129 words on Mac OS X
Mac OS X loves displaying progress windows. Presumably because it loves progress. Progress in copying or moving files, progress in deleting items in the Trash, progress in deleting items from a backup, progress in mounting a disk image, progress in connecting to a server, progress in burning a CD, progress in compressing or decompressing files.
Unfortunately all of these kinds of progress are displayed in a window of their own. Which means that you can easily end up with different progress windows covering each other and having to ‘manage’ your progress windows to actually benefit from the information they display. To me it would seem much cleaner to have a single window which displays all the progress panels for file or Finder based tasks. That would seem less disorganised.
10.5 does at least consolidate progress bars for all copy operations into a single window, if I’m remembering right, so maybe this will be the sort of tidying up that makes it into 10.6.
Hm, perhaps my memory is failing me but I thought, copy windows have been consolidated for quite a while. image @ article
Anyway, I’m not holding my breath. Particularly as all the progress windows seem to be ad-hoc constructions by whatever process is spawning them rather than suggesting a uniform infrastructure.