• Probably one of the most annoying things in X.4 is that after waking the Powerbook from sleep the cursor is frozen for a few (5-10) seconds. This is very irritating. Particularly when instant waking has been an appreciated feature of Mac hard- and software for years. This worked in OS 9, X.0, X.1, X.2, X.3… why doesn’t it work now?

• The connect dialogue box for AFP servers seems to have changed a little. There’s now a litte ‘gear’ button with a submenu for the connection options. It looks different than all the other ‘gear’ buttons I’ve seen.

  

• Another thing that has become much less responsive are the Bezels displaying volume and brightness changes. Not only does it seem that they need longer to load when they haven’t been used for a while – back to X.2 or X.1 speeds, I’d say. They also seem to be a bit less responsive.
• I really don’t like how they revamped the developer documentation for X.4. The strange use of scripts or frames or whatever makes navigating extremely hard and breaks the all important back button.
• This may have been around for longer but I never noticed it: The installer can now open a window displaying all the files that will be installed. Handy when wanting to have a look before starting the install. Complete with filter field even.
• People were happy to note that in X.4 you can swap the various modifier keys on your keyboard around. At least the Unix people were happy to have this. Personally I just used it to deactivate the Caps Lock key. While on the Powerbook the little light within the key seems to be turned on and off by the keyboard itself (it even works when the OS isn’t loaded yet) and the System can’t manipulate that, I noted that on my external keyboard hitting the Caps Lock key won’t turn the light on now. Nice.

• Virtual memory is still a problem… not as vital for me right now as I’ve got a larger hard drive but still quite a space consuming one. Does the system really need to have two gigabytes of swap files – minutes after I quit all running applications? While things have gone back to a somewhat saner state where the maximum swap file size seems to be 256MB, rather than giving you 1GB ones, I am still puzzled why they stick around for ages.

  

• Do you sometimes drag a file to an open dialogue? It’s quite a convenient way to select files which are easily accessible in an open Finder window. But completely fail to understand why, even in open dialogues, dragging a file in there will only select (and display the contents of) the folder containing that file but won’t select the file right away.
• While I don’t really want to write about the Finder too much because it’s not worth it, enjoy even more localisation problems with the ‘Network’ source in the Finder being labelled in German in the column view but in English in the window’s title bar. Oh, and it has lost its icon of course. WTF? It also seems that you can’t drag the ‘Network’ icon to the source list in the Finder’s metal windows but that you have to use the Finder preferences to get it there.

• Looking at the Screens preference pane when an external screen is attached also gives an interesting, but not amusing, sight. The frequencies displayed in the dialogue are now strange numbers like ‘89.9 Hertz’ instead of the ‘90.0 Hertz’ you saw there previously. A nice new thing about that preference pane is the new button to collect all windows. That could be a nice helper when windows drift on the wrong screen or external displays don’t work and you want your windows back quickly.

  

• Another bit of bitching about Spotlight won’t hurt I suppose. One ‘feature’ of Spotlight is that the importer can set up a ‘display name’ for an item that differs from the file’s actual name. This is needed to make hacks like Apple’s indexing of iCal and AddressBook data possible. But it’s also needed to index all the e-mail messages which are stored as separate files but have some ID strings as names which won’t be very meaningful to the user. Thanks to that feature you can have unique IDs for file names which are important to make things work and meaningful strings as display names for the user.

  As long as you’re only using the Spotlight menu or window with its general lack of information this seems to work just fine. But things start being more tricky when you start hitting Command-R to display the selected item in its folder – in the Finder’s smart folders – which just happen to be the Finder’s find windows as well. Let’s just say you get a number of inconsistent results, with the Finder’s find feature’s ones looking the most reasonable.

  

• Finally, I note that I originally observed that the Dashboard’s Weather Widget completely lacks localisation and any handling of umlauts. I’d consider this kind of behaviour to be somewhere between incosiderate and buggy while Apple consider it to be correct. To add insult to injury, my weather widget – painfully set up to look up ‘Goettingen, Germany’, rather than the place where I live, stopped working. At first I thought there was a server problem, didn’t worry too much and limited myself to wondering why the desinged the damn thing in a way that it essentially stops working if it doesn’t have a network connection. But it didn’t start working again even a few days later. It turned out that certain things seem to have changed and now I have to pretend to be living in ‘Gottingen, Germany’ to please the weather widget. Potentially more logical, but still crap.

While the whole Core Image technology may be cool and modern, I haven’t even seen it at its full beauty outside of Apple’s demonstrations. Just because my old Powerbook doesn’t have a graphics chip that’s even close to being able to support Core Image. Apple claim that Core Image is smart enough to scale down to older machines, using the processors it finds there to achieve the same effects at a slower speed.

Apple’s foremost graphics demo application, Quartz Composer (which comes with the Developer Tools), that all the cool demos seem to be made with won’t even launch on my computer for its lack of new graphics chip. I think that’s mostly because of the lack of 3D power, though, than because of the Core Image aspects I mentioned above. Still, I’d like to ironically note that the files saved by Quartz Composer can still be displayed by QuickTime. At glacial speeds and incompletely, I might add, so QuickTime should better not even try to do this on older computers.

Core Image Fun House (also part of the Developer Tools), however, seems to run just fine on older computers as well. Aside from a horrendous tendency to crash frequently and it’s inability to have anything but a straight stack of layers, it should be sufficient to give you an idea of Core Image’s abilities. You can generate backgrounds and insert images. Those can be distorted or filtered. And there can even be animated transitions.

With slower computers, I recommend not using the example images supplied by Apple. They’re large enough to make your computer cry – or at least be painfully slow. Rather use a small image. Starting with a screenshot of Apple’s Core Image advertisement page and a few letters, I made the image below. To me it hints that Core Image gives you a fairly powerful set of tools. And one that can be used to create rather ugly things with very little effort.

Doing this kind of playing around (rather than any actual measurements), Core Image’s speed leaves a mixed impression. Standard filters on small images seem to run reasonably quickly. But once you have larger images, like an 800x800 image, even things like blurring start to feel slow and changing the brightness seems to happen at at most half the speed of GraphicConverter. This may be due to the whole image being updated at once after all the computations have been done rather than updating the display block-by-block like Photoshop does, but at the end of the day it makes my computer feel a few years older than it is.

So, for the time being, I don’t think I’ll get into Core Image too much. The only place where I can see myself using it actively is in the ever wonderful GraphicConverter which started having support for Core Image graphics filters soon after the release of X.4. GraphicCoverter’s UI for the filters isn’t exactly great or responsive yet but I’m sure that Thorsten Lemke will manage to improve that soon.

While Thorsten certainly is one of the more active and experienced Mac programmers around, GraphicCoverter has always been relatively slow to pick up new features offered by the OS. I assume that there are many reasons for that, ranging from the fact that GraphicConverter has been around for ages and still works on Mac OS 8 in its current version to the fact that Thorsten knows how to keep himself busy with gazillions of other improvements that are documented in GraphicConverter’s version history. As he was able to enhance GraphicConverter with Core Image fairly quickly (and with some Automator actions and Spotlight finding as well) suggests that both Thorsten and Apple are good at their respective jobs of programming and making the System’s new features easily available (even to ‘old-fashioned’ applications).

Initially I was tempted to go ahead and make some Core Image filters of my own. But as it turned out that I don’t really use Core Image all that much and the documentation suggests that it’d be helpful to use Quartz Composer when starting to progam the filter, there’s not too much point in doing this for me at this stage, so I can’t say a lot about that. It doesn’t look like there have been floods of cool filters coming along already, so people may be taking their time.

Apart from those basic problems, it also seemed like the capabilities of those filters are quite limited – even loops seem to be a problem. A shame… after seeing how slooow Java is on my computer with a little applet that one of the guys in our department wrote for drawing Mandelbrot and Julia sets (which lets you draw a route through the Mandelbrot set and it’ll ride along that route drawing an animation of the Julia sets at each point of the route), I had this little urge to come up with a clever and fast way to view those on my computer. A way that doesn’t involve using X11 to run the web browser on one of the Linux machines…

In short – no, I don’t have any real use for Core Image, no, I haven’t seen any compelling applications yet that make it look like a must-have. But I still hope that we will get them in the future.

X.3

Since X.3 the Mac’s PDF viewing capabilities and performance have been very good. Unless you needed very special features such as forms or encryption, the on-board Preview could compete with Adobe’s unpleasant Reader application and with its really nice find feature even outperform it.

Printing has been a somewhat different story. Ever since starting with OS X, I found its PDF-based print architecture to be less than perfect. The files it generated seemed to be bloated and often failed to print properly on old PostScript printers – one of the reasons why my dad had to replace his good old LaserWriter. Apart from the printing sometimes seeming a bit slow in comparison to doing direct PostScript printing from Linux or the classic Mac OS, it works without problems for me. Possibly because I’m not currently doing any graphics related work – sometimes there seem to be complaints from the people who heavily need all the features of the printing system.

Real World Printing

So what has changed with X.4? Not too much, I’d say. But a few changes made it into the system, that make your daily work easier. One is that the installer will now install a whole load of printer drivers – including the GIMP ones – onto your system. While those add up to a whopping total of more than 1,5GB, it’s well worth the space. At least for people who use portable computers as few things fell as silly as not being able to print just because you were too stingy to carry the relevant drivers around. Perhaps I’m just lucky, but I have yet to run into a printer on which I couldn’t print.

OK, that’s not true… there’s still a StyleWriter II somewhere at my parents’ house and we might even have the NEC P6 sitting around somewhere, but nobody considered using them for years and just establishing a working connection between them and my Powerbook would require non-trivial kinds of magic. Hmmm, I assume that I could be up and printing on the StyleWriter within ten minutes or so using one of our old Macs with a serial port, sharing it over EtherTalk and using Classic to do the printing…

Printing on any of the printers in our department isn’t a problem thanks to either AppleTalk printing (which remains the most reliable, IMO), the LPD queues our admin has set up or even Rendezvous Bonjour on a new printer. Similarly printing at my parents’ house isn’t a problem using AppleTalk over Airport (although it sucks that you can only have AppleTalk active on one of your network links, which means I have to change that setting if I want to print). And finally, the other day, in preparation for the Running Dinner at Jan-Philipp’s place, I enjoyed printing on the obscure old LaserJet he has over Airport Express (and potentially printer sharing) with a single click.

The only situations in which I still find printing difficult are those where Windows printers are involved. The results for that seem to be, ahem, iconsistent. Sometimes it seems quicker to cycle down to my department and use the printer there than to use one of my flatmates’ printers. But I haven’t really investigated this thoroughly and mostly given up on the topic because two crappy and unreliable software components, Windows and Cisco’s VPN software are involved. Both of which I don’t really understand and which have the tendency to just break down for no good reason. I don’t really want to handle the Windows computers myself, as I don’t want to break anything and get into trouble for that.

Printer Setup

Let’s have a look at X.4’s printing software now. Quite a few things have been shuffled around with this update. Looking at the different windows you see when setting up and using the printer, you get the impression that the transition isn’t quite finished that as there are quite a few applications involved in what’s going on.

In previous versions of OS X we used the Print Center (I think that was the English name) which took over the job of the good old Chooser. Step by step this started including not only the management and setup of printers (not that that’s something anybody cares about) but there were also weak tries at reintroducing desktop printers and a fax feature added to the OS. And the software situation started being messy, with there being the Print Center, the desktop printers which are actual applications and even a Fax system preference pane. My suggestion in that situation was to just move all the set-up aspects into single system preference pane and get rid of the setup applications.

And that may be what Apple are trying to do. We now have the Print & Fax preference pane which collects a list of printers, standard settings like the default paper size and printer, as well as the fax and printer sharing setups. While I still consider it a bit freaky to have the printer sharing checkboxes in the Print & Fax preference pane and also in the Sharing preference pane, it’s certainly handy. I do think, though, that the UI should make clear that the checkbox you check here affects the same setting as that in the Sharing preference pane. In fact, it also presents a finer grained setup about which printers you do and don’t want to share which isn’t available in the Sharing preference pane. So there should be a reference the other way as well. A little extra bug seems to be that once the Sharing pane has been opened, the checkbox of its Printer Sharing item won’t correctly reflect the current status after it has been changed in the Print & Fax pane.

Where things start being a bit freaky, though, is when you start to configure printers. Checking a printer’s queue will open the printer’s own little application and to show a window containing that information. While I don’t like the fact that a separate application – complete with Dock cluttering – is opened, and I seem to remember that this was much better in OS 9 or even QuickDraw GX where everything happened in the Finder, this still makes sense and has the advantage of giving us a unique way to look at a printer’s queue.

Pressing the buttons to configure a printer or to add one to the list of available printers is much more confusing, though. Where you’d expect a sheet to appear to let you choose the relevant options, the Print Center will be launched to display either a window or its information palette. This is done in a way that the switch between the applications may just not be apparent to the user but which may very well leave you with the extra and confusing icon of the Print Center in the Dock after closing the window you have been dealing with.

So the Print Center is actually still in the business of doing all the work here (with the UI updates in the preference pane when making changes in Print Center being really fast and good, btw). And its feature to add printers has been significantly improved for this. Pressing the button to add a printer there won’t open what used to be the System’s slowest opening sheet anymore but a separate window, the Printer Overview, which is the same window that the button in the Print & Fax preference opens.

And this window shows that Apple seem to be aware that the previous way of adding printers was overly technical. Instead of having to worry about first choosing a protocol (i.e. gibberish) and then looking for printers, the window will display all the printers that the system manages to see without help in a list. I.e. this simple window with its convenient filter field should be able to locate the vast majority of printers that people use. Nice.

If your printer can’t be located that way you can press the button at the bottom of the window to get to the old sheet for locating printers that gives you all the gruesome protocols and options. Or, for IP printing, there’s a second ‘tab’ (well, UI wise this is a bit strange…) to set up IP printing in a reasonably simple way.

In short, we’re finally seeing good progress in printer selection. And if both the printer selection and setup will be moved right into the system preferences, I think we’ll have pretty much the best way to deal with this topic which unfortunately is fairly complex. In fact, trying the different options and protocols I was amazed that AppleTalk (or PAP, I think) pretty much beats all of them in terms of comfort. Many of the other methods still require you to do some manual setup, like explicitly telling the system what printer you are using or figuring out what options are installed on the printer. Things that seem to have worked without any problems in AppleTalk printing for a decade or so.

A final aspect that’s worth mentioning in this context is that the software can now give you information on the printer’s toner supply. While I’ve heard people complain that Apple is putting annoying commercial links on there screen here for buying supplies, there seem to be no such links for the printers I have access to and the feature itself seems like a good idea. It seems to be available in the print sheet and in the Print Center. On the other hand, our printer tends to always claim that it will run out of toner soon, so I’m not sure the info you get that way will be helpful. In addition I don’t quite understand what the bar in the information sheet – which sadly is available from the Print Center only – wants to tell me. Any hints?

Printing

Now, let’s go on to look at printing. Nobody’s really interested in setting up printers anyway. That’s just something which can get in your way when needing to print something really quickly. And we’ve seen that Apple have improved your chances of getting through printer setup without pain. In fact, having to use the manual printer setup could be considered one of the worse cases anyway as in the good cases of Bonjour and printer sharing you can just select the printer you’d like to use in the print sheet without any need for prior setup.

The print sheet remains largely unchanged from X.3. My memory may fail me here, but the paper handling pane of that sheet seems to have new options for resizing the output to a certain paper size. Which may come handy. (The paper sizes you can see there strangely include the ‘… (small)’ paper sizes which seem to have vanished from the rest of the system and only differ from the others margin-wiser – I’ve never quite understood those, probably something about printer margins or so.)

The final aspect that saw changes is the menu for PDF workflows. And, looking around on the internet, I saw many people complaining about it because its little black triangle doesn’t look good and having a menu pop out of such a button isn’t HIG-compliant. All this may be true, but to be honest I welcome this change. Just keep in mind how that part of the dialogue looked not too long ago: Ugly large buttons with strange icons in them. Perhaps that could be interpreted as HIG compliant in some strange way but it always looked like an eyesore to me. So I prefer the updated look.

Sure, the triangle is strange, but moving it a bit to the right and making it less pointed may improve that. I also like that the buttons’ order is switched. The PDF Services button now comes with a number of pre-defined services, and you can use Automator to make your own. The menu now also contains an item to edit it directly, letting you add and remove PDF Workflows without needing to dig around in some obscure folders in the Finder. It won’t let you re-order the Workflows, though.

The only thing that remains unclear to me is how Workflows can be made to post-process a file, e.g. using CocoaBooklet and then still send it to the printer without too much hassle. I still think that would be quite a good use for PDF Workflows.

PDFKit

On to a slightly different topic, PDFKit. In X.3 everybody was impressed with Preview and how well it handled PDF files. Many third party developers expressed their unhappiness at only having access to the fairly simple PDF handling features they got from the standard Cocoa environment when a much more powerful set of features was already available. In X.4, finally their wishes are fulfilled and the much more powerful PDFKit is available to all developers. It contains features like searching PDFs, adding notes and accessing the table of contents to them.

My first – and possible only, as I don’t care too much – experience with PDFKit wasn’t too positive, though. In my experiment to make an Automator action I made use of PDFKit. All I wanted to do was to open a PDF file, manipulate its metadata and write it back to the disk. The metadata stuff worked fine but in the process of writing the file lost it’s built-in table of contents – the one that appears in Preview’s drawer – which isn’t acceptable. This may have well been my fault, but I remain unaware of it. Perhaps this requires deeper digging in the frameworks or they’re just not good enough for that yet.

Preview

To see OS X’s PDF features at their best, it has always been a good idea to look at the Preview application. There are a few new features, such as the tool to annote PDF files with red circles and text notes. That’s as sweet as it is useless – it seems that you can save those annotations but not remove or edit them once they’ve been saved – very slowly, I might add, even when no changes to a file have been made – to the file. They don’t seem to be found by Spotlight either. As saving a file with annotations kills its table contents as well, I suppose that it wasn’t just my fault that I couldn’t add metadata without killing it as mentioned above.

More useful features include Preview’s new ability to store the last page you looked at in a document and re-open it at the same place the next time. And a global list of bookmarks for the application which let you jump to a specific page of a specific file right away. This still seems a bit rough, though, with the list of bookmarks being in the application’s preferences and not accessible by Spotlight. There are also a couple of view settings, letting you see double pages if you have a huge screen, the integration of the screenshot tool Grab right into Preview and the nicely integrated slideshow tool with the same interface as all other slideshows on the system.

What could turn out to be useful is that Preview lets you make rectangular text block selections now — by holding the option key. Particularly in multi-column files copying and pasting text was next to impossible without that. Preview also integrates nicely with Spotlight as far as PDF files are concerned by automatically starting a search for the term that Spotlight looked for after opening the PDF. Unlike Safari, which will cleverly only use the first word of the last Google search term for text searches, Preview uses the whole search term, though.

Strange aspects of the app are that you can’t crop bitmap images – but can crop PDFs – and that the little previews of PDF pages are displayed in reverse order, which I consider particularly useless.

While Preview is definitely good enough for everyday use, there remains one problem for me that had been introduced back in X.3. When doing a search for a word in a large file which can take a while (say, half a minute on a 5MB 500 page file or a few minutes on a 100MB 100 page file) Preview will lock up completely while searching and not finding anything. I had hoped this would be resolved with the X.4 update.

Safari

To finish, let me note that Safari has native PDF support now. Which it should’ve had from day one of course, but hadn’t. It’s there finally, and I remain underwhelmed. In part because I can’t get it to zoom the PDF to the full window width by default. And always having to select a menu item that’s inconveniently hidden in a contextual menu sucks. It will certainly be good enough for occasional PDF reading and being able to print and save the files right from the usual Safari menus is nice. But having in mind that Schubert IT’s PDF Browser Plugin has come very far in the past years, what Apple offer looks like its not enough.

Despite my disappointing first experiences with Spotlight, I still think that it’s quite cool technology. It still seems to need a lot of improvement and optimisation which I hope – without holding my breath, though – we’ll see in the future.

How it works

In case you aren’t familiar with Spotlight yet, I’ll give an ultra-brief summary of how it works. Look around at Apple’s site or on Google for details. This is not meant to be comprehensive.

Spotlight creates an index of the files on your hard drive. That index isn’t just about the file names but also about the file’s metadata such as the dates of file creation and last accesses to the file. Spotlight can gather even more information about the files, such as the size for images, the authors of documents and so on. The key to doing that is that Spotlight can use plugins, so-called metadata importers, to extract the information from the files. These plugins live in some Library’s Spotlight folder (I find it rather unclear at this stage how Apple name the folders in the Library. There’s Spotlight, but not Dashboard, there’s Widgets but not Actions, there’s Automator…) or, with well-made applications in the application itself and don’t have to worry the user at all.

The system uses the new powerful concept of Universal Type Identifiers (UTI) to figure out the types of the files it’s dealing with and then hands that file to the appropriate plugin for importing. An initial import will be done after installing X.4 and can take quite a while. In the first days after the release of X.4 you heard many people talk about their system still being busy with doing that initial import. And with even a moderate amount of files such an import will generate a rather large index in the folder ‘.Spotlight-V100’ at the top of your startup volume. Mine is 200MB at this stage, 50MB for the ‘store’ which I assume to be the metadata and the rest for the content index which I assume to contain the text from files’ contents.

The really smart bit about Spotlight is that the system will inform it of any changes that are made to files and there’ll be a quasi-immediate import of the new or changed file, meaning that the index is always up-to-date if you’re just running X.4 and thus that you can have things like searches that keep their results current at all times.

The data gathered by Spotlight isn’t just accessible from the system’s main Spotlight interface but can also be used by applications or from the command line. Apart from its lousy performance, it’s a very powerful tool that should enable developers to do amazing things in the long run.

My main complaints about Spotlight are nicely summarised by an animated ad campaign that Apple cursed the web with around the release of X.4, so this may be a good point to start at, with more technical bits coming later on. Two of the ad’s punchlies were Find anything on your computer and Instant results appear as quickly as you type. If Spotlight did that, it’d be great.

Find Anything

Apple’s ads claim that a feature of Spotlight is that you can find anything on your computer. This is a blatant lie – or ‘feature’ as they’d say in Cupertino. In fact, there never was a version of the Mac OS in which you could find fewer things on your computer. Back in System 7, say, you could find almost anything. There were very few ‘invisible’ files which the System hid for good reasons or which inconsiderate developers spread around. This didn’t get much worse until the move to OS X.

In OS X, not only are parts of the system software not visible at all in the Finder (and thus very difficult to copy), e.g. the ‘private’ folder at the top of the startup volume. In addition, invisible files are spilled everywhere – presumably to store your view preferences and other useful information that the Finder ignores. However, with a bit of patience, the Finder’s find command would find the vast majority of files for you if you only knew a bit of their name and were allowed to see them.

In X.4, however – by its clever design – a lot of this is lost. Try searching for any file which lives inside your System folder and you’re out of luck. Do a simple search for the term ‘Finder’, the name of a running application that is well known to the computer and you may get a couple of results but not the one you’re looking for. The bottom line of this is that, thanks to Spotlight, I cannot find the vast majority of files on my computer which were perfectly easy to find in previous versions.

There may be reasons not to index every single file on the computer – particularly as OS X has the bad habit of having gazillions of them most of which are unlikely to be relevant to me at any stage. But I should be able to find them anyway. Particularly when using the world’s most advanced – or so – search technology. If the amount of data generated by putting all those files in the index (has anybody tried this? what did it do the index size and Spotlight performance?) is too large for Spotlight to work smoothly afterwards, then having just the file names in there would seem to be both a reasonable compromise and the least that Spotlight should do.

Instant Results

Apple’s claim that Instant results appear as quickly as you type isn’t as blatantly wrong but still wrong. Perhaps I’m just typing too fast but nothing ever appears while I’m typing. I don’t consider that a massive problem, though. What’s more annoying is that it takes a couple of seconds for the first results to trickle in, around ten seconds for searches with very few results to complete and around half a minute for those with many results to complete. Even when having in mind that my Powerbook isn’t exactly new, this is so far from being ‘instant’ and – more importantly – from being useful, that using Spotlight just isn’t the life changing experience you’d like it to be.

With that amount of time at my hands I can locate almost any of the files that Spotlight indexes on my hard drive manually – seeing that most of them are in an order that I made up myself and have used for years. But I think I wouldn’t mind too much to wait for half a minute to access that particular e-mail from 1996… but not-so-strangely I do mind having to wait such a long time for the computer to find a file that I’ve saved a few minutes ago, an application that I use every other day or to return the item I selected yesterday when doing exactly the same search. I am tempted to say that a few rather small optimisations, such as having quick access to applications, addresses and recently used items would make Spotlight seem much quicker and useful.

User Interface

It has been said many times – the user interface of the System’s Spotlight feature is a complete mess. The first thing I noticed about it is that it loses keystrokes. You can’t simply hit the Spotlight keyboard equivalent and start typing your search term. Because, in case it’s swapped out or the system is busy it’ll take a while before Spotlight’s search field is on screen and has focus. Anything you enter before that will just be ignored (or go elsewhere). That really sucks and destroys one of the very nice things of the Mac – even if your system isn’t fast enough or very busy you could just type on and everything happened as expected as soon as the computer can catch up. This is definitely not the case with the Spotlight search field and that’s bad as it really keeps you from being able to use it in a quick workflow.

While the quick-search menu is sort-of OK – except for the jumping around of search results and the eternities it needs to load icons, even of the same type – the separate window is a piece of junk. It doesn’t belong to the Finder and can’t be found in per-application Exposé switching. In addition, its display of data is different from everything else. And not even particularly good.

It’s hard to get to see additional meta-data or location in the file system (hint: use the menu for that and rest the mouse over an item to see its location, although you can’t simply ‘Reveal’ an item from there) and once you get to see those data, their selection does seem strange (who really needs to know the type of camera used to make a phone in his search results?); It shows and sorts items with the very strange ‘last used’ date, which leads to some files appearing as ‘without date’ and a lack of spacing in its display; it’s impossible to see an image’s full name when showing images in preview mode (which ignores the information about how the image is rotated), switching those modes doesn’t preserve selections, it’s poorly localised and so on. Loads of obvious bugs. The only nice thing is that it can do neat slide shows with the images it finds - but this looks a bit like an afterthought as well, as that feature should be available for any Finder window as well, but it isn’t: You can only do slideshows from Spotlight search results for some reason as Paul points out, a feature that’s available for selections in a Finder as well – hidden in the contextual menu.

Let’s hope someone will report those problems or someone at Apple actually uses that piece from UI hell and will notice what kind of crap they shipped. Everyone else just go and hope that this won’t be another eternal usability issue like the Finder.

Localisation

While Spotlight’s UI is poorly localised, the actual technology behind it takes localisation into account. Not only will the various localised names of items be indexed, but also the list of all available fields of data that Spotlight stores can be localised be a Spotlight plugin’s developer.

Either of these points is both good and bad. Generally I think it’s good that localisation has been taken into account right from the start. But practically this is very messy. The drawback of having those localised names is that Spotlight is searching for the localised name only. This means that on a German system, say, searching for ‘Calculator’ will not find the Calculator application for you because it’s called Rechner, or rather its name is displayed as ‘Rechner’ while it’s bundle is still called ‘Calculator.app’.

To begin with this is annoying because I occasionally have English-speaking people recommend to use a certain application to me. And I have no idea what its localised name is. So I can’t easily find it. What makes this worse is that Apple’s file name localisations in the Finder just didn’t work before X.4 if you told the Finder to show you actual file names (rather than that mostly truncated stuff it shows by default). This means that my OS X experience has only had English names so far and that I still find it difficult to deal with the German ones.

But that’s not the only problem: The search results are just very broken because of this ‘feature’. When searching for ‘Rechner’ on my system, Spotlight will dutifully present both the Calculator application and the Dashboard widget. But it won’t show the Calculator’s preference file because it doesn’t have a localised file name.

This seems to be a rather hard problem to solve and probably indicates once more that localised file names aren’t as good as they look at first. Or at least that their implementation in OS X is nowhere as good as it should be. For the time being, I am really looking for a way to make the default Spotlight search match the English (or file system) names as well as the localised ones. I think that should solve a big bunch of the problems I’ve seen.

As for the other localisation problem I mentioned, you need to go to a smart folder and then select ‘Other’ in the list of search options. This will give you a sheet with a very long list of things you can search for. Spotlight plugins can add their own terms to that list. And these terms and their descriptions localised. But only if the plugin is. Seeing that many third party applications aren’t fully localised and only available in English this means that you’ll end up with multiple languages in that list. Which doesn’t just make it harder to read the list but also makes using the wisely provided filter field a pain as you’ll have to check at least two languages.

In fact the localisations provided by Apple are quite strange as well. I knew there was the ‘Raw Query’ search option available, but there didn’t seem to be a canonical way to translate it into German. I tried a couple of translations that sounded reasonable to me but none of them did the trick. Not wanting to go through the hundreds of search terms one by one, I ended up asking Pierre to mail me a smart folder with such a search and just opened that on my system, revealing that the term I was looking for was ‘Reine Daten’ which translates to an unexplicable ‘Pure Data’.

Additional Plugins

Apple are offering a list of available Spotlight plugins on their web site. It seems to be the least used list in the trio of Automator, Dashboard and Spotlight. And for a reason. Plugins can happily live in an application’s bundle and will be used by the system once the application (version) itself has been used. So there should be very little need for such a list. Sure, there will always be some importers coming from third parties, but I hope this won’t be too many and application makers will do their job.

I haven’t really tried this but as the documentation claims that the System only uses a plugin contained in an application’s bundle once that application has been opened by the user, it may be that updating an application – which should reset the application’s status to untrusted – without running it right afterwards might bring you into a situation where you think that files you copy to your drive should be indexed but they actually aren’t.

Making Plugins

Making Spotlight plugins isn’t too difficult. When making the Spotlight importer for Rechnungs Checker I found the most difficult thing to correctly figure out how to introduce UTIs to the application in a way that conforms with the existing file types. While Apple provide information on that topic, I wish it’d been more comprehensive and with more examples. From my point of view UTIs will be big and people should try to use them as soon as possible. The fact that the property list entries in the documentation don’t really match those you see in the plugins that are installed by the system doesn’t make you more confident either.

The other difficult thing was testing. It was (and probably still is) quite unclear to me how exactly everything works and when it is done by whom. For your plugin to get to index files a couple of things seem to need to happen. (a) you need to define UTIs for your file types and describe them (Having a syntactically correct property list is essential for that – unfortunately XCode doesn’t give you any warnings when it isn’t), then (b) the System needs to be aware of those UTIs and your Spotlight plugin (using lsregister -f seems to be quite a good way to do that. For your convenience the tool is easily accessible at /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister – as can be found out using the stone age locate tool rather than using Spotlight – cough) and (c) your Spotlight plugin needs to be in one of the Libraries’ plugin folders or the application containing it in the Spotlight folder of its bundle’s Library folder has to have been run at least once. This will enable the machine to index your files.

But only the files that are changed after copying the application to your disk. In the – possibly not entirely uncommon – situation that files are already around but the application will be updated after the initial scan of the hard drive, you might be out of luck. Using mdimport -r might solve your problems. But it may as well not, due to a bug I’ll describe in a second.

But first let me sum this up by saying that while coding the plugin is easy, getting it do actually index all the relevant files seems to be a tricky one. I tested this with a couple of people on different machines and couldn’t come to a proper conclusion. Sometimes things worked, sometimes they didn’t. It’s all a bit messy and could use proper documentation and guidelines.

Bugs

Besides the really strange bugs where Spotlight just doesn’t return any results for a perfectly good query you throw at it through its menu bar interface, or that doing searches by the path name (which can be found in the ‘Other’ search terms) just don’t work, there’s the issue I mentioned above. It seems that at the time of importing a file Spotlight stores a file’s UTI in its database. However, the UTI associated to a file can be changed by installing a new application on the system and that change won’t make it into the Spotlight database.

So if you have a UTI for fairly general file types (e.g. in Rechnungs Checker we have to open CSV files) that type may have been classified by the system to be a text file and Spotlight will have stored that info in its database. And while the system may happily be opening those files with your application afterwards and the Finder will be displaying the correct icon and file type, Spotlight will still have the old info. This means that your files won’t turn up in ‘by type’ searches. And, at least as worse, there’s no way to force Spotlight to re-index those files as you can only tell it to re-index the files that are imported by your plugin, i.e. the files that have the correct UTI already.

The only way around this is to run mdimport on those files one more time which will correct the issue. But if all your files of that type aren’t located in the same place, actually doing that may be somewhat painful.

Other problems I observed so far were with Apple’s PDF importing plugin which seems to choke on some large PDF files. I haven’t really tested whether it’ll find all the text in large files either – but I’d consider that an important feature. Apple’s xml/property list importer als regularly chokes on one of the property list files on my computer (meaning that it uses about a minute of processing time to index it – and as the file in question is one of NewsFire’s cache files and NewsFire touches those every five minutes for some reason, it means the computer is continuously busy.

Apple’s MP3 importer also needs more work. Not only have there been reports that it’s not particularly good at getting the songs’ durations right. It also seems to fail to import certain kinds of older MP3 tags. My hint: Go to your iTunes library, select all songs and choose the Convert ID3 Tags command from the menu to convert all tags to the newest (2.4) version.

I’ve also read that connecting a non-trivial number of external drives to your computer will result in indexing madness and basically kill your system. I haven’t done that yet and most likely never will, but it’s certainly the kind of serious bug Apple should get rid of quickly.

Wishes

Let me finish with some wishes for future updates of Spotlight. The first and foremost ones concern the points I mentioned above: Spotlight should be able to find any file on my computer by its name it least. Spotlight should be faster, at least for a small and most likely looked for subset of the files. And Spotlight’s main UI should be better.

Apart from that, there are other weaknesses of Spotlight. At this time it is designed to operate on a per-file basis. I.e. there is at most one set of metadata for any single file. As many files are little databases – bibliography files, address books, actual databases… – that could do with more detailed indexing, a more general approach that can generate several sets of metadata for a single file would be nice. To begin with this would spare the authors of such applications to do the hackery that is currently done by iCal or the Address Book where an additional file is generated for every single piece of data they manage – just to make that data available to Spotlight. This seems a bit clumsy. And once that has been improved, I’d also like (well, I didn’t see any so far…) to have a documented way that lets my application know what the user searched for when a document is opened from Spotlight search results. Applications like Preview can already do this and then automatically highlight the search term. Other applications should be able to do the same as it can really help the user.

Further Reading

I recommend reading the relevant pages of the ars technica X.4 report. And Apple’s marketing blurbs and developer documentation for Spotlight, perhaps. If you’re completely annoyed by Spotlight you might enjoy the anti-Spotlight hints from Alf.

• The recent documents menu has been improved to not just include the names but also the icons of the recent documents and the folders they’re contained in if you’ve recently opened two documents with the same name from different folders. I think this makes it easier to spot the difference and enables you to find things with less effort.
• Dragging an icon from the Dock will now turn the cursor into a ‘poof’ cursor to indicate that you’re removing the icon from the Dock even when it might stay there after releasing the mouse button because the application is still running. Probably still a bit confusing – but better than before with no indication at all.
• The Enery Saver looks simpler now and gives a clearer distinction between the different energy profiles. What puzzles me is that there’s only a single entity of ‘My Settings’ and that making any change to one of the presets will overwrite whatever other custom setting I had made before. What also puzzles me is that there’s a menu for setting the processor speed but it’s always in the ‘High’ setting – even in the most energy saving mode. Another nice improvement is that you can easily switch between the profiles now if you’re using the Battery menu. The data it shows seem to be less reliable than they used to be, though. The times tend to be significantly too high and I had the computer fall asleep without giving me the warning window beforehand.

• Permissions have always been a great pain in OS X. At the same time they are essential for keeping the system reasonably secure. Certain pieces of software shouldn’t be executed by the system if they aren’t owned by a reasonably privileged user and write access to them isn’t limited. Unfortunately certain third party installers don’t get this right. It looks like X.4 now checks the permissions for certain folders automatically and offers to correct problematic settings.

  Apart from this being a good idea, I thought the UI was quite good as well as it clearly gives you an option to ‘decide later’. Nasty things like access rights tend to cross your way when you’re in a hurry to get something done and can’t spend time finding out what you have to do. Getting a dialogue that gives you the typical ‘Correct/Cancel’ options will leave you feeling uneasy as it’s not clear that you’ll get another opportunity to look into this. Having ‘Decide later’ instead is much better.

  

  The problems I had were eventually fixed. But I think it took two attempts. I had installed a few pieces of third party software, though, without doing the recommended restarts.

• The delay of the volume and brightness bezels coming up is even larger now than it used to be.

• Safari has much better error messages now as they don’t spawn a sheet that blocks all of the window’s tabs and will require user interaction to get rid of but just display in the browser’s content area. Not hat Camino hasn’t done this for ages. The extra display area Safari has this way can be used well to offer additional explanations which might make a standard sheet look cluttered. Apple even offer helpful buttons in some cases, including one that opens a new tool to check your network connection:

  

• That tool, Network Diagnostics, which lives in the System folder’s CoreServices folder, can probably be quite helpful for people who feel ‘lost’ with all the different settings and buttons in the Network preference pane. And with being triggered by buttons that you seen whenever there is a network problem it may be a useful tool. I haven’t tested it exhaustively but it couldn’t connect to our wireless network using the password from my keychain.

  

• While at the topic of wireless networking, let me note that my Powerbook fails to automatically reconnect to our wireless network when waking from sleep. Are you seeing similar problems or can you recommend some preference file to delete to fix this?

• But back to Safari. It also has a fun warning to stop you from stepping into spoofed URLs using IDNs. I ran into that when playing around with PithHelmet the other day. Good to have a ‘More Info’ button there as well, which just leads to some web page, though. The dialogue isn’t localised either.

  

• People who’ve used OS X for a while will know that one of the good things about its so-called Finder is that you’re pretty sure it won’t get much worse in future versions. But Apple seem to disagree and work hard to introduce more non-standard UI and bugs into the product. What exactly did they think when coming up with the sheet for saving ‘smart’ folders which will only let you save them in three different locations – despite those ‘folders’ just being simple files which will happily live anywhere on your hard drive?

  

• There are a few new Desktop Backgrounds, a couple of them being nice black and white affairs.

• This may not be all new but it’s the first time I’ve seen it because I hadn’t started from a freshly installed system for ages: There is no Classic preference pane in the System Preferences by default. It will just be placed there after you’ve used Classic once.

  

As I started the X.4 experience on a new hard drive and did a clean install, I also had to reinstall a couple of other things. I was pleased to see that Wacom have managed to have a proper preference pane for their tablet driver now. And – like everyone else – I had to wait until a week ago before Cisco had managed to upgrade their wonderful VPN client to work with X.4. The current version seems to have a slightly different icon and it seems to be a bit less reliable than its predecessor. In particular it sometimes just stops working and starts giving confusing error messages with hexadecimal numbers when trying to use it after waking the computer from sleep.

Expectations

My view towards Automator – while being generally positive – is a split one. The one side is that I’ve been a big fan of AppleScript for years and Automator looks like it will widen the path that AppleScript lets us go. On the other hand, I was afraid that Automator coming into existence might mean that AppleScript might receive even less attention in the future than it had so far. I am happy to say that the latter point didn’t happen – at least technically – while the former hope seems to have become true to a reasonably large extent.

The User Perspective

At first let’s look at Automator from a User’s perspective. Despite being technically minded, I feel capable of doing that. I am at least as easily confused by hard to use stuff as any other person. The first thing I saw of Automator is its icon. It’s a very clever one in that it manages at the same time to look like a robot holding a pipe, thus flirting with our Unix friends and technically describing what it does and to look like a sweet robot holding a bazooka, which together with the Terminator-esque name makes it seem both funny, effective and worth using – if only for a laugh. While it’s sweet, it seems to be a bit too clever to me.

Next comes the double click… and then a long wait. In a way I should have expected that, it’s an Apple 1.0 version after all and we should be used by them being really slow in their first two revisions at least. After the long wait we see an ugly metal window with clumsy and oversized toolbar buttons and the main UI. The UI is reasonably easy to understand – you can select actions, read their descriptions and drag them to the work area where you can set them up and rearrange them. The speed of this is very poor, though. When typing ‘pdf’ into the filter field, for example I’ll need to wait a whopping three seconds for the text to appear in the filter field and the listing to be filtered. With at most a few hundred strings being compared here, this is just a bad joke. But even if it weren’t, it makes the filter field quite annoying to use.

The same performance problems are there when rearranging actions. As far as I can tell, the different actions are supposed to move around to make space for the new action that you are dragging. When I do it, it sometimes happens immediately and sometimes happens slowly. To make things a bit more tricky, the items are sometimes dropped at the wrong location.

My Powerbook is quite slow by today’s standards. And while these effects may be less visible on the latest G5s, seeing them on my computer not only discourages me from using Automator but also suggests that Automator isn’t as well programmed as iTunes (which filters through thousands of songs in less than second) or the Dashboard (which slides around widgets just fine and even makes a slick transition animation when dragging them from the Dashboard Dock) when it comes to performance. I’m sure we’ll see performance improvements there with time but I’d rather have them come with X.4.1 than a few years down the road.

Even right out of the box, Automator knows many actions and I guess that many applications will bundle their own before long. Even in the initial setup it may be hard to find what you’re looking for, so the filter field is important for efficient usage of the Automator application.

And while I’m bitching, let me also mention that it’s driving me crazy that those little crosses in circles to delete actions from a workflow are on the right hand side of the action’s title. This is a Mac. They should be on the left. I keep clicking those useless numbers. And it also irritates me a lot that the actions keep changing their (apparently always non-alphabetical) order depending on what you do. That makes it hard to find things. They’ll need to find a better way of highlighting the recommended ones – perhaps by highlighting them? Finally, every new window will have the bar that splits the list of applications (with short names) from the list with the actions (with long names) right in the middle. So after waiting for an eternity until the window opens, I still have to move things around to make it usable… but back to actually using the Automator application:

Despite the large number of actions, I found it quite troublesome to use Automator so far. A few things I wanted to do couldn’t be done with Automator – e.g. getting the contents of a Safari window (the existing actions all seem to re-download the page and thus don’t work when you’re offline or the page isn’t re-loadable). And others couldn’t be done because Automator can only handle really simple processes: There seems to be no way to gather information from two different places and merge them in one of the actions. That’s a shame – probably a tradeoff made for UI simplicity.

After trying to come up with useful stuff to do with Automator for a while I didn’t find too many things. While Automator has the whole infrastructure there to create contextual menu entries in the Finder, to make little applications, PDF plugins and so forth, I couldn’t come up with too many things that’d really make it shine. Particularly things that I couldn’t have done with AppleScript as well.

Examples

I still came up with one useful action. It’s an action that I could have done with AppleScript as well. But it was much quicker to do with Automator. From time to time I download the web pages of my blog to my computer, so I can also reference them while I’m offline. I was really looking forward to X.4 and Spotlight for these as finally there would be a way to quickly search my old posts without needing Google. While I’ll still use Google while I’m online simply because it’s much faster and has a much better display than Spotlight, having a way to search them while being offline was great.

As the files span a few folders and subfolders getting this right manually might have required some thinking (or knowledge of perl or something), but it was very easy in Automator. A little four step action consisting of

1. Specifying the folders
2. Asking for a recursive listing of files
3. Filtering for results whose name doesn’t end in ‘.html’
4. Adding ‘.html’ to the names of those files

While I found this action very useful, I also thought it was ironic that the only good use I could find for the one new and exciting tool on the computer was a shortcoming of another new and exciting tool.

Developing for Automator

I also tried to make some actions for Automator. It’s not difficult to make a basic action but it’s quite messy. XCode has a template that sets everything up for you. Start with that and you’ll be fine, particularly if your action is written in AppleScript. Technically the actions are pretty sweet. They use all the good Cocoa stuff we’ve gotten to know and love. You set up the minimal UI for Automator and will automatically have the entered values thanks to Bindings. Like in AppleScript Studio you can also mix and match the use of Objective-C and AppleScript to get the most of it. This will let you use low level system functions for the hard work while driving the UI with some simple AppleScripts.

What I found quite tricky about making the actions is that there are little strings all over your project containing the action’s name. And if you happen to change that your project should have another name (e.g. after copying a finished project to re-use stuff in that one to create another action), you’ll have to track down all occurrences of the relevant string and change them. It’s in the property list, it’s in the build settings, it’s in the executable settings. And it’s quite annoying. Perhpaps someone can come up with an Automator action to do this for us (Perl scripts will be accepted as well).

The next annoyance is that to make the Automator action reasonably well documented you need to write quite a few strings. Those are pre-inserted into the plist and strings files for you but I find their order and arrangement quite irritating. Having a window with a nice setup to handle all of those strings (including notes to remind you what exactly they’re for and autofilling the values you’ve used in other projects) would be a great help. And while I’m at it, XCode should also give error messages if you’ve managed to have a typo in your manually edited property lists – that can cause quite irritating instances of things not working and I recommend TextExtras to do the checking in the meantime.

For a simple action, right now the effort of creating the action is so high that I’d say it’s not worth it. If Apple can reduce the effort needed to turn a working AppleScript into a working action, people will be much more likely to bother creating actions.

Looking beyond AppleScript actions there’s still the rest of Cocoa. While AppleScript actions may be nice for those who can’t handle AppleScript, I’m just fine making a little script for myself and running it. But with Cocoa coming into play, actions can be much more powerful than AppleScript. To check that I programmed a little action that takes PDF files from the workflow and two strings, the file’s author and its title and then used the new PDFKit to insert those into the file as PDF ‘tags’. Those ‘tags’ being in place means that Spotlight can index the file more specifically.

And, well, it works. At least on the Automator side. PDFKit seems to destroy the file’s table of contents when adding the tags, so it should be used with care if you want to preserve those. That’s a shame, particularly as those tags aren’t particularly hidden in the PDF files and I imagine that they should be quite easy to write. It looks like this may be solvable by looking right into Core Graphics, but getting into that may too much time to be worth doing it.

As I only noticed that shortcoming of the PDF writing later on, I also dug a bit deeper and made an action that gets the selection from Bibdesk and another one, mixing Cocoa and AppleScript, that changes the metadata of the PDF files belonging to the publications listed in Bibdesk according to what’s stored in the BibTeX file. And after a bit of trouble – and the almost non-debuggability of AppleScript when run from Automator – that worked as well, with the caveat of potentially destroying your files again.

My conclusion from these experiments is that there is real power in Automator, but that there are many things that can go wrong and make creating the actions a pain. In addition Apple should make the ‘overhead’ part of creating and managing the actions easier as well as Automator itself more convenient for developing actions, e.g. by not forcing you to quit and restart it all the time. It will also be interesting to watch what happens with regard to localisation. Apple seem to have made a great effort to localise all actions. Which is important if you want to get people to use things. Most other actions will not be localised to the same extent. So things will look quite messy for those not using English as their system language. (Hmmm, AppleScript started out with support for different languages as well – but that never happened…)

For my personal use, I’d be quite happy to use AppleScript myself and have the power of AppleScript Studio with the ability to use Objective-C classes right there in the Script Editor without the hassle of having to create and manage a project in XCode.

I’ll dump the results of my action coding in a folder on our server, so you can play around with it if you want to. No guarantees though, and the advice to back up your PDFs before manipulating them. If you find a way to solve the table of contents problem for the PDF files, please let me know.

The Public

So how is the public going to use Automator? I’m not sure. I fear that many people who don’t do scripting also won’t use Automator either. And looking around on the web, many actions that you see popping up seem to be quite simple jobs, sometimes just seeming to contain a single AppleScript command. While having these may be important for novice users who don’t know AppleScript, it may also end up cluttering up Automator’s reservoir of actions without adding significant new features. I.e. I am a bit sceptical whether things will end up all cool and useful.

If you – as a part of the public – want to enlighten me, then please show me a simple way to make an action that works as a Finder plugin and displays the metadata stored for the selected files. My idea was that this should be a simple Get Finder Selection → run shell command → display output job. But that so didn’t work that I ended up doing most of the job in AppleScript which still doesn’t work properly when used as a plugin.

AppleScript

While I’m writing on automation in OS X, let me mention AppleScript as well. It has been updated to version 1.10 with X.4 and there’s quite a long list of changes hidden in the release notes. Some cleaning up seems to have been done, particularly in the area of strings and the handling of Unicode. And the dialog boxes that can be displayed should conform to OS X HIG now. Unless I’ve missed it when reading the release notes there is still no built-in sorting and no improvement for the whole separating/creating strings to/from an array thing. text item delimiters-Я-Us.

The browser for AppleScript dictionaries looks different now. It offers a number of options for viewing the dictionary – none of which I like too much – and has a filter field, which is very handy if you know what you’re looking for and just need to re-view the exact documentation of a command or a class.

And there’s the AppleScript Utility now which consolidates a couple of system-wide Apple-Script related options for you, so you don’t have to look for them in different places. To me this’d look much more natural as a preference pane, but perhaps it’s not mainstream enough. One thing the utility will do for you is activate the system-wide AppleScript menu. This has been around for ages, but it hasn’t been used enough. It’s a brilliant tool. Activate it and set it up to not display the Library scripts (they’re outdated and useless anyway).

Then go to the ‘Scripts’ subfolder of your personal library folder and create a folder called ‘Applications’. Inside that folder you can add other folders with the names of applications and the Script Menu will display the items in these folders in the Script Menu when that application is active. Some applications like iTunes or Mail bring their own Script menus. Usually you just need to move the contents of their scripts folder over to the new one and then their script menus won’t reappear the next time the application is launched.

This way you’ll always have the right scripts accessible in one and the same location. And with the Script Menu also being able to deal with aliases graciously, you can easily add the same script to several applications without having a management nightmare. In addition to AppleScripts, the menu will also execute shell or Perl scripts for you. And - to return to my original topic – Automator workflows.

What did you do in AppleScript or Automator? And what would you like to do with it?

iChat

The new iChat version doesn’t impress.

• There’s a new, simpler icon without that AOL person in it. Good.
• There’s Jabber support, which I have no use for and I wonder how many people will have.
• Despite now offering three different protocols to connect over and a preference to manage ‘Accounts’, iChat is still keen on opening a separate window the available contacts of each service. What were they smoking?! Even the open source people had better solutions for this years ago. The same holds for the iChat menu which preferably shouldn’t clutter itself with references to different services at all.
• The minimal size of the contacts window has been increased to 210x343 pixels. That’s by far too large. And it’s not that it’s displaying more information in that window than it did before.
• There are audio- and videoconferences with multiple participants. How many people will use these? Particularly as even simple audio conferences don’t work on non-trivial network setups. While it may be easy to do those multi-person conferences now, it still doesn’t seem to be possible to just add another participant to an existing chat – which I’d consider more useful.
• I’d also like the ability to quickly switch from an existing text chat to a voice chat, or the other way round. Sometimes things get too complex for typing everything or you want to quickly send an URL to the person you’re talking to. This still feels very clumsy.
• iChat pops up an annoying message window every time I disconnect from the internet. I haven’t found a way to make it shut up yet. Instant messaging is nice to have but it’s not important enough to bother me with its connection problems.
• iChat can now be told to not disconnect from IM services when in the background via Fast User Switching. That’s progress. But it will still set my state to ‘Away’ when using the other account. Basically I don’t ever want to have any other status than ‘Available’. I think of IM as a phone. People can call, and if I’m not there they can call again later or just leave a message. People shouldn’t be able to see whether I’m actually sitting at the computer or not.
• On the Rendezvous Bonjour chat, I have to display my name as given on ‘my’ card in the address book. It’s a good idea to default to that name but I should have the option to change it.

Image Picker

Since X.3 OS X has contained the Image Picker that lets you set an icon for yourself in iChat, an image for the people in your address book or for new users (Although I’m not 100% sure that all of these applications actually use the same service. It looks like iChat contains a separate copy of it which gives slightly different results.) It’s quite a nice tool that lets you do basic image manipulation and scaling as well as accepting video input.

But it had and still has major problems with doing good scaling and with preserving transparency. My favourite iChat icon is one of the grand Dr. Zoidberg which I also use as an icon for a hard drive partition. It works perfectly there. But when dragging it to the Image Picker, it’ll end up at a by far too small size for reasons beyond my comprehension. That’s not a big deal as I can easily rescale the image with the tool. Unfortunately, rescaling will destroy the transparency information and thus Dr. Zoidberg starts living in a white box rather than hovering over whatever background there is. The scaling done with the images is also quite bad for icon style graphics. All the edges start looking jerky after having been scaled.

I really hope, Apple fix this one. It’s a nice tool and a good idea. But technically it still needs some work.

Fast User Switching

The jerkily scaled icons with lack of transparency can be seen in the Fast User Switching menu. It’s original incarnation had the obvious design flaw that it always filled half the menu bar with the user’s full name. Not particularly useful but nothing that changed in any of the X.3 updates where it should’ve been fixed. In X.4 this problem has been solved and you have a selection of seeing a user’s full name, short name or just an icon for the Fast User Switching menu. That’s acceptable, I suppose. I might be able to abandon the shell script I kept handy to Fast User Switch.

I’m not using Fast User Switching a lot. Mostly when wanting to test something on a ‘clean’ account or when wanting to make clean screenshots without having to rearrange my normal work environment. But I seem to remember that with some revision, Fast User Switching and iTunes would let you continue listening to the music of the account in the background. Somehow things are a bit strange in that area now. When switching to a second account the music running on the first account will stop being played. Indeed, my first account will not emit any sound as long as the second account remains logged on. That sounds like a bug.

Furthermore, the whole process of Fast User Switching sounds like it may not be perfectly engineered. While doing the Fast User Switch, shortly before the login panel appears I can hear the music from the background accont which will then be abruptly stopped. If all this were about a user’s permissions, this shouldn’t happen for sure.

Finally, I note that the German localisation of the login window is buggy in that it has about double the width it should have and thus looks out of proportion and rather ugly.

Help

While Apple’s Help application is starting to be reasonably speedy, it still carries some old bugs in it. In just over a week of using X.4 I already needed to trash its Caches, so it would start up properly and not eat all of my CPU time while displaying nothing.

I don’t like that the drawer with all the available help books is gone. Particularly with a large number of help books on the system it was a much more convenient way to browse through them than using a menu.

Mail

Looking at Mail suggests that drawers are going out of fashion. I’m not writing an extensive report on Mail as that would just be upsetting. My bottom line is that a formerly lean and elegant application has become more bloated and much more ugly.

In fact these fruit are so low-hanging that I made the tool to just insert these smart mailboxes into Mail: Mailboxer. Not quite as convenient as having the feature built-in, but a step in that direction anyway.

• The mailbox drawer is gone. I thought that drawer was brilliant. Easily available when you needed it but not cluttering your screen the rest of the time. With the new ‘pane’ for the mailboxes you are forced to keep Mail’s main window at a rather large size. In addition the mailboxes can only appear at the left hand side of the window which I consider inconvenient as it moves the stuff I’m interested in away from the edge (easier to see) and forces me to drag messages from right to left for filing, which seems to be a slightly bigger effort than dragging left to right (for a right handed person I suppose).
• As has been mentioned in many places, the toolbar is another attempt to severely break with any HIG as well as good taste and usability. I recommend the Cage Fighter to fix that – but the spacing in the toolbar still looks broken after using it.
• The account management preferences have become a bit more sophisticated, letting you reorder stuff now, for example.
• Likewise the signature preferences have become more sophisticated – or should I say confusing? The whole setup with various columns looks hierarchical and overly complicated. And I fail to understand what its point is.
• The button to encrypt messages will be enabled even when there isn’t any certificate for the only recipient of the message. When sending the e-mail you’ll then get and error message that encryption couldn’t be done. This doesn’t happen for all recipients and I’m not exactly sure for which ones it does happen but it does look rather clumsy.
• The items in the menu to select the account you are sending a message with are of the form ‘Name (E-Mail address)’. As the popup menu is likely to be quite narrow if you’re also using the menu to choose a signature and have a reasonable window width, this means that you can’t tell which account you’re using just by looking at the popup menu as all items will begin with your name.
• Turning on the BCC field will still be permanent rather than just for the message you’re writing.
• HTML. I’m not going into this. But I suspect the general move towards using HTML in Mail is part of the reason why the displaying of other messages feels even slower than it used to be.
• Long standing obvious bugs, like the address book completion for entering e-mail addresses not working if you are typing quickly or when you are typing nicknames from the address book are still present. Am I the only one who tries to send messages to ‘mum’ rather than typing the actual name?

The bottom line is that I would have happily kept the old Mail application.

Windows

There’s this new window type in X.4 which can be used like metal windows but doesn’t look as crappy. If only they had replaced all metal windows with the new type!

Bug Reporter

Apple’s Bug Reporter has become more powerful. The developer tools now contain CrashReporterPrefs which let you set up how you’d like the Bug Reporter to work. Only in developer mode you’ll get to see crash reports. Depending on what crashes the Bug Reporter also offers to open a Terminal window and collect even more information about the hanging application. And finally you get to see a progress bar when sending them to Apple. There’s even a thank you note when you’re keeping an eye on it. Sending a bug report while being off-line might also crash the Bug Reporter which I considered ironic.

Voice Over

If you want to be freaked out, try playing with VoiceOver. It can do lots of funky stuff like read things off the screen and enlarge whatever you’re selecting. It looks like good technology but really gives me a headache.

Finder

Basically the Finder remains the mess we’ve gotten used to in OS X. It just feels a bit smoother and faster in some places and lost its habit to not display localised names when you want to see all file name extensions (which I’m not quite happy with as I don’t know the German names of many applications from the years of other behaviour that we’ve seen so far). We’ve also got new copy dialogs which I like much better than the old ones. It would have been nice for all the copy, uncompressing, disk image mounting and trash emptying progresses to finally live in the same window, though.

What annoys me the most at this very moment is that mounting and unmounting volumes will change the width of the sidebar in the Finder’s metal windows. I’ve got this set up so it only displays the icons and doesn’t show any text and want it to stay that way.

And the networking capabilities seem to be worse once more. Since installing X.4 I haven’t managed to see any Windows computer on our home or the university network. I do see a lot of empty ‘WORKGROUP’ folders though.

The improved CD burning from ‘folders’ introduces yet another concept and I find it both confusing and terribly slow with large amounts of files dropped on those windows. Why can’t I simply click burn on any folder and have the Finder handle the rest properly.

Sleep

X.4 seems to bring a real worsening of the sleep mode. Going to sleep is a bit odd. I usually hit the power button and then use the upcoming dialogue to send the computer to sleep – usually pressing ‘S’ on the keyboard. This has worked perfectly since System 7.5. But in X.4 the dialog sometimes takes a few seconds to appear on screen which really irritates me. Perhaps it can get swapped out now and couldn’t before?

When waking up from sleep, it seems like the computer needs longer time to come back to life. While the screen’s contents will be back immediately, it often takes quite a few seconds before I can use the trackpad again.

Performance

Performance is difficult to judge and document. Particularly when concerned with the ‘perceived’ performance which is about whether using whether running feels smooth. In total X.4 seems smoother to me than X.3. Particularly things like scrolling work more smoothly and quickly. On the other hand there seem to be more glitches now where the mouse cursor just hangs, the Dock moves jerkily or iTunes pauses. Very strange.

Keychain

A central but probably underestimated aspect of OS X’s encryption and password features is the Keychain Access application. Most users will only be familiar with the dialog boxes presented by the keychain infrastructure in the system which asks whether applications – mostly updated applications – are allowed to access the passwords in the keychain:

While they may be a bit annoying because you’ll be hassled a bit more frequently that you’d wish to be, I’ve always liked these requests as (supposing that Apple was willing and able to make them work as advertised) they give you a bit of control about where your passwords are going. In particular, when running your own computer at least, seeing such requests because an application was update when you didn’t do any updates may raise some suspicion.

For a while now, the dialogs for allowing access to the keychain could be expanded to reveal more information about who was requesting what. At many times the information given there wasn’t too enlightening or specific, though. In X.4 the UI for the expanded part of the dialogues has been cleaned up a bit and they’ll only show the name of the requested object and the requesting application rather than the path. But those names will be in the blue boxes which we started to see in X.3’s Mail for addresses and which are now standard Cocoa UI elements. Clicking those boxes will pop up a menu showing the application’s path, for example, and allow direct access to it.

While I still find what’s displayed in those dialogs a bit confusing at times, and I’m not entirely sure that their German localisations are understandable, it looks like we’re moving in a direction where things become clearer and more accessible.

Keychain Access

While the standard keychain dialogue boxes are probably good enough for most days’ work as everything you’d want to do with your passwords can be done through these dialogues if the programmers of the applications you use put enough work in them, you’re really missing out if you don’t know the Keychain application which lives in the Utilities folder.

To begin with, the previous paragraph isn’t quite true: You can’t delete passwords from the keychain using the standard interface. While the keychain is supposedly safely encrypted, you may want to do that as well and will have to use the Keychain Access application for that. In previous versions of OS X, the Keychain Access application used to be a bit of a pain. It would manage your passwords for servers, networks and other things as well as certificates for signing your own mails or verifying the signatures on other people’s. But was far from being effortless. Once a larger number of passwords and certificates had accumulated, managing or even finding them wasn’t fun.

This has changed with X.4. Finally the Keychain Access application makes its power more visible. You’ll find the standard filter field which lets you quickly locate the item you’re interested in. You’ll find a number of categories at the left to just show items of a certain type (e.g. AppleShare password, Certificats, Keys or Notes which you can simply save securely into the keychain). And clicking an item will display a quick summary of it at the top of the window. All this looks quite familiar and reasonably easy to use:

When clicking the button at the bottom left of the window the pane seen at the top left will appear and list all keychains the system knows of. Your Login keychain will be the top one and the one your applications use. You can create additional keychains to put subsets of your keys or some note in – and make them accessible with a different password, say. The System keychain will contain keys that are used by the system, e.g. WEP keys for Airport networks. Finally the X509 keychain contains keys to verify the authenticity of others. As far as I can tell, when these tests fail Safari brings up the warning that the connection is encrypted but the other side cannot necessarily be trusted.

Double clicking any item in the list will open a new window – with some settings for the key you are using for keys, with information and setting regarding the certificate for certificates and with the option to view it for notes. Viewing the critical information will require you to enter your password – at least the first time.

Apart from the encrypted notes, those features have been present in previous versions of OS X as well. But they didn’t seem to be used much in the past. Perhaps they’ll find more users now that the Keychain Access application itself looks less scary.

My recommendation is to take a look at Keychain Access at least. You may be running into it at some stage. If you’re into acronyms, be sure to take a look at the application’s preferences and then report back what they mean. And there’s one more thing which looks like it could be both great and a bit strange. Right in the Keychain Access menu hides the menu item ‘Certificate Assistant’ which launches the application by that name that lives in ‘/System/Library/CoreServices/’.

Certificate Assistant

The Certificate Assistant is a typical ‘assistant’ offering you pages of questions and trying to help you out with the answers. In this case the area of interest are certificates. And it’s a rather complicated topic, which is why the assistant offers buttons which reveal sheets with lots of extra information and explanation of the terminology on many pages. While I suspect that many people will feel overwhelmed by this, it’s probably the best you can do in this area. Crypotgraphy will not work if people use the tools ignorantly.

The five courses of action offered by the assistant are to make your own ‘self signed’ certificate which sounds most interesting. You should be able to use it to make your own certificate which will automatically be added to your keychain to use for encrypting messages in Mail. This means that people can get into the Mail signing game more easily. On the other hand, you probably shouldn’t really trust the encryption by those certificates too much if the only contact you had with your e-mail partner was electronic. It’d be much preferable to meet in person to exchange certificate or verify the certificates’ fingerprints (which can be seen in Keychain Access of course). Perhaps ‘phoning’ people via iChat could be an option to get that ‘in person’ verification but with just a tiny bit of paranoia you’ll consider that unsafe as well. Unfortunately this hasn’t really worked for me yet, potentially because of the other certificates that are in my keychain – it’s not really transparent what’s happening there.

Next is to make your own certification authority, meaning that you’ll, thirdly, be able to generate certificates for others – potentially useful if you’re making certificates for a circle of friends or your company. What’s particularly nice about that is that generating your own certificate authority will generate a configuration file which you can send to people and they only have to double click (in case they’re running X.4., I guess) to invoke the Certificate Assistant with the correct options. Not that I really know what I’m doing, but feel free to give my file a shot and we’ll see what happens. Note that the Certificate Assistant seems to include an SMTP agent that e-mails your request away. More critically, it doesn’t tell you that there is a problem when there is no internet connection available to send the message over. I suppose requests made when being offline are just lost.

Then there’s an item to request a certificate from an existing authority. I haven’t tried it, but it seems to ask you for all the information needed for a certificate and then e-mails an appropriate request to a certification authority, the address of which you‘ll have to provide, though. The last option lets you view and verify existing certificates.

This assistant looks like a rather powerful tool with many hard-to-understand options. I’m not an expert in cryptography and how to implement it properly. But Apple certain made an effort here. I hope they did a good job as well.

Safari

Safari’s skills in dealing with certificates – used for the encrypted connections to web sites – have been improved as well. The well known dialog which Safari uses to complain about untrusted certificates can now be extended to display the certificate. And you can ask Safari to always trust this particular certificate.

Passwords

When looking around Keychain Access or other places of the system where passwords need to be generated, like the Users preference pane, you’ll notice another new feature of X.4. There’s a little key button now which will open a palette that helps you make a good password. To begin with it has a little control that tells you how good the password you entered is. If it isn’t good enough it’ll offer some hints of the ‘use non-dictionary words’ or ‘use numbers and punctuation’ kind.

It goes even further in that it has a menu listing different ways to generate passwords – from random ones to easily memorisable ones based on dictionary words. You can pre-set the length you want and the tool will tell you how secure the generated passwords are. I swear that the combination of the railway service and cholera in the screen shot have been randomised up by the software.

Address Book

The final thing I want to mention is a little improvement to the Address Book application. In X.4 it will put a little check mark next to e-mail addresses that you have a certificate for. That’s nice and may save you a trip or two to Keychain Access. Particularly with Mail not giving any information on which keys it uses and where they come from, this can be useful information.

Double clicking one of the checkmark will display a sheet with information about the certificate. This would be nice if it weren’t buggy and displayed only the first certificate that it finds for the address in question: Most certificates are valid for one year only. Thus you’ll end up having a couple of them for each e-mail address. And Address Book should display all of them or at least the current one rather than displaying an old one saying that it has expired.

Another strange thing is that the Address Book will display a check mark for certificates which exist but which Mail will not use. It’s not entirely clear to me what’s going on there and why.

Scepticism

I started off sceptically vis-à-vis the Dashboard. And I do remain sceptical. There are two aspects to my scepticism: Firstly, the Dashboard looks like it’s a cover up for many of the failures in OS X. You’ve made an operating system in which doing a quick computation in the Calculator is a royal pain, because there’s (a) no Apple menu to keep it easily accessible for you, (b) a Finder which makes it a royal pain to find (but which you’ll have to use as you don’t want to clutter your Dock even more) and (c) application launch times giving you enough time to do the computations manually. In a way, Dashboard seems to be a cheap way out of that as it’ll give me an instantly available calculator. So this part of my scepticism isn’t actually about Dashboard as a technology or a platform but rather about it giving Apple an excuse to continue ignoring those other problems in OS X.

Secondly, I am concerned with the UI. Not only do Apple advocate that Dashboard widgets look distinct from the rest of the system, they also chose HTML as the main platform to create widgets in. And as a stroll across the web will remind you, HTML is the platform that has given us some of the worst UIs in existence. In addition, creating Dashboard widgets is simple. Meaning that it’ll be at the same time enabling lots of people to create the widgets they want and causing a flood of poorly made widgets to appear. Just like RealBasic and – to a certain extent – AppleScript Studio, the Dashboard platform will provide Perversiontracker with an ongoing supply of entries. Not because the technology is inherently bad but because it’s easy to create stuff.

Hands On

When installing X.4, the Dashboard was one of the first things I tried out. Because it’s easily accessible and even puts its (removable) Dock icon right beneath the Finder. And because it’s eye candy and I’m a sucker for that… I just happen to like things to slide around my screen at the press of a key. Hitting combinations of the Exposé and Dashboard keys is particularly pretty as Apple made the different slides happen with a slight delay, so invoking Exposé’s desktop mode when the Dashboard is active will slide out the Dashboard widgets first and only afterwards slide away the other windows. Pretty.

Invoking the Dashboard will darken the existing windows and slide in the widgets. At the bottom of the screen there’s a little ‘plus’ button, the clicking of which will reveal the Dashboard Dock. I find this quite remarkable and well done. To begin with it looks good that the button turns while the Dock slides in. Then it’s also quite clever to move any widgets which might get into the way of the Dock upwards with the Dock, so the Dock doesn’t overlap anything. Those widgets will be moved down again when the Dock is closed.

What I find remarkable about the sliding is that instead of covering up the lower part of the screen with the Dashboard Dock, all of the screen’s content is just moved upwards. This is probably a good demonstration of how far OS X’s display technology has come and that it is now abstract enough to just slide anything anywhere. For those of us who grew up with System 7, 8 or 9 and still have the idea of the somewhat ‘holy’ menu bar area this looks astonishing.

To use a widget you can click its icon in the Dock or drag it to the location you want it at right away. The latter option is very sweet as the icon morphs into the widget’s default shape during the drag. I could sit here all day Homer Simpson-esque and drag widgets from the Dock into the widget area and back. As usual, holding the Shift during the effect, will give you a slow-motion effect to leave enough time for salivating. That said, I don’t even see the full ‘ripple’ effect that’s apparently there in the Dashboard on dropping things as my computer is too old to provide such eye-candy. I do see the eye-candy when closing a widget, though. Odd.

What’s a bit buggy still is the adding of new widgets to Dashboard. The widgets go to the ‘Widgets’ folder in some Library Folder and will be automatically discovered by the Dashboard. Just not quite automatically. While the folder seems to be re-scanned whenever its contents change, the display in the Dashboard Dock is only properly updated when you scroll to the next page of widgets. Before that you may see widgets without their proper icons or with wrong names which is rather confusing.

Widgets

Now let’s look at some of the widgets provided by Apple. Those are going to be the standard that others will be judged by, so they better be good. Thankfully, Apple have the resources to employ people with good programming skills as well as people with good graphics skills, so we can enjoy pretty and mostly working widgets. As said above in the scepticism section, I doubt that the majority of other widget developers will find the time and resources to put a similar effort into their widgets.

Weather

The weather widget is perhaps the most immediately appealing of the widgets. It has extremely nice graphics to show the current weather at the selected location. And those graphics were already to be seen at the keynote last year. Looking at the graphics themselves suggests that the widget can cover a wide range of weather situations and even tries to reflect details like wind in its graphics. Together with the – now standard – use of transparency this is very good.

But lets get there first: After dragging the weather from the Dashboard Dock, it will default to show the weather of the place you set up in your location preferences. That’s a good way to use that information and to remember that what you set up there is about more than just time zones – despite being in the ‘Date and Time’ preference pane. To set the widget up more specifically for wherever you live, you have to flip it around clicking the little ‘i’ button – the flipping being another bit of eye candy I don’t get to see on my computer although I think that this simple rotation should be possible… On the back side you can then enter the name of the town you live in and hope that it will be found.

And that’s where problems start being apparent. Not only will American towns be listed first regardless of your current location. In addition the widget can’t handle umlauts. Living in Göttingen means that I am affected by that first hand. Of course people quickly checked on the web site providing the weather reports and found out that entering ‘Goettingen&