Location, location, location
I’ve been pretty much gushing over Mac OS X Leopard for the last few days so I thought it’d be good to show a little balance. While using the Mac OS over the last few years I’ve wanted to have something natively handled and I was hoping it would be taken care of in Leopard; Location detection.
By design most modern Operating Systems allow each user to save an innumerable amount of options. Not only can we manage our own directories, system level options, and per-application preferences - we’re also able to customize the look and feel of the Operating System without changing it for another user of the same system.
This has been true for nearly every OS since I began using computers in 1994.
Yet, even the very latest, cutting-edge version of the Mac OS is unable to change a few of these preferences based on my current location. Sure it remembers the passwords to access the wifi networks I have encountered in my journeys - but I need something more. I need to be able to add location-based preferences for things like mounting drives, SMTP servers in Mail.app, and per-directory file permissions to name a few.
Any Operating System designed to run on portable devices, like my Macbook, should have these types of things built-in without the need to search for third-party solutions.
October 31st, 2007 at 4:54 pm
How do you picture the user (yourself) actually making the change of location? Would it be something you could select from the menu up top? Would it automatically try and guess based on the IP you’re given via DHCP? I’ve got to admit, it would be pretty interesting to see something like that implemented.
October 31st, 2007 at 9:09 pm
Jonathan: For Internet specific preferences - it could be based off of something simple like the SSID (or Mac address even) of the router you’re connected to. And it would could happen automatically once these “locations” were setup.