AskTog, January, 2004

Panther: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

For a long time, people have been writing me, asking that I do an in depth review of OS X. I held off because I really didn't think OS X was ready for prime time. That's all changed. OS X, in the form of the Panther release, is more than ready. This is a review, then, of what Mac is doing right and where they still need to improve.

This is the first instance I’ve seen of a major OS making purposeful use of corners to carry out major activities. I applaud Apple for this. The point directly below the current position of the mouse is the easiest target for users, prompting the rise of contextual menus. Next in line are the four corners. Throwing the mouse in the general direction of a side will result in the mouse arriving at the exact point of one of its corners. Corners have been languishing, largely unused, for the last 25 years.

Of course, everything can be improved, and Exposé is no exception. While you can carry out a complete Finder task, such a moving or copying documents from one folder to another, as soon as you open one of those documents, all the other windows come flying back. It would be nice to carry out a subtask that went beyond the finder while holding the rest of the document in abeyance.

For example, someone calls on the phone and you need to find and email a certain document. How nice to be able to just set everything else aside until that contained task is over, then bring back your previous work. Apple should experiment with a few solutions. Perhaps option-clicking the first document opened in the Finder would let Exposé know to stay expanded until explicitly called back. Perhaps the behavior could just simply be changed, requiring a second visit to the corner to open it back up. (This could be made an option, for backward compatibility.)

Exposé also needs an exclusion list. Some specialized OS X applications, ones that extend the Finder itself, should remain visible and accessible. These would include things like Drag Thing, which offers System 9-like tab menus and a desktop trash can.

Those of us who have become enamoured of Konfabulator widgets would also like to leave exposed during Exposé operations those of these miniature objects we have elected to embed in our desktop.

Finally, Exposé needs to add a tiny delay before opening when the mouse is thrown into a corner. The corners are such pointer-magnets that users often arrive there by accident. Users, under OS 10.3, are now learning to slow up their mouse activities in general to avoid accidentally triggering Exposé. A delay of between 1/20th of a second and 1/10th of a second should be sufficient and will result in a significant speed increase in other nearby activities, such as accessing the Apple menu.

The real significance of File Vault is that it makes the Mac the first OS that protects privacy, rather than just security. For those who have not considered the difference, security is a scheme that ensures that only your corporate masters can find out what you are up to. Privacy means that only you can see what you are up to.

Perhaps the biggest difference between Apple and Microsoft has traditionally been that Microsoft supports corporations and Apple supports individuals. File Vault once again brings that difference into sharp focus. It actually has the potential to hurt sales to corporations that reserve their right to spy on you—hence the marketing spin that this is to protect corporate secrets on the road—but it once again clearly illuminates Apple as one of the good guys, a force in the world to slow down the seemingly inevitable advance of our Brave New World.

The underlying problem with the Dock is that Apple appears to see it as a complete solution. In The Top 9 Reasons the Dock Still Sucks, I break it down for them, problem by problem, and suggest the strategy they need to follow to support users beyond the initial sale.

1. Design for density. A design team needs to examine this sharp downward turn in information density, identify each element of it, and address it in such a way that OS X at least meets, if not exceeds, the information density of OS 9.
2. Allow users to set the classic view (no chrome) as the default for new windows
3. Tighten the grid and make it dynamic as an option, so it does the best possible job under all circumstances.
4. Augment the compact view so it is as useful as the chrome view. Clicking on the status bar should hide/reveal the toolbar. Users wanting the Windows-like sidebar should be able to turn that on and off easily without all the ponderous chrome surrounding it. Finally, view options stripped from the context menu and placed in the toolbar need to be displayed in the context menu as well.

In the meantime, users should manually switch each window to classic view and drag the icons into a tighter position. (At least you only have to do this once per window.)

Cascading Close

The single-window Finder was not met with great applause, but Apple may have been onto something. So very often, I find myself with a cascading series of windows as I follow a path. We now have the column-view, so such meanderings can be done within a single window, but it is a far more abstract activity than opening windows, uncomfortable to people other than programmers and power users. We also have option-click, which in fact closes windows behind us.

I would like to see a preference option to make close-behind be the default, with option-click then used to leave a parent window open. This action should only happen with parent-child movement, not as a general Finder rule. It should also result in the child window opening in its own size and position, not within the parent window’s borders. Inconsistency among different objects is just as important as consistency among identical objects. (The enforced consistency is what is wrong with the Windows cascade solution.)

“I have met the enemy, and he is us”—Pogo

Developers often fixate on the method of use they personally prefer. This may be why the spatially-oriented finder view is not making much progress now. Developers tend, by and large, to prefer abstractions. The same thing plagued Microsoft for more than a decade, with efforts going into making the keyboard interface as efficient as possible, while the point and click interface languished. (That has been corrected.)

The problem with this kind of imbalance is that, eventually, the approach receiving the most attention indeed becomes superior, fulfilling the wisdom of the developers. What becomes lost in the analysis is that, had the developers put the same effort into the other approach, it might have borne more fruit at an earlier time with less effort. What also becomes lost is that the now more productive approach may be very uncomfortable for the people using it. In the Windows world, this often doesn’t matter. People have no choice; their employers have made the choice for them. In the Mac world, user-comfort is just as vital as user-productivity.

The Finder also continues to lack basic functionality. For example, you can no longer do a "Get Info" to find out how many objects rest within a file. True, you can just open the window in classic view to see how many are at the top level, but you now have to open ever folder within the folder, armed with a calculator, to add everything up. Graphic designers often get paid based on how many objects they create, just as writers may be paid by the word. The graphic designers suddenly have a new, laborious job to do.

With Mac’s tiny market share, it’s apparent that both Apple and its developers are limited in person-power, a continuing reality which must be addressed.

Panther does give us "Secure Empty Trash" in the Finder menu. This overwrites the sectors on the disk seven times, carefully and fully removing all traces.

This Secure Empty option should be included on the trash's context menu. It should be renamed "shred," and users should also be given the ability to shred single files, perhaps by holding down the Option key while dragging the file, turning the trashcan icon into a shredder icon. They should also be able to select a file or group of files within the trash window for shredding.

(Shredding takes many times the time of normal trash removal. You don't want to have to shred 1500 documents just to securly remove one.)

Couple the shredding with the ability to "clean:" your Mac. It does no good to shred a document if a RAM image persists in virtual memory on the disk. If we're going for privacy, let's make it a complete solution.

Making things even worse, the team failed to map the OS 9 colors to OS X, so many of the documents are showing up in colors unfamiliar to the existing user base. Finally, they have carefully emulated the worst features of the System 9 system, too few colors, and a lack of ability for users to choose their own colors. This needs fixing.

View and add to reader responses on SlashDot >

Previous AskTog Columns >