when you open it up, you're greeted with a very ominous and threatening message:

IGNORE THIS FILE. This file does nothing, contains no useful data, and might go away in future releases. Do not depend on this file or its contents.

"Boot Camp now includes HFS+ read support that enables you to access the files on your Mac OS X partition from Windows. It’s read-only to prevent PC viruses from affecting Mac OS X,"

Multi-Touch gestures in older Mac models.

Static analysis. (for Xcode)

http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/friday-qa-2009-03-06-usi...

I haven't tried valgrind yet but there is a little buzz about it.

http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/friday-qa-2009-06-05-int...

I've heard designers getting angry about this. Is there really such a big difference?

This seems to be a concession to web browsing. When visiting web pages, many Mac users complain about images showing up as too dark, when they appear "just fine" on Windows browsers. Safari was supposed to fix this, but third-party browsers like FireFox and Camino never bothered to deal with color correction, so this default is a work around, since so much work is done on the Web anymore. /-: (Funny how Windows users never complain about images appearing too bright or washed out. I guess Windows are used to problems dealing that OS. (-: )

(Not that this should 'ffect me much, I'm using a ColorSync profile on my home machine that changes the white point to a grey tinge to match the lighting in my apartment anyways.)

Also note that the largest part of application size is not in binary, but in resources (images, nibs, etc.)

Edit: also, all major apps are compiled with 64-bit support (and should run on 32-bit systems), thus it's minus ppc, but plus x86_64, which has a larger code size.

Also, I'm never going to use Safari unless they make a bookmarks pane on the left as FF and IE do. Message to Apple: don't put being different ahead of being useful.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/06/08/apples_mac_os_...

Also, it's important to note that Snow Leopard will only run on Intel Macs.

P.S. FreeBSD and some linuxes don't exactly target the same kinds of users as apple. You know, the typical FreeBSD or Debian user probably cares about which version of gcc is default, and probably couldn't care less about photo editing software. Their PR seems adequate to me :D

The Kubuntu listing is better than the Ubuntu page, but still not there. There's overuse of bullet points, which limit detail. Everything is generally too terse and badly-organized.

They rely on prior knowledge and don't explain what the improvements mean to the users. What is this? "The new plasma-widget-network-manager replaces the old KNetworkManager applet." What does that mean to me, a new Kubuntu user?

Apple does it better. They have nice delineation of features, so you don't have to go looking for information. It's also listed in much more detail, which is the main problem with the OSS lists.

Actually, looking at both pages, it seems like the Kubuntu people are doing something fundamentally different. They're listing new versions of software, briefly detailing the changes, and pointing to the software changelogs. Apple is talking about the OS as a whole and dividing it into parts. They're not saying "iChat updated to version X"; they're saying "iChat in Snow Leopard has features Y and Z."