Quarter Life Crisis

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard [part 2 of 2]¶

5551 words on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

Thanks for sitting through the first part of the Mac OS X.6 review and still coming back. In today’s instalment I move on to the features of Mac OS X.6 which I consider less great in the way they came out. For these features I think that Apple’s idea of ‘refining’ them didn’t go far enough and I plenty of missed opportunities there. At the end I include a bunch of mixed short notes and observations which could be interesting.

Contents

• Finder
• iChat
• Time Machine
• Activity Monitor
• (Dock) Exposé
• Location Services
• XCode
• Further Notes

Finder

Ever since Mac OS X arrived old-time Mac users bemoaned the decease of the proper Mac Finder (in case I’m not bitchy enough about it go and google your own Siracusa quotes on the issue). Yes, the Finder has been improved in every update, yet substantially it has always remained a royal piece of shit. It may have become faster, prettier and everything but as long as it keeps regularly misplacing my windows and icons it is far from helpful and seems like a tool designed to turn people into command line users.

With the whole 64bit thing Apple apparently felt obliged to turn the Finder into a 64bit application as well. As Apple also decided to not make Carbon’s GUI parts 64bit savvy, they thus forced themselves to turn the Finder into a Cocoa application as well. As a consequence I assume that some poor programmers were locked in a basement somewhere in Cupertino to dig through that code and turn the Finder into a Cocoa application, painstakingly preserving whatever fragile balance the application had before and hopefully preserving sufficiently many of the tiny details included to make the GUI tolerable. (Hint: They didn’t. The X.6 Finder seems even keener to place my icons at random positions than its X.5 predecessor. Particularly when crashing / needing to be killed it quite enjoys displacing all my carefully aligned desktop icons on a stupid grid. Using Undo never restores the correct icon position and doing so on Desktop icons while Exposé is active tends to place icons beneath the menu bar. Ahem.)

In short, people probably put a lot of effort into creating a Finder that sucks just as much as the old one but which can tag itself with the labels ‘64bit’ and ‘Cocoa’. That’s not surprising, but it’s still a shame that this opportunity to finally bring the OS X Finder to the same level as its Classic counterpart was missed. It’s even more of a shame that no exploration of new file management user interfaces was started.

To be ‘fair and balanced’ let me mention a few actual improvements that made it into the Finder: In the View menu you can now adjust the sort order in column view. As an addict of sort-by-date-modified, I am tempted to find this useful, although first attempts to actually use it suggest it is too unpredictable, particularly with respect to which windows and columns will be affected by this setting. You also have great control of the sort options in Spotlight results windows now, letting you do a sort-by-date-modified there as well. Sort-by-size is still missing, though.

Also, the advancing of the progress bar in the copy dialogue looks smoother now [but they didn’t make an effort to unify the countless progress indicators the Finder and System can display which would have been a good improvement as well].

And let me keep the best improvement for the end, so we can party like we were using System 7 from HFS drive: The Finder now supports a ‘Put Back’ command for items in the Trash again, meaning that you can easily return items that were accidentally trashed where they belong. That’s great, they just missed adding the same feature for the Desktop while doing it. The magic here lies in the Trash’s .DS_Store file, by the way.

A rather amusing change in the Finder can be observed when resizing the sidebar in its windows. Note that when doing so the toolbar buttons for the view style now move to be aligned with the end of the sidebar at all times. Interesting question how that is coded, considering that the toolbar looks like a usual one with flexible spaces. What’s less amusing is that you can now completely hide the sidebar (using a command in the View menu, but not by dragging it) to have a sidebar-less window with a toolbar. I guess in X.7 we can then hope for a toolbar-less window with a sidebar…

iChat

iChat started out as the little application that could, with a bit of an AOL stink to it. But over time it became quite capable adding features like Jabber chat, audio and video conferencing and screen sharing - a definite improvement to all parent-support situations. However, the dirty little secret of iChat remains that it is not a master of any of its trades. None of its features works really well, the user interface options for the features seem to have been tacked on by summer interns year after year and over time they even mutilated good features like Bluetooth support which previously worked. All in all iChat could have done with a lot of user interface consolidation as well technology improvements. But it didn’t receive a single one or perhaps just a few on the connection side (as these are long-term experiences, it’s hard to judge them at the beginning, my impression right now is that things may be a little better but are far from working well).

To be less mystic, let me list a few obvious improvements that I have been waiting for for years:

• A single contact list without needing to resort to third party tools like Chax.
• Not disconnecting from AIM and Jabber all the time. And if a disconnect happens, discreetly reconnecting instead of bouncing the Dock icon until I manually reconnect.
• Support for more messaging services, or a plug-in interface so other people can provide that support.
• Reliably establishing audio and video connections.
• Gracefully handling low-bandwidth situations (Skype will give you a crappy image, iChat will give you a Connection Error - which one does your mum prefer?)
• Bluetooth support that works like in Mac OS X.3 (particularly a simple button for switching between wired and Bluetooth audio)
• A single interface for text, voice, video, screen sharing communication with the ability to freely up- and downgrade the connection type.

I am happy to admit that these are not particularly creative features, just the bugs that need fixing. Once those are sorted out, people may start thinking about ‘innovation’. A rather obvious one would be to file Chat protocols along with e-mail conversations in Mail because they often tie into one another (and because Mail has become a junkyard of non-conversational things already, so it might be refreshing to add something that fits in).

At least Apple fixed one problem they introduced in X.5: When running in German, iChat no longer places the log files of chats in folders named DD-MM-YYYY which was among the stupidest things one can possibly do. One still has to write one’s own script to rename the existing folders (because - obviously - Automator remains unable to serve as a tool for simple tasks like this).

Time Machine

Time Machine is great to have as a part of Mac OS, particularly since most of the really bad performance and crashing issues we saw shortly after the release have been resolved. Unfortunately Apple seem to have left it at that. Allegedly Time Machine’s performance has been improved for Mac OS X.6 (do you notice this in a significant way?), but none of the many details that could have used improvement saw any.

Two main issues that remain unsolved have to do with setting up your backups. As soon as I had a spare hard drive, I figured it would be a good idea to just leave that at the office for some ‘off-site backup’ magic. As many people have keys to unlock doors in our building, I wanted my office backup to be encrypted. Time Machine makes that unnecessarily difficult, I wrote up the steps for creating an encrypted backup in Mac OS X.6. Options for creating encrypted backups and for converting an existing backup into an encrypted one are missing from the graphical interface (and I had to battle the finer points of the command line utilities for disk images to achieve the desired effect - something made less fun by the fact that always it takes a whole night’s wait if you want to convert a 200GB backup).

While Time Machine does not officially support backing up into existing disk images, it does run those backups once you have all the components aligned just right. Time Machine’s recovery interface, however, always fails to locate my disk image backups unless I manually point it to them (by mounting the disk image and option clicking the Time Machine menu to select the backup volume to use - a useful command that may be a bit too well-hidden)

The other shortcoming that remains is related to the same setup. As I have two backup sets, I want Time Machine to use both. Unfortunately the software does not do that automatically, but only acknowledges the existence of a single backup set at a time. Meaning that a whole round trip to System Preferences along with many clicks is required every time I want to switch to the other backup volume. This, of course, should be handled automatically out of the box as the whole effort of Time Machine focuses on making backups a complete no-brainer that isn’t susceptible to human failure like forgetting to press some buttons. I have since created TMSwitch, a small (and rough) tool to do the switching automatically as well as turn Time Machine off at night.

Activity Monitor

If you want to know something about your Mac’s state and aren’t too keen on the command line, Activity Monitor is an invaluable tool. It makes it easy to monitor the processes running on the system, to learn details about the resources they consume and to sample or kill them if needed. One thing I always like about Activity Monitor is the care that went into the application’s design: For example the column titles changed the text shown in them into a shorter version once the column became too narrow to contain the full title. For example ‘Real Memory’ turned into ‘RSIZE’. A very elegant way of handling things, I think:

It looks like someone ‘redesigned’ the application for Mac OS X.6 and ripped all that goodness out. The smart name replacement is gone, so you end up with non-information and ellipses all over the place, columns have wider (and seemingly random) minimum widths now which makes it hard to set up an efficient display, the amount of space wasted at the left hand side of the process name column was increased by even more pixels. That is, the formerly good experience was broken.

In fact things are worse outside the main table as well: Look at the numbers at the bottom: Instead of being right or decimal-separator aligned they are now left aligned and hard to read. Keen observers will also note that Apple finally removed the display ‘Nice’ CPU time which had been dysfunctional since X.5 anyway. That said, the system can still do a bit of nicing, as a run of the (tcsh) command) yes > /dev/null &; yes > /dev/null &; nice +20 yes > /dev/null & shows, but just as in X.5 it essentially sucks. The CPU cycles may be distributed according to some rules, but a highly niced process (e.g. a video encode in Handbrake which was completely unnoticeable in X.4) can still ruin the responsiveness of the whole system. I’ve even seen it affect video playback.

The screenshot above also highlights a further design error Apple introduced in this release: They increased the right padding used in NSTableViews’ header cells. Look, for example at the PID column, it is right aligned and there is a strange space at the right hand side of its title which makes things look broken as the title doesn’t line up with the text in the column any more. The extra space is ‘needed’ for displaying the sort direction indicator, with the change being that Apple now leave that space even when the sort direction indicator is not displayed (even when the list cannot be re-sorted, in fact). Not only does that look bad, it also affects all Cocoa applications, meaning that any application with tightly spaced columns may now have ellipses appearing in its column headers because of this change on Apple’s side. Thanks a lot.

(Dock) Exposé

Apple also decided to tweak Exposé, my favourite feature of Mac OS X.3, which I still use countless times every day. And unfortunately these tweaks get a big thumbs down. Exposé excelled in moving windows out of the way, and displaying miniatures of all windows. By arranging the windows in a free style and in sizes proportional to their actual one, this gave you a convenient grasp of which window is which one despite the lack of a strict order.

In Mac OS X.6 Apple completely reversed that design decision and instead opted for preserving order of the small windows between invocations of Exposé and arranging them in a neat (almost-) grid. The order seems random but you can actually have them sorted by name or by application using Command-1 and -2 (sort-by-application isn’t really alphabetical, though). The grid implies that all windows of each screen are scaled down to the same size, meaning that each of them will be scaled by a different factor and your collapsed Stickies window will occupy as much space as the editor you are doing work in. Ridiculous, if you ask me.

Furthermore per-application Exposé now highlights the Dock icon of the application it’s currently showing and it can now be invoked for applications without open windows which is less-than-useful, particularly when tabbing through applications. This over-enthusiastic usage highlights the graphical activity (dimming the screen, hiding other windows) caused by Exposé. That’s more irritating than it is useful to me. The only nice addition here is that per-application Exposé also displays the application’s minimised windows - which can now optionally be stashed invisibly in the application’s icon in the Dock rather than close to the Trash can (personally I hardly ever minimise windows, it just feels too slow compared with leaving everything open).

But I’m not done with being irritated yet. There’s still the new feature, Dock Exposé, to cover, which probably is the reason for futzing with Exposé to begin with. Dock Exposé somehow marries Exposé to the Dock. The trusted mouse gesture of clicking and holding an application’s icon in the Dock to see its Dock menu has been killed and replaced by Dock Exposé, which dims the whole screen and invokes per-application Exposé for the application you clicked. I don’t welcome this change as I have years of muscle memory telling me that clicking and holding the mouse on a Dock icon will open its Dock menu and let me quit it, hide it or issue some simple commands. Luckily the Dock has a hidden preference show-expose-menus to turn this off.

What’s even more ridiculous is the inconsistency of the menus that appear for application icons in the Dock. When invoking Dock Exposé, this menu appears:

The menu is white-on-black in a small font. It contains the items Quit, Hide and Options in that order, with the latter revealing a submenu for the rarely used Keep in Dock and Launch when Logging In options as well as the frequently used Quit command wedged between them. The application’s Dock menu items are missing from this menu, as are the application’s windows which you already see in Exposé.

If, however, you do a contextual menu click on the same application you get a menu as well. It shares the fashionable white-on-black menu style [Is it just my MacBook’s shitty screen or does anti-aliasing and sub-pixel rendering generally look so bad for white-on-black type?] but otherwise keeps the traditional layout of Dock menus with the application’s additional menu items and open windows being added, the Quit command located at the very bottom and the Hide command above it.

Whoever ‘designed’ this begs to be punished.

People have found a way to ‘hack’ around some of the Exposé shortcomings which can be found here. As doing this involves manipulating your System’s Dock application, I suggest you only follow these steps if you’re confident that you know what you’re doing and keep in mind those hacks in case things break with the next system update.

Location Services

The Core Location framework made it from the iPhone to the Mac as well. It’s a fascinating technology that tries to determine your location by using the GSM cell, you GPS coordinates and the IDs of local WLAN access points. The latter are mapped by Skyhook Wireless and that idea is brilliant. On the iPhone (or iPod touch) it’s a very cool feature and it just seems like magic when the device just knows where you are to scroll the map to the correct location or determine your closest bus stop and the next connections from there.

I guess the same technology is a bit less amazing on a computer as you don’t need to know your location as frequently. Indeed, the only place where Apple uses Location Services right now is in the time zone preferences which (clumsily I must add, as surely one can map people at that level of granularity by their IP address alone) try to determine your location to set the correct time zone. Personally I don’t travel enough between time zones to consider this a significant improvement, but it may be convenient.

As it remains unclear just how much information the computer sends (over what seems to be a https connection to Apple) and what happens to it. There’s no direct statement about what happens in the time zone preferences or the help either, so I do wonder how desirable location services will really be. I can see that companies may love you running them, but will there be services that improve significantly if you don’t need to enter a post code but have it transferred automatically?

XCode

I won’t discuss the developer tools in detail as they are a huge subject on their own and people who use them more frequently than I do are more qualified to comment. Hence this point comes at the very end, not because it’s the worst change in X.6, but because I’ll leave it at a rather superficial look. Yet, my first impression (after taking a detour to Preferences → Fonts & Colors to restore non-antialiased Monaco 10 to be used in the editor) is quite promising and suggests that the small bump in version number for XCode from 3.1 to 3.2 is deceiving.

The application feels less sluggish. The Help has been completely revamped. Because it would very hard to be worse than XCode’s old Help that has to be an improvement (although to me it still seems like a waste of space, an enemy of efficient keyboard navigation and having the Back/Forward buttons in terribly bad location). The Research Assistant has been renamed Quick Help and seems to be much better than the previous version, particularly performance-wise, which means that one may get away with using the help less. Time will tell.

In addition to that a new set of compilers, including GCC 4.2 and the LLVM version have been included. The static analyser is there as well and it even comes with very neat integration right into the XCode editor. Frankly, I always thought that the static analyser’s web front was rather good (seeing that it’s a development tool and those seem to be obliged to have horrific interfaces), but integrating it right into the editor is obviously much better:

Interface Builder’s inspector still seems to be the same (i.e. bad), Quartz Composer has been revamped to look more sexy and Instruments seems even more powerful, though I’m fairly sure I can’t even appreciate it’s power. One really bad thing these applications have in common is the ‘Library’ palette which seems to be some new UI chique in Cupertino these days but which I usually find very clumsy to use: big space wasters with poor navigation, not exactly what I’ve been looking for; but that bad trend already started in X.5, so it’s hard to blame X.6.

Further Notes

Of course the previous points are far from comprehensive. They’re just the things that I actually run into. Other points may be:

• Exchange support: Zero benefit for me, but apparently the corporates cheer about it. It scares me. I don’t want corporate users in my world. They made quality software like Windows and Office big and seem to be keen on putting all their power and money to get crappy pseudo-solutions.
• Screen Locking 1: Quite annoyingly, Energy Saver now seems to lock the screen when it turns off the power. Before, only the Screen Saver did that, giving the two reasonable states of sitting at desk without using the machine and not needing a password to continue using it and not sitting at desk with the screen locked. I’m annoyed by that.
• Screen Locking 2: A nice new detail about the screen locking is that you can now set a 5 second delay before it actually locks. This makes accidentally hitting the hot corner I have set up for screen locking less painful.
• Keyboard Switcher: Switching keyboard layouts now comes with improved feedback. A quick keyboard layout switch using the keyboard equivalent for it will work as before and toggle between the current keyboard layout and the one you used previously. But if you keep holding the modifier key of that keyboard equivalent a bit longer, a big transparent overlay will appear and let you pick the keyboard layout you want from a list. That’s great as it doesn’t force you to focus on a tiny bit of screen way up in the menu bar and it means when switching past many keyboard layouts you don’t have to know the exact number of switches to make (and possibly press keys one time too many) but you can look along the list. The feature would proabably be even more useful if it recognised which screen you are currently typing on and made the list appear on that screen.
• Image Capture: I rarely use it, but the application seems to have been reworked, making camera management and sharing simpler. That should be nice.
• Scanner Sharing: Can now be set up in Sharing Preferences. Without a scanner I don’t have much use for it, but strangely it doesn’t seem to be the same as the Camera Sharing in Image Capture which conceptually feels just the same to me.
• Printers 1: We only have HP PostScript printers at the office so everything is dandy just as it would have been in 1993. Mac OS X.6 even ships with a PPD for our new LaserJet P4015 (previously I had to download it from HP’s atrocious and slow website) which has a cool booklet printing feature that’s unfortunately not available to all printers.
• Printers 2: The OS doesn’t seem to install as many printer drivers by default. Which seems like a bad idea. Sure, those drivers do require a load of space (to a large extent because printer manufacturers are idiots, one suspects), but I’d rather waste some space on my drive than being in the middle of nowhere without internet access and having my computer tell me it needs to download some driver. Be prepared!
• Printing 3: The Printer Proxy applications which display the print queues now have a nice new feature to display a preview of a print job. That comes handy when you have a bunch of jobs without good names in the queue and want to delete one of them. Said preview comes with fancy (overly animated) page flipping, is aware of double sided printing and, it seems, invariably assumes that books are read left to right (or front to back as we say in the West). Previews do not reflect the booklet feature mentioned above, though, and you still can’t drag a PDF from the print queue to your desktop.
• Compression: Looking at the X.6 startup volume from a X.5 drive shows you many files of size zero which you cannot open. It seems like Apple are trying some compression trick there which superficially looked like they’re stuffing compressed file contents into some extended attribute. Perhaps that explains the smaller size Apple claim for the installation?
• Utilities: The Applications folder looks cleaner now. Things like Exposé, Spaces and the AppleScript Editor have been moved there.
• AppleScript Editor: It now contains the preferences from AppleScript utility. The lower pane of its document windows has been reworked as well to be more confusing than it was before.
• Sudden Termination: The name doesn’t explain the feature too well, but the idea is great: Applications can now tell the system that they have nothing they need to store or clean up when they quit. When that is the case the system will simply kill the application when it is quit. If you remain logged into the machine for a long time without restarting and don’t quit applications (as I do), you will know that logging out can take ages in those situations. It happens because applications have been swapped out over time and the system needs to slowly swap them in again just so they can be quit. Sudden Termination lets applications play nice and give the system the chance to quit them without all that fuss. Even document based applications can easily support the feature as NSDocument will automatically take care that the application isn’t terminated in this way as long as there are unsaved changes. Neat.
• Metric Megabytes: Someone at Apple decided that the user interface needs to display ‘metric’ (i.e. base 10 rather than base 2) Megabytes now. I guess one will get used to this over time, but it’s very irritating. I’m used to DVDs containing 4,3GB of data (not 4,7). I’m used to my swapfiles having sizes that are powers of two (not 535,9MB). I’m astonished by the inefficiency of my MacBook writing its 4GB of memory to a 4,29GB sleepimage file. I’m confused that a 4096 Byte file is 4KB while a 40200 Byte file is 41KB. Does that make any sense? Does anybody apart from lawyers benefit?
• Airport Menu: The Airport menu now displays the signal strength for each network it can see. That’s nice, even though I’m not really convinced it will be particularly useful for anything but finding an open network (those don’t seem to exist in Germany anymore). What’s a bit strange is that I always have weak networks appearing in and disappearing from the Airport menu, so actually following the signal strength isn’t really possible.
• Spotlight: Its GUI seems to be as sluggish as it was before. But after all these years they managed to follow the basic programming guideline to respect a user’s number formats for the built-in calculator.
• Stacks: Stacks gained more options. I can’t be enthusiastic about this as I find stacks mostly too slow, clumsy and unusable. Not using the stack and simply opening the Finder window unfortunately is not among the new options they added. It still takes a Command-click to do that.
• Weather Widget: Mu-hahahaha, of course it’s still not localised [patch with German localisation], but it does default to degrees Celsius now on my system. Just like the iPhone version, it’s powered by Yahoo rather than Accuweather now and it can handle Göttingen when you enter it as a place name. [Reminder: in Mac OS X.4 you had to enter Goettingen for it to work, in X.5 you needed to enter Gottingen, and only now Göttingen does the trick and is promptly changed to ‘Gotinga’ for some reason, like it is at flickr.] I also still wonder why the Weather Widget (and the Weather iPhone application) don’t use Core Location. It would seem natural there.
• Installer: In a way the Mac OS X.6 installer is fantastic. It certainly has the smallest number of clicks between starting the computer from the installation volume and having the freshly installed operating system in place. I’m not really sure that I’m happy with the loss of control (and the difficulty of finding the command to erase the volume), but from a simplicity point-of-view this will be hard to beat.
• Rosetta: The PowerPC emulator Rosetta is not installed by default and Software Update will download it as needed (which seems pretty much like a huge and unnecessary opportunity for FAIL). It doesn’t need much space, so I’m wondering which ideological or monetary motivation made Apple do this, the customer’s benefit certainly isn’t it.
• PowerPC: No more support for PowerPCs. With all the beefy G5s around this strikes me as a bold move. Luckily people aren’t missing out on much as most changes to have to do with future-proofing and PowerPCs certainly aren’t part of the future as things look now.
• AppleTalk: The writing was on the wall since Apple killed AppleTalk support for file sharing in Mac OS X.4 and AppleTalk, the most user-friendly network technology ever, has now vanished from Printer Setup as well. It’s a shame because none of the newer networking technologies do as good a job at keeping a live list of services, and on the printing protocol level none seem to provide as rich an interaction with the printer. AppleTalk was ahead of its time and died before the time managed to catch up.
• Remote: Apparently Apple don’t support this feature officially, but instead of fixing that attitude problem of theirs, they seem to have changed the software handling the remote control in a way that non-Apple applications like VLC can still receive the remote’s signals but the signal will still be passed on to Apple’s applications. A bit user-hostile if you ask me. Let’s hope the non-Apple developers manage to work around this.
• Gamma: Apple (finally) changed the gamma value of their display calibration. There goes the classic Mac look… well it’s not quite as (a) my MacBook’s screen is a crappy dithering hell anyway so I am in no position to notice anything and, more significant in a global sense, (b) the magic of colour management means that you shouldn’t see the difference caused by the gamma change on colour managed images. What remains are the UI elements and Apple seems to have done a reasonable job of making things look all right. Just some of my old icons seem to look a bit different now. In the long run I imagine this change may be beneficial for people who publish images on the web without knowing what they do.
• Monospaced: Mac OS X.6 comes with a new monospaced font called Menlo. Apparently it’s meant to become the OS’ new default monospaced font. It’s probably not bad, but non-anti-aliased Monaco 10pt isn’t bad either. I think I’ll need still higher resolution screens before I can switch my monospaced font size beyond 10pt and live with the anti-aliased versions. What I saw so far of Menlo looked by far too dark to me and I found it hard to skim through code and actually find the things I was looking for.
• Creator Codes are unfortunately ignored by Mac OS X.6. Quite a stupid strategy to destroy this time-proven bit of Mac user friendliness which attaches information to a file indicating which application should be used to open it. Such information can still be set for each file individually and manually from the Finder, but that’s a far cry from the smooth automatic handling of yesterday. Now, just as in the arcane world of MS-DOS, the file type (most commonly indicated by end of the file’s name) determines the application which a double click will open.
• PICT format: When running in 64bit mode Preview refuses to display images in the classic Macintosh PICT format. Sure it’s a legacy file format, but why force people to go through their files to update them when the relevant code is still part of the system?

All right, that’s it - The things I managed to notice so so far that felt worth mentioning. I had to put the bar pretty low for that as many of them are mere details. In fact, my guess is that despite this long discussion many people would find it hard to tell the difference between X.5 and X.6 when using it unless they look at the numbers the System tells them.

If you liked this and could do with even more details and words, be sure to read John Siracusa’s X.6 review at ars technica as well.

Still think Mac OS X.6 is worth having? Why not make me filthy rich and buy a copy through one of my links below?

August 29, 2009, 19:52

Tagged as mac, mac os x, os x, software, x.6.