Soo… new OS X.. 10.7 and all, and continuing with the big cats theme they’ve named it Lion, surely it’s time to go to 11, there aren’t too many big cats left! And it would make sense to finish on the “king of the jungle”.
Having switched from Windows to OS X this year, there are a few things that I like in Windows 7 that I wish OS X would incorporate. Note: I still use Windows on my desktop machine to do serious work like video converting, photo editing (big screen) etc.
Anyways… my list… and I think that they’re reasonable! In no particular order, but as they come to me….
- Ability to just pull drives without having to eject and get that stupid warning
- Stop Spotlight automatically indexing removable drives unless I tell it to instead of having to tell it to NOT index drives
- Better management of network drives, particularly Windows shares… gotta learn to live in both worlds Apple!
- Moving files from the context menu, ie: offer a CUT and PASTE instead of just COPY. Damn Apple… you’d think this was obvious? My workaround is to just drag the files from folder to folder and hold down the Command key to move. Works, but harder
- Automatically arrange folders. If you start extracting the contents of zip folders you get files jumbled up everywhere. You then have to right click and Arrange things to make Finder clean. Take a left from Explorer… If I say organise by name, I want you to keep that folder organised by name
- Have a “Bring to front” option for the dock so that it shows itself (not automatically hides) on the desktop but if an application takes up the full screen, it gets sent to the bottom. You can then call it to the front my mousing down. Showing the dock all the time looks nice on the desktop but it takes up valuable space, especially on a 13″ screen. Do something like RocketDock.
- Better file properties management. Like if I select 5 items in a folder, Explorer will say how big those files are all together. Or if I selected 4 folders out of 10, I can right click, hit properties and see how big those four folders are combined. I’ve made the mistake of selecting quite a few photos and hitting Command+I thinking it would do what Windows does only to have hundreds of inspector windows pop up… not cool. If you can’t do that, at least change the xxxGB free at the bottom of Finder, I don’t really need to see how much space I have free in EVERY SINGLE WINDOW, I can see that by looking at my desktop.
- What’s with renaming items by pressing return and opening using Command+O? I would have though that Return would be a more logical open command? And give rename a separate shortcut. That’s a very Windows way of looking at things I guess, I’ll learn eventually.
- Have a way of showing the path to files. I know that there’s the path bar but compared to the breadcrumb navigation on Windows 7 it’s pretty weak.
- Get rid of the millions of .DS_STORE and other 1KB . files… what the hell do they do anyway!
- More of a hardware point for the next line of MB’s, but seriously, have a clicky system for the SD card, don’t let it stick out, it makes it look so less “Pro”. And sometimes I like leaving the SD card in the computer when I put it in a bag and having it stick out is just awkward.
I admit that OS X is NOT Windows and that’s one of the reasons that I decided to buy a Mac to start with. But there are lots of cool little Windows features that OS X could learn from.
Having ranted above… and yes, some of those points are being really picky, there are lots of cool things I like, being and not limited to:
- Quick look is just AWESOME, way better than the crappy Windows preview pane that takes up space and doesn’t really do a great job of displaying stuff like documents as it tries to cram everything into such a small space. The ability to go fullscreen (big Mac thing I’m finding out) it pretty cool.
- Stacks. Some people don’t like this, but I find that it’s a really neat way of displaying a limited amount of files and applications quickly and very nicely it must be said. For loads of files it’s probably better to just open FInder. But there’s no real equivalent on Windows… maybe jumplists and libraries?
- Expose. I find this really really cool and probably better than Flip3D for moving around windows, I haven’t tried it with loads of Windows open, it might be a little impractical but you can then open up task switcher inside the window preview thingy to focus on one app.
- Spaces. Having multiple desktops is a Linux thing that I’ve just found out I can do on my Mac! Catch up Windows! You’re lagging. Although I admit I see no point in having multiple desktops on a 24″ screen but on a 13″ laptop – very handy!
- Menu apps! Those little apps that sit in your menu, really cool. And they are a really efficient way of displaying updates to stuff – like Echofon or something.
- Growl. Having a standard system for pop up alerts is way better than the jumble of mess on Windows, I get alerts top right for WLM, bottom right for MediaMonkey and bottom left for Digsby – they all look different as well. Top left is saved for the Start button.
- Multitouch is just awesome, I can no longer use other laptops without trying to two-finger swipe to scroll and two-finger tap to right click. And it looks awkward in front of other people who have no idea what I’m going on about.