::scr Ramblings of a Classic Refugee or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love OS X

[Chris Devers]

Replying to various bits & pieces of this thread...

On Sat, 2 Feb 2002, celia romaniuk wrote:

> Nah. Good interfaces need time and development. Sure, the designers can
> do their best to make it really good up front, but I think the case with
> OSX is that released it before it's even as sophisticated as OS9.

Has anyone spent any time using a NeXT box? It seems like OSX draws more
from 10 years or so of [tepid?] NeXT interface refinement than the 20
years of [rapid, nuanced, mature] OS<=9 development. And no it isn't done
yet, and yes it looks like it'll keep feeling sluggish until most all of
today's hardware is obsolete. Lazy developers try to get Moore to do all
their work for them...


On Sat, 2 Feb 2002, Alex Robinson wrote:

> > 2) Sort out the Dock:
> >
> > 	a) Reduce the size
> > 	b) turn off the cycle-sapping magnification.
> > 	c) anchor it to the right of the screen.
> 
> CHECK
> 
> And auto-hide it.
> And not use it for launching apps or minimising windows. Then it makes a 
> pretty good open apps list.

Alternatively, *don't* auto-hide it, and accept it as a most frequently
launched apps launcher (and with TinkerTool, the arrows indicate which are
open and which are minimized and which is active, etc). 

And also, I've found that putting the dock on the left works best for me. 
New icons (new apps, minimized windows) open on the right, so this keeps
the Finder and a chain of other regularly used applications anchored. Then
to the right of the divider, I have links to each partition, allowing
BeOS/FinderPop-esque navigation of the filesystem via popup menus, and
again this will generally be anchored in place. Thus puts about ten icons
into more or less regular positions. Anchoring it to the right would cause
all these icons to shift back & forth as apps & windows open & close.
 
> Actually I think the trash in the dock is the biggest UI improvement in
> OSX. It's always there rather than hiding on the desktop obscured by
> some window or other. And since I've anchored the dock to the bottom
> right it's even where (it should | I've come to expect it to) be. Fitts
> Law++

Bah. When you're in the Terminal most of the time, just rm -rf ~/.Trash/*
and no hunting is required. :) But then, having to type it in could be
seen as an interface failing, if you're of that persuasion...

> > Pisspoor tabbed app switching
> 
> I can live with that

I've come to enjoy it, actually. The trick is to notice that, once you hit
CMD+TAB, you've shifted one item to the right on the Dock. (If you keep
the dock hidden then this would be confusing.) Then, while holding down
the CMD key, you can tap back & forth between TAB and SHIFT to move right
and left across the list of open applications. On other platforms, it
seems like the "reverse switch" would be CMD+SHIFT+TAB (or ALT+SHIFT+TAB),
requiring a three key chord, but in Aqua it's a two key chord. Similarly,
switching between windows within a single application follows the same
rules, except with a tilde instead of the tab key (not everywhere, but
most applications seem to obey this). 

And going by Dock position is a bit unorthodox & takes getting used to,
but it does kind of make more sense. The traditional stack based app
switching forces you to mentally keep track of the last thing you were
using, and this mental list will keep changing all the time. If you spend
most of your time in one application -- a web browser say -- then it's
going to be hard to remember which other app you were using last; on the
other hand, if you're rapidly working among three or more apps then it
could be even harder to mentally track. 

By [1] basing the app-switch sequence on the order in which things appear
in a visible Dock, [2] making it easy to move items around in that Dock,
and [3] making it easy to shift forwards & backwards within the list, the
mental burden basically disappears: just look which way you want to go and
jump over the corresponing number in that direction (or even around the
end of the list if that looks shorter). 

It becomes, in short, spatial. 

Wasn't spatiality part of the beauty of the old interface?

> > WindowShadeX
> 
> CHECK
> 
> I hadn't bothered with it but I've just given it a go. I like it.

I miss windowshades, but didn't like WindowShadeX (or FruitMenu): it
[they] just felt way to kludgey, like it was trying to get the system to
do something that it was violently opposed to. WSX kept making windows
disappear for me, and I couldn't ignore the fact that the windows weren't
really being shaded, they were just transparent. Not sure why, but the
result was feeling no less cluttered than before, so I just got rid of it.
I too want Apple to bring the functionality back, or at least for third
party hacks such as to this to at least get less hacky than they are now. 

> > Spring-loaded folders. They should never have got rid of these.
> > I was gobsmacked that they did since they're so *useful*. Ah
> > well, it's due in the next release, I hear.

<aol />

The lack of spring loaded folders is a big part of why I barely using the
Finder at all now; doing everything from the command line instead. You can
get an approximation of popups with column view, but it's just not the
same... 

> Hopefully these will mature and be even better than the original
> Kaleidoscope. Given the sheer scope and the consistency of the
> underpinning of interface elements by Aqua, the possibility for as much
> customisation as the user can stand seems eminently doable

OTOH, the rigid consistency currently being enforced seems like it would
preclude a lot of the deep, Kaleidoscope-esque customization, wouldn't it?

> seems mouthwatering and if done right should avoid the potential "it
> looks great but you've made it unusable" problem of themes (sorry - that
> sentence extremely poorly thought out).

No no, that's exactly my problem with them, and as much as I chafe against
the imposition of "Steve's sense of Style" in Aqua, I'm willing to put up
with it if behavior is more or less guaranteed to be consistent. I'll take
behavioral consistency over cheesy "design" almost any day...

> If done really right, ancillary services such as help systems should be
> able to reflect the user's theme choices creating a truely seamless
> experience (or am I smoking crack here?).

Well, assuming theme developers suddenly sprout a fondness for writing
good, clear documentation, then no I'd say your crack is pretty mild :)

>  >>>> I want chrome <<<<
> 
> You know what I mean. Chrome all around the window. Not just a title 
> bar. So I can grab a window on any side and move it. So I can avoid 
> trying to scroll and ending up in some other window/app entirely :(

Just like BeOS. I also liked Be's window title scheme, in which the width
of the title would be minimized as much as possible, but extending to no
more than the width of the window itself if it needed that much. The nice
bit was that these title tabs would default to anchoring on the left, but
you could slide them back & forth so that you could overlay a series of
windows and get to any of them by clicking on the visible title. I've
never seen a GUI/theme manager that was capable of that hack; embedding it
in Aqua would be a very welcome addition...
 
>  >>>> I want desktops <<<<
> 
> Not SpaceDock-alike desktops. Real unixen-grade desktops. Nuff said.

And again BeOS, though of course I'm sure they got the idea from X. This
is such a great feature, yet neither of the two mainstream OSes has afaik
ever experimented with it. Why not? Having a series of virtual desktops,
and being able to say OPT+TAB between desktops and CTRL+TAB between
windows on the currently visible desktop would be such a nice feature...
 
>  >>>> I want glue <<<<
> 
> that allows:
> * the recording and playback of any action or task, such as typing key 
> commands or text, selecting menus and dialog box options, clicking on 
> controls, rearranging and resizing windows, opening applications and 
> documents, and prompting the user for input.
> * the assigning of any sequence of these actions to keyboard commands, 
> toolbars, menus, and scheduled shortcuts.
> * the resulting scripts to be fully editable (or written from scratch).
> * the resulting toolbars and menus to be fully customisable.

Have you tried AppleScript? Have you tried the new AppleScript Studio? I
thought it was able to do a lot of this sort of thing already in OS9, and
that this functionality has been brought forward to OSX. I thought ASS --
hmm, unfortunate acronym there, must send a note to Cupertino... -- was
able to do GUIs as well. (GUI ASS, yikes that's terrible.) 

> Isn't it obvious that the OS should be a database too? 

...well it is to anyone that used, again, BeOS... :)

> Actually I also want auto versioning and trashing ;)

Would it make sense to build CVS or something like CVS into an OS? How
could that be used? Would it be too much overhead? How could it be put
into an interface in a clean way? 

> Whereas Apple's advance down the path of filename extensions and the 
> abandoning of the resource fork is a step in very much the opposite 
> direction :(
> 
> *cough*

Well, yes.
 
> And then sometime late last year I read that piece about that
> BeOS guy's conversion to OSX - the future has been and gone. 
 
Well, that was a lot of realpolitik, I think -- Be was dying on its own,
and now that Palm owns it it's dead. According to a friend that works
there, Palm has no intention of maintaining a desktop operating system,
and they don't seem interested in licensing or open sourcing any of it
either. For the latter, they don't seem able to do that even if they
wanted to, due to licensing schemes with other companies; as for the
former, it smells a bit like Xerox-PARC: "that's all operating system of
ours is nice, but it isn't a copier^W handheld, so we're going to pass..." 

*sigh* 



--
Chris Devers

"Okay, Gene... so, -1 x -1 should equal what?" "A South American!"    
[....] "no human can understand the Timecube" and Gene responded
 without missing a beat "Yeah.  I'm not human."