Colourmod is a Dashboard widget for Mac OS X that you’ll end up using much more than you think you would. I’m not a designer but as someone who fiddles around on the web I find myself in need of a hexadecimal color code from time-to-time. And when I do, I use Colourmod.

There are a few ways that I find myself using Colourmod to find the color I’m looking for. The first, and perhaps most obvious way, is to drag the “blue dot” color picker around the main color well and find the color I want making subtle adjustments by using the slider. The second, is to manually enter in the hexadecimal color code that I’m currently tweaking and make small changes until I get exactly what I want.

One nice feature is the blue arrow that will quickly copy the current color code and place that value into your clipboard. This makes finding, selecting and copying a color code into your text editor very, very quick.

Feature suggestions? Sure. One thing I’d like to see is a single text area that gives the proper RGB color values for a color. Although Colourmod supplies these values they aren’t easily selected. I’d also like to see a much easier and more accurate way to use the color picker. It is very tough to make small changes especially to light gray colors.

Oh, and I’d ditch the ‘U’ in Colourmod. But that’s just me.

Well, here is another widget I suggest taking a look at. Whenever any of us geeks order something online we’re feverishly refreshing the delivery status page of our shipper of choice to see where the package is. Well, not anymore. Now you can use Delivery Status.

Delivery Status is a widget for Mac OS X that makes it pretty simple, and dare I say sexy, to track a few packages at once right from your Dashboard. Junecloud has also made an iOS application for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch so that you can track your packages on the go.

I really like how the widget color-codes the statuses based on the shipper. A nice touch.

See, there are useful Dashboard widgets out there. They’re great. And you should know about them.

I’m going to change that.

This article by Kirk McElhearn at Macworld on How to use services in Mac OS X has pushed me over the edge. What are services? McElhearn explains them this way “Simply put, OS X services let you borrow features from other programs.”

/via John “I don’t know” Gruber.

I want to change that.

I’m going to start featuring well-designed, still in-use Dashboard widgets from time-to-time here on the blog. My personal blog is relatively obscure in today’s tech web but – hopefully – one or two people will find these posts about these widgets. If you’ve run across, or built, any Dashboard widgets you think should get some attention – feel free to email them in.

So lets start out with GAget – a well-designed Google Analytics Dashboard widget by Zoltan Hosszu. (Side note: Zoltan is an awesome name.)

I don’t know about you but logging into any Google Account or any Google product has been troublesome over the last few years. I’ve got personal accounts, Google Apps accounts, work accounts, etc. I get sick of switching. GAget allows me to quickly take a look at any of my site’s statistics by simply swiping (with three-fingers on Lion) over to my Dashboard.

GAget’s HUD shows you exactly what you need to see at a glance; number of visitors today, the trend over the last week, two weeks, or month, the bounce rate, time-on-site, and how many hits were new visitors. Very, very good information if you’re striving to bring up the overall audience for your site.

If you happen to need more information, perhaps for advertising purposes, you can always log into Google Analytics and drill down further.

I have two feature requests: a way to see the top 10 search keywords that people are finding the site with, and the top 10 URLs on the site (besides the homepage). But overall this widget does just enough to keep the stat addict in you well fed.

“All of the things that are great on iOS are the same things that are absolutely worthless in OS X Lion.”

Since upgrading to Lion I’ve come to love many of the iOS-lessons-learned that Apple had decided to bring “Back to the Mac” and so I was puzzled by what Chris said. So I asked him to explain further and this is what he said.

“launchpad, full screen apps (annoying implementation), infrequently used safari tabs reloading, I’m sure there’s more”

And…

“I should probably have said some of the great things in iOS make no sense in Lion. Love the reverse scrolling.”

I don’t agree with everything Chris tweeted and I thought I would go over these things here rather than via a few replies on Twitter. I’ll take these one-by-one.

I’ve already wrote about why I think Launchpad could be confusing to new and inexperienced users. On Lion applications are able to be installed using the App Store as well as by-hand and it creates a combination of circumstances that make it harder to understand why you can uninstall some applications via Launchpad and not others. That being said, the rest of Launchpad makes perfect sense for new and inexperienced users. I launch applications using Alfred but my mother would love Launchpad. At the time I wrote that post Kyle Slattery tweeted that he rarely removes applications from his Mac and so many people may never experience that confusion. If true, then Launchpad seems like a great addition to Mac OS X.

Although not every application supports Lion’s new full-screen feature yet I’ve been able to put it to good use with Terminal, Mail, Aperture, and Parallels. I’ve used full-screen browsing in Safari a few times and in a few circumstances (which was very handy at the time) but for the most part I only use this feature in those four applications. Could I live without it? Yes. Is it a got-to-have? No. Do I like it? Yes.

To be honest, I’ve never noticed unused tabs in Safari reloading for me. I’m not a tab-hoarder as some are so my experience probably differs from those of you that keep 40, 50 or more tabs open at a time. I’d drive myself crazy with that many tabs open. My connection to the Internet is normally fast enough that I can open a web page and access it fairly quickly. I don’t need to keep them all open. So, perhaps this is annoying for some but for me it goes unnoticed.

Something I do agree with Chris on is Lion’s reverse scrolling. I love it. Like everyone else it took me the better part of a week to catch on and retrain my muscles and brain – but after that it has been very enjoyable to go back and forth between the iPad and my Mac and scroll the same way. One thing I have found, however, is that this particular change has caused me to begin to use some of Lion’s multi-touch gestures on the iPad. So now I’m beginning to wish that some of these gestures move over to the iPad (such as three-finger swipe between apps, two-finger swipe to move forward and backward in my browser, etc.)

Two more features that I adore in Lion; Resume and Versions. Resume is a feature that allows you to resume any application where you left it after you’ve closed it. This is one of those invisible features that once you have it you can not imagine giving it up. Accidentally close a window on Lion with some work in it, open it back up, and you’ll immediately see the value of this feature. Versions, while I have only needed it once, makes it dead simple to go “back-in-time” on a specific file without having to use Time Machine. I don’t know that this came from iOS, perhaps it is simply an extension of the lessons that they’ve learned from the use of Time Machine, but as more and more applications make use of this feature in Lion the more utility it will serve.

For me the best update to Mac OS X was Snow Leopard. It was the update that made my computer much, much faster and much, much more reliable. It was like buying a brand new computer. Lion doesn’t quite feel like that to me but it does do something very important – it begins to bridge the gap between my use of the iPhone and iPad with my Mac. I use all three of these devices every single day and having them all come together has meant that I’m more productive. And that is a very good thing.

As I outlined in Recent software problems:

“Since upgrading to Lion my Mac isn’t going to sleep. It is frustrating as I’m the type of person that never, ever shut my Mac down. Instead I usually would just close the lid and be on my way. But, now, when I come back to my Mac the fans are spinning and in some cases the battery is drained. I’m hoping that a forthcoming update to Lion will fix this otherwise I may have to take drastic measures.”

This problem continues. However, I ran across this solution via a few Google searches.

1. Unplug your Macbook Pro.
2. Put the Mac to sleep (Apple Menu -> Sleep or close the lid)
3. Once asleep, plug your MacBook Pro back in.

I’ve confirmed that this works. I’m still looking forward to a Lion update that addresses these and my other issues.

Today I’ve stumbled across a slew of hidden settings that you can’t find via the UI.

For those that are unaware, prior to Lion installing an application on the Mac went something like this; download a .DMG file which would mount to your Mac much like putting a CD in the disk drive and dragging the application icon into your Applications folder. That’s it. Drag, drop, installed. To uninstall an application you just delete the application from your Applications folder. Done.

The caveats to this process were the need to unmount the DMG after you’ve installed the application and then trashing the leftover DMG files in people’s Downloads folder.

However, with Lion came the promise of simplifying this process even more. Why? Because, although the above process seems simple it wasn’t nearly as simple as Apple had managed to make installing and uninstalling applications from iOS. On iOS you open the App Store, click Install, the application’s icon shows up on your device’s Home Screen. If you’d like to uninstall the application you tap and hold the icon, an “x” shows up, click it and confirm that you want to uninstall the app. Very simple.

Lion wanted to bring this very same workflow to the Mac. The workflow goes very much the same; Install applications directly from the Mac App Store, the application’s icon shows up on Launchpad, click and hold to uninstall the app from your Mac.

However, on Lion not all applications are created equal. Some applications were installed prior to, or without the use of, the Mac App Store. Perhaps you downloaded the application from the web or you simply have it installed from long before Lion. Either way, these applications still show up on Launchpad – they just can’t be uninstalled from Launchpad.

Which is why I think uninstalling applications on Lion is arguably more difficult for some people because the workflow for one application is different than the workflow for another application. If Apple could have allowed for applications that were not installed via the Mac App Store to be uninstalled using the same workflow they would have. There must be some very good reasons why they can not – however, I thought that they should have at least showed a dialog to instruct the user on how they can uninstall the application anyway.

For instance, if I’ve got Launchpad open I can drag the application’s icon to Trash on the Dock. Shouldn’t this uninstall it? If I was in my Applications folder and did the very same thing it would. So why not from Launchpad directly to Trash? Why even allow me to drag it over the Trash? Why not show a message when I do this: “Sorry, but you’ll have to open Finder, navigate to your Applications folder, and remove the application from there manually.”

I’m not sure why Apple didn’t find some way to either make this easier or to inform the user how to accomplish this simple task. But a few years from now, when 90% of all installed Mac applications have been installed directly from the Mac App Store, Apple will no longer need or care to worry about this issue. And perhaps that alone is reason enough for them not to care about it now.

Typically when you insert a disc to upgrade Mac OS you need to reboot to the disc for the installation process to begin. This means that during the entire upgrade process (even though this process gets shorter and shorter with each update) you’d be effectively without a computer. The upgrade to Lion, it would seem, doesn’t require this step. The update happens just like any other installation process. However, you’ll still need to reboot when the upgrade process is complete.

Notable, but not as notable as not having to reboot at all.

Calling it a launcher application is sort of limiting. Alfred can help you play music, give you quick access to your clipboard’s history, and even help you attach files to your emails. Its absolutely great and version 0.9 is packed to the gills with new features and updates.

I’m not sure why but I’m on a command line kick lately. Not just the Tron Legacy style for Terminal but I’ve now begun using iTerm2 as my Terminal application of choice. I have it in a second Space on Mac OS X fullscreen with 3 shells running.

The first shell is 50% of the screen split vertically. The other two are each 25% of the right-side of the screen split horizontally. This way I can edit files in the left hand pane via Pico or Vim, use Git in the lower right-hand corner and be SSHed into my server in the top right. Here is a screenshot.

The inspiration for this came from constantly seeing my fellow Viddler team member Todd Troxell rock the command line exclusively. Dude is hardcore and seldom uses any UI save for the Web itself.

Today I’ve used Lifehacker’s guide to using Notational Velocity via the command line since I was already using Notational Velocity app on my Mac, Simplenote on my iPhone and iPad I figured I might as well add the ability to edit these same files via the command line. Thanks to Dropbox all of these files are kept nicely in sync between all of my devices. It is sort of like living in the past and the future at the exact same time.

Now I just need to update my Tron Legacy style for Terminal to work with iTerm2 and I should be pretty well set to be about as geeky as I’ve ever been.

Every since seeing Tron Legacy I’ve wanted Flynn’s computer. From what I’ve heard on the Interwebs it runs Sun Solaris. Since I’m a Mac guy maybe I can have my Terminal look like The Grid’s UI without needing to run an entirely different OS.

I’m basing this style solely off of this screenshot from the Tron Legacy movie trailer. Here is what my Terminal looks like now.

There is still more to do. First, I have to find the font that they are using (font experts, help?). If you want to contribute to this I’ve put the style up on GitHub.

His example shows an easy way to grab all of your Delicious bookmarks off of the service. Only, if you are a Terminal newb you may not have any idea what just happened after you run his suggested command.

So, my suggestion is to run the following command. First, open Terminal by opening the ~/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app or simply type Terminal into Spotlight and hit Enter. Then, run this command.

curl https://username:password@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all -o "delicious.xml"

That -o flag, or option, tells curl that you’d like to save the file. The filename that you’d like to use is in the quotes. Now, you’ll have a single XML file saved in your Home directory called delicious.xml with all of your Delicious Bookmarks.

What you do with that is up to you. Just about any text editor will allow you to read the .xml file.

Oh, and like Mr. Keith I’ll be posting all of my links back onto Delicious as well. I just have to write a quick plugin for WordPress. I’m sure I’ll find time for that sometime in 2011. I’ve never thought of doing that (no idea why) but I am going to start. I don’t know what the future holds for Delicious but either way it is fun and easy to “dual post” the links.

Erica Sudan has made a nice little utility called AirPlayer (look for the download link in the list at the bottom of the page) that makes it dead simple to use your Mac as an AirPlay destination device. Sort of like turning your Mac into a TV with an AppleTV attached.

I just used the YouTube application on my iPad and played the video back on my Mac using this utility and it works just fine. Simple too.

/via Lifehacker.

Where we all assumed it meant that Apple was refocusing everyone’s attention on the Mac from the iPhone/iPod/iPad, Dediu suggests something else. Jobs himself stated during the event that some of the things they’ve learned from iPhone, iPad and iOS were being applied to the Macintosh in both hardware – the new Macbook Air – and to OS X Lion. So these lessons-learned were being brought Back to the Mac.

Clever. Genius. Awesome. (via John Gruber)

I recently had the need to upgrade each of these on my Snow Leopard install and it worked perfectly.

Update May 20, 2011: It turns out that Tomlinson’s website is down. So, here is a brief synopsis of what you can do to add this functionality to your Mac.

• Open Terminal
• In terminal, enter: open .profile
• Add the following lines of code
  # TextMate
  # set path and simple shell function
  export TEXTMATE_PATH=/Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/Resources/mate
  mate () {
  $TEXTMATE_PATH $1 $2 $3 $4 $5 $6
  }
  # svn for TextMate (default editor, end-of-line types)
  export EDITOR="$TEXTMATE_PATH -w"
  export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8

  # Coda
# set path
export CODA_PATH=/Applications/Coda.app
# function roughly like 'mate .' by expanding '.' to '*.htm*'
coda () {
if [[ "." == $1 ]]
then
open -a $CODA_PATH *.htm*
else
open -a $CODA_PATH $1 $2 $3
fi
}

• Save .profile
• Quit Terminal
• Restart Terminal

There is also a slightly more robust script written for Coda by Aditya Bhargava that handles a few more tidbits and it is available on GitHub.

Thanks to Apple for providing a solution in relatively short order.

I’m a tagging freak. I believe tags are the best way to help organize data into miscellaneous piles of information. It gives us a non-hierarchical (that isn’t a word, is it?) way that we can search for things later. Yes, I’ve read Dave Weinberger‘s book Everthing is Miscellaneous. I told you; tagging freak.

Apple has, in their own way, provided support for tagging in Mac OS X. They have a field in their metadata for files called “Spotlight comments”. Or, ‘the words you’d like to use to search for this file using Spotlight’. So if I have a document that, for whatever reason, is about my cats Pickles and Pookers but – somehow – does not mention them inside of the file by name or in the filename itself, I can add “Pickles Pookers” to the Spotlight comments area and presto! – I can search Spotlight for either of their names and find the file.

Magic.

Tags, on the other hand, adds a certain UI to this process that I think Apple should have done from the very beginning. From inside of any Applescript-enabled application (which is a lot of applications) you can invoke a UI to help you add some tags to that file. You can do this in Mail.app, Finder, inside of iPhoto, and even on bookmarks within Safari. Then, you can do specific searches in Spotlight later for those tags. The screencast on the home page for Tags does a good job of explaining what the application does and what it allows you to accomplish.

Source: Tags | Overview.

The responses were a mixed bag. Some told me to ditch Mail.app, some said that they’d rather use POP3 instead of IMAP, and others with far less email messages than I have sympathized with my situation.

Today while starting up the Macbook and sipping my coffee, I noticed Apple released Mac OS X 10.5.5 as a free software update.  In the change notes I took notice of this particular line.

“Addresses performance issues related to displaying IMAP messages.”

To be honest, I don’t know what this actually means. It could mean that it speeds up Mail.app’s ability to display IMAP messages with in-line attachments.  But it doesn’t say that.  It could mean that it speeds up Mail.app’s message list, which is what I want it to say, but it doesn’t say that either.

After updating to 10.5.5 this morning I gave Mail.app a whirl.  After several “restarts” of Mail.app it seems to be a little slower than it was before at displaying the message list.  It takes 33-seconds to load the list on an IMAP-powered Mailbox with 11,899 messages.

So while the above update is, I’m sure, an update to Mail.app with regards to IMAP performance. I’m not seeing it yet.  It looks like I’ll either switch to a web-based client for my Gmail-for-domains powered email (especially now that Gears runs in Safari) or somehow keep 1,000 messages in my Inbox at a time.

Suggestions?

However, more and more data is being stored “in the cloud” and so Spotlight sometimes needs to learn new tricks to keep up with the times.  Google Docs is a perfect example of cloud computing/storage.  I use it for personal documents that I need to collaborate with people on and Viddler uses it every single day.

Google’s Precipitate “… lets you search for and launch the information you have stored in the cloud from within Spotlight or Google Desktop for Mac”.  Essentially it does something I’ve always wanted to do; create a simple file and link it to the Web.  Spotlight indexes the file’s information, but the link opens a browser ((Now I just need to force Spotlight to open these links in Fluid.app and I’d be all set.)).

Give it a spin!

Source: precipitate – Google Code.

When Apple released the latest update for Mac OS X Leopard, with the version number of 10.5.3, they updated the way that Spaces worked.  As John Gruber pointed out, Spaces now can better focus on “task separation” rather than “application separation”.

Here is a quick overview and history for you.  Spaces is a virtual desktop application that, for the lack of a better way of putting it, allows you to create as many desktops as you’d like.  Right now your computer probably has one desktop or one “viewable area to put windows”.  With Spaces, you can create more than one, and then use each of them for different purposes.

Prior to Mac OS X 10.5.3 Spaces was used more for separating applications onto different Spaces rather than setting up Spaces for tasks.  An example would be keeping your email on one Space, while having your browser in another, to keep the two applications separate for use. For people that are more productive based on focus, this made it nice to focus on your email Inbox instead of having many windows open.

However, I called this version of Spaces a glorified “Hide Others”.  In Mac OS X you can hide any application, or, hide every other application except the one you are currently viewing.  The first iteration of Spaces was like a different way to use this feature.

In the latest version of the operating system you can separate your Spaces into tasks rather than only by application.  An application, like Safari, can have windows present in every single space if you’d like.  This way you can have a Space set aside for writing, one for email, and another for working on a logo.  Sound confusing?  Consider how I’m currently using Spaces – and it might help clear things up for you.

Space 1: Writing / Reading: I use my first Space to read just about everything I need to read.  Google Reader in a Safari window, tabs open for other articles and links people give to me, etc – are all on this space.  Since my reading and my writing usually go together, I use this Space for writing as well.  This means that while I’m writing this entry, I’m on Space 1 with tabs and windows open that are related to this entry.  Nothing else is distracting me from this task of writing this entry.  All of the information I need to complete this task is on this Space and nothing else.

Space 2: iTunes and other long-duration tasks: Have you ever needed to encode something in iMovie or, perhaps you’re downloading something that will take a long time, or transferring files from one location to another, backing up your computer, etc.  I use this second space for those tasks.  iTunes is always open in Space 2, though I can control it through my Apple Keyboard, so I don’t need to switch to that Space to play, pause, skip to the next song, etc.

The reason I separate the long-duration tasks over onto their own space is because I feel they can be a distraction.  I find myself checking applications that are “doing something” every now and then.  Now I don’t check them usually until they are completely finished with their task.  I find it is far less distracting.

Space 3: Email, IM, and Twhirl: I also call this my “communication station”.  The entire Viddler team keeps tabs via a Skype chat.  I also use iChat on a daily basis.  My email Inbox is in a constant state of flux.  And Twhirl, the application I use to keep up-to-date with Twitter and FriendFeed, is also getting updated every 15 minutes or so.  In order to keep my distractions down on all other Spaces I keep these tasks dedicated to this one Space.  I’m free to check up on them when I want.

Space 4: Projects: Typically, on a given day or at a specific time, I’m working on one project.  This space is where I do that project.  For instance, if I’m programming something I’ll have Coda, Transmit, any browser windows with documentation and reference material, and perhaps a browser window with a preview of what I’m working on – in this Space.  This space is completely project centric, with nothing else to distract me from that project.  It is very seldom that I need to work on 2 projects at once ((That don’t fit into the other Spaces I already have set up.)) so I’m able to focus on the project until it is done.

I’ve found Spaces to be very enjoyable since the 10.5.3 upgrade to Mac OS X and while I think my usage of it will mature over time, the last few weeks have been liberating in many ways.  Just the other day, while at a meeting at ViddlerHQ, I used my project Space to keep notes for the meeting.  There was no other distraction available for me during that meeting so I was able to both take notes with my laptop open and be a constructive part of the meeting.

How are you using Spaces?  Have you given it a try since the update?

Update: Switching Spaces and preference oddities

After rereading this entry, and being asked questions via Skype by Kyle Slattery, I might have omitted a few details that I should probably include in this entry.

First, is that I recommend deselecting the “When switching to an application, switch to a space with the open windows for the application” box.  This will allow you to switch applications without switching Spaces.

Second, is that in order for Spaces preferences to take effect – you have to restart your Dock sometimes.  I am not sure why, but this doesn’t happen to everyone.  Here is the way John Gruber explained it in his aforelinked entry:

“Lastly, I should mention that I had problems getting this new feature to work at all. After upgrading to 10.5.3 and seeing the Spaces-related changes in the release notes, I tried it out. Toggling the new checkbox made no difference for me, however — I got the same old “jump to another space when switching apps” behavior either way. I solved the problem by trashing my com.apple.dock.plist preferences file (which, since Spaces is controlled by the Dock, is where most Spaces-related prefs seem to be stored). After logging out and logging back in, the new checkbox worked perfectly.”

And last, that I use the Cntrl+arrow keys to navigate around to different Spaces the majority of the time.  But, when I’m at home on my desk using my Might Mouse, I’ve set up the third-button ((Which is the equivalent of pushing down the scroll wheel.)) to also show my Spaces.  This makes it really easy to switch whether my hand is on the keyboard or the mouse at the time I need to switch. 

“Sigh, I was excited about Google contact syncing in 10.5.3, but it turns out it’s only for iPhone and iPod touch users. Lame.” — Kyle Slattery on Twitter.

I didn’t care too much about this at the time because, well, I have an iPhone and I figured I’d have the feature once I updated to the latest version of Leopard.  But then I got to thinking.  Why would Apple, or Google for that matter, want this feature to be limited in such a way? Turns out, even the daring John Gruber thought the same thing.

I have no idea.  But such as limitations are, someone took the time to figure out a way to hack it.  And so now it is up on Lifehacker and all of you out there without iPhones and/or iPod touches can rejoice.

Source: Lifehacker: Enable Google Contact Sync Without an iPhone or iPod Touch.

“With creative features rivaling ‘Pro’ applications, while retaining plasq’s signature ease-of-use, Comic Life Magiq is a Quantum Evolution of Comic Life.”

I’m downloading the trial right now to give it a spin.  I’m fairly confident Eliza would like to get her hands on Comic Life Magiq to create some really neat photo projects.

Video demonstration of Comic Life Magiq

Source: Comic Life Magiq.
Related:  Other posts tagged with plasq.

In Tiger, when I clicked Show All I got a really nice Spotlight-only window that I could then drill down into the results more specifically.  For example, if I was searching for photos of my friend Chris Fehnel, the window in Tiger looked like this.

Tiger’s Spotlight “show all” window.

Pretty straight forward, right?  It breaks out Documents (or in this case conversations I had with Chris in iChat), Email messages, his Address Book entry, and photos that I had tagged with his name.  Brilliant!

Tiger’s Spotlight window also allowed for some sorting options on the right “panel”.  Sorting by date, kind, location of the file, etc, – is quick, easy, and straight forward.

Now, let’s take a look at Leopard’s Spotlight window when clicking Show All for a search for “Chris Fehnel”.

Leopard’s “show all” window.

I don’t even think I have to explain how bad this is.  Imagine being new to the Mac, and seeing this window.  This is horrible, unusable, and makes me wish I could downgrade to Tiger.

If anyone has any suggestions (besides Finder replacements), I’m all ears.
 

The erring widget.

I began reusing Ta-da Lists recently when I found out about the iPhone support.  It works beautifully.  When I think of something while I’m on the go, I can add a ta-da list item with my iPhone painlessly.  When I’m back at my computer, I reference the very same list.  I love it.

Up until the other day I was using the Ta-da Lists widget as my way to interact with my lists on my Macintosh computer.  But for some reason the widget now just spins (pictured) while trying to get the lists and their items.

I don’t know what is going on, but I’ve sent a few messages to whomever I could find contact information for.

As a side request: If anyone knows an application, rather than a widget, that utilizes Ta-da lists – please let me know.

Fixes

As I said, my list of fixes will be pretty short.

An unlimited number of labels would be where I’d start. If you open your preferences in Finder you have a Labels area that gives you a selection of 7 colors that you can change the names of, to fit the label. I use this feature rather sparingly so I can actually get what I need labeled within the 7-label-limit – however why is this a limitation at all? Why not have a quick + button that lets you select a color, name the label, and you are off to the races. Perhaps it has to do with people deleting labels that scares Apple from including such a feature.

Saved searches are currently the only folders that allow you to view things “like Spolight” windows show files. By kind, date, etc. If you create a smart folder you can see a new view button at the top – but yet you can not view those on other folders. I think it’d be neat to have that view across the system, not just within saved searches.

Keyword autocomplete when doing a keyword search is really annoying. If you do a search within Finder, then click + and add a Keyword filter – Finder will load your list of keywords from your entire system (including those in iPhoto). On my Macbook it took about 20 seconds to do this (good ole’ beachball meantime), and then it autocompleted anything I typed. Instead of being able to type in partial names (i.e. Paul), it forced me to search for a specific Paul. Here’s the annoying part, I have 7 people that I know with the first name of Paul, and 8 that I know with the last name of Paul. Turn the autocomplete off.

DMG mounts should not automatically be opened with the finder in “collapsed mode”. I am not sure where to throw the blame here – if it is Apple, the developer who packaged the DMG, or something that I’ve set on my system. But I have never once wanted to keep Finder in collapsed view since I will eventually have to drag the application into my applications folder to install it.

Feature requests

There is a lot of hoopla about having tabs and other various things, but I’m not sure I’m on board with that yet.

Better media browsing when you are viewing a folder filled with images, movies, or audio. Right now if I’m viewing a directory full of JPGs I can view it in thumbnail (or tile) view, and then open my preferences and bump up the size of the thumbnails. But why not an iPhoto like slider for this type of thing? Why not have a quick way to sort by date, kind, or keyword?

Apple should start taking some of the functionality back out of the applications that it creates and start putting those features into the operating system. Make it just as easy to find a photo in Finder as it is to do in iPhoto.

Final thoughts

See, that wasn’t so bad. I’m sure the improvements to Finder in Leopard will be pretty broad. Not only because of the amount of criticism that has flew – but also because there will be new features that it needs to support (such as Time Machine).

I’m not sure I want to see it change too much though – and if it becomes anything as bloated as Path Finder I may just have to revolt!

Note: Be sure to check out other parts of my Leopard wish list listed below:

1. Part one: Safari
2. Part two: Mail
3. Part three: iChat
4. Part three: Finder

[tags]finder, macintosh, apple, mac os x, osx, leopard, wish list, iphoto, keywords, searching[/tags]
[slug]leopard-wishes-pt4-finder[/slug]

Fixes

I hope not to sound as if I use iChat begrudgingly because, on the contrary, I rarely find fault with iChat during my normal usage. However if I really turn a critical eye to it, I find:

Error messages should be more descriptive when a video or audio conference, or file transfer fails. Many times there are issues with NATs or Firewalls getting in the way of iChat trying to make connections. iChat typically reports with an error message along the lines of “blah blah blah”. If iChat could have a built-in utility to test your connection for possible problems, and then offer ways of solving those problems based on it’s findings – that’d be cool.

Better Address Book integration is something that I’ve long for since the beginning. Both Adium and iChat both pull your contacts address cards to add buddies to your list – however they also hold their own lists separate from the address book. I’d like to see every contact held within iChat to be in the address book, and vice-versa, by default. What typically happens is, if I sign up for a new AIM account, and load up iChat – I will be forced to go in and add each buddy from my address book into iChat – rather than it just recognizing them. Perhaps there is a reason that they do not do this (perhaps some would find it annoying) – but for me – I think it’d be neat to at least have the option.

File transfers that don’t work when video and audio do seems really strange to me. If I am talking to someone on video and I try to send them a file, and it doesn’t work, that seems strange to me. Why can we make a connection for audio or video and not for transferring files?

Update the tooltips which are used to show your buddy’s info. If you hover over a buddy, you can see some quick information about them – usually their AIM name, and current status. Like Adium, I’d like to see this updated to show a larger version of your buddy’s icon – along with a way to quickly send them an email, an invitation to an event in iCal, a link to the song currently playing in iTunes, etc. This could also be considered a feature request, but I’ll get more into that in a second.

Feature requests

There are a few of my feature requests that delve slightly into what we already know will be included in the next release – but bear with me because I think they need to be refined a little more.

System-wide iChat integration could go well beyond what we see now with Mail and Address Book. Currently you can see who is online from within Mail (if you have that particular email address associated with the current AIM username), and also from within Address Book. This is sufficient in my opinion though anywhere address book information is used (i.e. in the Address Book widget), it’d be nice to see a person’s online status as well.

However, there are many more ways I’d like to see iChat integrated into the OS. If we take a look at the four reasons I currently use iChat, perhaps we can see a way to integrate it more.

1. Text messaging. There are several ways I could see this being used. Contextual menus in Safari, as just one example, give you a way to “Search in Spotlight” and “Search in Google” when you have highlighted text. Perhaps “Send to buddy” would also be available instead of having the need to copy/paste all the time. This may seem like a very small thing, but just think of the amount of time it could save.

Perhaps this feature could be extended a bit further to actually be an option from within Pages.

2. Audio chat. Audio chat should not be limited to only sharing one’s voice. With a little jiggery pokery, or software like Audio Hijack Pro and Soundflower, one could potentially share their tunes with someone working remotely out of the office or with a computer not directly connected to the LAN. Or, maybe two people would like to collaborate on a project in GarageBand, and they could do so by “porting” the output of GarageBand in the current audio chat.

The implications could be fairly endless here.

3. Video chat. Just like with Audio chat, I’d like to see a way to share video via the video chat feature. I realize that the upcoming release will have some screen sharing, iPhoto slideshow, and other features. But being able to open iMovie and show someone a rough cut of a project their working on – could prove extremely valuable.

4. File transfers. What about being able to send a file from anywhere in the system to someone on your buddy list? You can do this now by dragging that file onto your buddy’s name in your contact list – but what if you could do it from within the application you are working on the file with. Say I’d like to send that same rough cut of the iMovie project to someone so that they can edit it further. Emailing it is not an option (too big). I could send it to him in iChat but that means I’d have to save it, open finder (or use Spotlight) and drag the file onto their name ect. What about a button to “Send to Buddy”?

Update (9am on Nov. 15): It turns out there is a product for doing something like this with Skype. It was written about on TechCrunch. Interesting.

I could also envision this feature being awesome from within iPhoto. Quickly send someone an entire album. Sure, this would bypass Apple’s .Mac photo-sharing service built-into iPhoto. But I think .Mac sucks.

Final thoughts

As I said, I really don’t have many issues with the current iChat. Not enough to make me jump ship to something like Adium (which I would have to write a 5-part piece to say what I don’t like about it). I’m going to stick with iChat – and I’m looking forward to the new stuff coming up.

Note: Be sure to check out other parts of my Leopard wish list listed below:

1. Part one: Safari
2. Part two: Mail
3. Part three: iChat
4. Part three: Finder

[tags]apple, macintosh, mac os x, osx, wish list, leopard, ichat, buddy list, aim, adium, audio hijack pro, soundflower, safari, spotlight, mail, garageband, imovie, iphoto, finder, itunes[/tags]
[slug]leopard-wishes-pt3-ichat[/slug]

Fixes

Here are some things that I believe should be fixed in Mail.

Smart Mailbox rules are seemingly complete – though I find one oddity among them. When you select the “Message is in Mailbox” filter, you are presented with every Mailbox you’ve setup – even the Smart Mailboxes that you’ve already created. However, if you select the “Message is not in Mailbox” filter, you are not given the Smart Mailboxes as options. I’ve thought about this for awhile, and I still can’t figure out the reason.

The search box should allow for multiple filters such as you find in the current Finder. Searching for a subject, then being able to click + to drill down until you find what you are looking for. I have about 12,500 pieces of email, and finding the 1 that I am looking for can sometimes prove difficult with a single search filter.

The address book panel seems very OS 9-ish. It works, but I’d like to see the design of this updated a bit.

Feature requests

I realize that Mail is getting “a significant upgrade” when Leopard is release, though the major feature additions looked atrocious in my opinion. Here are some things I’d like to see.

The iLife Media Browser would be an awesome addition to Mail’s default set of icons on the New Mail window. Attaching photos from your iPhoto Library is quick and easy – if you already have iPhoto open. I envision a time where we can click on the Media Browser (similar to what you find in Pages, iMove, etc) and find a photo or photos and attach them with ease.

Side note: The new version of Mail will have “stationary” – and from what I can tell from the screenshots released so far there is a new button called “Photo Browser” at the top. I hope that this is not a brand-new, non-standard media browser that does not use the same frameworks that are used throughout the system so far. And, I hope that this button is not only enabled when you choose a particular style of stationary that allows for photos. We need this feature to be available any time we want to send normal attachments.

An all new way to attach files would be nice. Utilizing a media browser to attached photos, audio, and perhaps even video – would be nice. But I can see definite improvements that could be made to attaching documents, spreadsheets, and compressed archives too.

Imagine you need to attach an Excel spreadsheet, a PDF document, and a .Zip file full of product images to an email. When you do this, I would like to see a preview of the document that I am going to attach. (This does currently work with PDFs and Images) I’d like to see previews for Excel spreadsheets, Text files, Rich-Text Files, Word Documents, .Pages documents, Keynote Presentations, and anything else that usually resides in the document window.

As per .Zip archive files, it’d be nice to select a zip file in the “attach file” panel and be able to see the file names of the files within the archive. This would ensure that I’ve selected the correct file to attach.

Automatic compression of multiple file attachments is something that was “introduced” by AOL back in the mid to late 90s. I have not used America Online since then, so I have no idea if this feature still exists.

If I had an email with multiple attachments, as described above, Mail could automatically compress those files on send. This way, the transmission of data would be slightly smaller. On the other end, Mail.app would uncompress those files into their original state prior to displaying the message to the recipient.

Side note: The biggest problem with this feature in AOL (circa version 2 or 3) was that when you sent email to anyone that was not an AOL user, they’d just get a .zip file. Back in those days .zip files were not yet the norm, and so you had to have people go to winzip.com or something to download a utility to uncompress those files. In other words, their email client did not have the “automatically uncompress files upon receipt” feature. Annoying to say the least.

The other problem with this is, Mail would have to have a slightly proprietary compression format so that when a .zip, .tar, .bz (etc) type of file would come in, it wouldn’t always uncompress those files. If I was sent 1,000 text files in a .zip archive, I wouldn’t want those files automatically uncompressed by Mail.

Final thoughts

I’m trying not to be too picky, otherwise this list would get quite long. Any application that is used as often as an email client always gets more than it’s share of scrutiny. I’m fairly happy with my email client to-date, and I hope that the trend continues.

Side note: Leopard Mail will include Stationary, Notes, To-Dos, and RSS feed reading ability. From what I’ve seen so far, I do not “like” any of them (even though what I did see would be considered BETA).

The Stationary seems a bit superfluous though I can see people having a ball using them. The Notes doesn’t make sense to me yet simply because I do not email myself notes. There are hundreds of ways to “take notes” on the Mac OS ranging from widgets to small menu bar applications to full-blown GTD applications. The “to-dos” in Mail seem like they’d be better kept and updated within iCal. I’m sure the integration between iCal and Mail will be might tighter this time around – so I’ll have to see that integration prior to passing judgement.

RSS within Mail is a completely new headache to me. RSS feeds within Safari is only made for those people who keep track of a few web sites. With constant attention to feed management you may even be able to get away with having 100 subscriptions in Safari without pulling your hair out. Unless the integration of RSS feeds (which should be called “Feeds” but we’ve already talked about that), rivals that of NetNewsWire, then I see no improvement than using Safari for your subscriptions. Too much synergy may not be a good thing in this case.

Note: Be sure to check out other parts of my Leopard wish list listed below:

1. Part one: Safari
2. Part two: Mail
3. Part three: iChat
4. Part three: Finder

[tags]apple, macintosh, mac os x, osx, mail.app, mail, iphoto, ilife, safari, leopard, mac os 10.5, wish list, ical, gtd, stationary, notes, to-dos, rss[/tags]
[slug]leopard-wishes-pt2-mail[/slug]

The first thing I’m going to tackle is Safari (though I believe that Safari should be updated as a separate application and not part of the OS). I’ll try to focus my thoughts from fixes, to actual bugs, to feature requests.

Fixes

The following are not “bugs” in the traditional sense. I believe that most of the following was done intentionally, I just do not think they should have been done.

Setting your default browser is currently held within Safari’s preference panel. This “feature” definitely gets on the nerves of many and really I can’t figure out why this resides in here. In order to switch from Safari to Firefox you’d need to first open Safari and tell it you want Firefox to be the default browser.

This isn’t to say that Firefox (and other browsers) do not ask if you’d like to use them as the default browser on your system – but this does not mean that this is the proper location for this preference. What if I uninstalled Safari?

The blue RSS button at the top of the browser is fairly misleading. Apple is attempting to “brand” a doc-spec. In other words, they are saying that all “feeds” are RSS. Obviously this is not true. I do not want that icon to change from RSS to ATOM to “WHATEVER” when it applies, I’d much rather see Apple use the unified feed icons to go along with the unified feed theory (another post I have to bring over to my local site soon).

Multiple feeds detection kinda goes along with the above. I suppose this could be filed under a new feature request – but I feel like they might have kept it simple on purpose. I wouldn’t mind seeing a short list pop up with the available feeds for that site. Obviously this would only be useful if web masters actually listed these feeds in their documents.

Feature requests

Safari is definitely a browser for the average user, but I’d like to see a few of the “not so elementary” features from other browsers find their way into the Leopard release of Safari. Why? Because I’d much rather use Safari than Firefox if it only had the following.

Bookmark keywords (click to zoom)

Bookmark keywords is something I use heavily in Firefox. I am not sure how widely used this feature actually is, since even browsers like Flock do not currently have this feature built in (and Flock is built off of the same engine and core as Firefox). Side note: I’ve been told that Flock 1.0 (due out sooner than later) will have these features as it will be built off of the Firefox 2.0 release.

To explain really quick, for those that are not familiar with this feature – Bookmark keywords allow you to setup shortcuts for your bookmarks. Let’s say that you had a rather long URL that you visited often, and you didn’t want to traverse your long list of bookmarks in order to get to that page without typing in the name manually, you can setup a shorter keyword for that. (see screenshot) You type in that keyword, and poof, you’re there.

Searchable history is not something I use every day, but when you need it – you find it very handy. I suppose I could liken a searchable history to Spotlight. Before Spotlight was introduced we never knew how much of a pain it was to find things on our local system. But, after having Spotlight for awhile now, I find it indispensable. Such is the case with searchable history. Safari’s history menu is crude – and needs a significant update.

Update: As Nathan pointed out the history in Safari is indeed searchable. But I would have never found it if he hadn’t told me where it was. So the UI needs to be adjusted to make this much more accessible.

Final thoughts

Really my requests for Safari are very light and don’t hold a ton of water when it comes to my decision to use Firefox instead of Safari. There are other, underlying, reasons why I use Firefox that are much more “under the hood” type of reasons. For instance, many WYSIWYG editors inside of various web applications do not function properly within Safari. Hopefully, with the very latest version of Web kit no doubt being included in the upcoming release of Safari, we’ll see some of this functionality made available.

I remember the first day I wanted to jump ship from Safari to Firefox. I wanted to use Google Calendar and couldn’t because Safari was not a supported browser. But now that I rarely use any online web applications – I may switch back and deal with my little niggles mentioned above until they become available (hopefully) in the next release.

Note: Be sure to check out other parts of my Leopard wish list listed below:

1. Part one: Safari
2. Part two: Mail
3. Part three: iChat
4. Part three: Finder

[tags]leopard, mac os x, osx, macintosh, apple, safari, wish list, browsers, flock, firefox, bookmarks, history, rss, feeds, atom[/tags]
[slug]leopard-wishes-pt1-safari[/slug]

Mr. Jobs I must appologize for my ignorance and arrogance. I love my iMac, I really do, but I have always had problems with this or that. Not with the computer itself, mostly just connecting to my other computer. Well, today I decided to read the documents on your well design website. Side note: Your website is always fast, and reliable even though a large percentage of the Internet population downloads movie trailers, and now music from it. Kudos.

After reading few docs about connecting my iMac to the PC, I found it incredibly easy to do so. My sincerest appologies for ever doubting.

Your friend, and future 100% switcher,
Colin

I still find it pretty funny how long it took me to switch fully to Macintosh and how now I’m still mad at myself for being on the OS for so long. For any of you on the fence, pick a day and switch – you’ll not regret it.

[tags]apple, macintosh, imac g4, steve jobs, letter, repost, pc, mac os x[/tags]