Monday, January 09, 2006
MWSF Wishlist
Now that I've been over what I think about the current crop of rumors about MWSF, I'll bet you all want to know what I am WISHING for at MWSF this year?
- A NEW FINDER
The Finder sucks. It is, at best, slightly worse than the Mac OS 9 Finder, and is in major need of an overhaul. No more choosing if you want brushed metal or standard windows, no more file-deletion-task-blocking balogney, no more ultra-wide task granularity (spinning beach ball every time you try to do anything), no more 'interrupting' (one app claiming the foreground when you're working in some other app), no more foreground server connecting ( actually no more foreground anything! Do everything in the background, do it quickly, an do it ON ANOTHER THREAD so I'm not tied up waiting for it to finish).
If Apple were to deliver a NEW Finder, I would be over the moon, but I won't expect that for real until "Leopard" comes in the fall (?)(or maybe it'll come right now to go along with new Intel machines? I don't know if this is 'required' or not) - A DECENT NETWORK VOLUME BROWSER
Separate the network browser from the Finder, in so much as it needs to be. It should 'look' like it's part of the Finder, but function completely separately. I should be able to browse network volumes the way I browse local volumes (though I like the current pick-a-server-and-"connect" paradigm), it should be fast, and I shouldn't have to wait a dog's age for new servers to appear/unavailble servers to disappear/server name changes to take affect etc. And move the friggin' Windows Workgroup/WINS server config stuff out of the Directory Access App to somewhere that makes sense.