OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard: Fix the Finder!

With OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard”, Apple’s Goal is to “Enhance the performance of OS X, set a new standard for quality and lay the foundation for future OS X innovation.”  They are promising that, although there will be no huge feature additions, 10.6 will be worth our while since it will give Apple the opportunity to clean up their code and make a cleaner, leaner, meaner OS X.

Yet, missing from the feature list which includes things like Grand Central, is something that Mac users have been clamoring for for a while:  An overhaul of the Finder.

I will totally get this upgrade if, on their list of fixes they fix the #%@#% Finder. Seriously, it’s the most used, most prominent element of OS X in need of an update. Most people will get way more mileage out of an overhaul of the Finder than any of the other things I’ve seen listed.

For instance, fix the crashes, have Trash remember the origin of deleted files so you can actually recover them, and have enable Undo/Trash support for files that are erased by the “copy and replace” Finder operation. For that matter, how about a “copy and merge” function instead of (or in addition to) the aforementioned?

The Mac Trash Bin

I hate to admit it, but Windows actually has one advantage over OS X, and that’s the handling ofdeleted files.  Sure, on both systems you can always undo the last operation (well, not always… I’m not going to make that blanket statement).  However, Windows Recycle Bin has a few big advantages:

Windows Recycle Bin remembers where each file came from.
Just right click an item and choose restore, and it will go back to the right place.  Very important for those deleted preference files that need to end up in some arcane location in your Documents and Settings. In OS X, good luck placing stuff back in to the right folder. Strange that OS X is all about metadata but doesn’t keep track of this.

You can selectively remove items from the trash
As opposed to OS X’s all-or-nothing “Empty Trash” option.

When you’re copying a folder and another of that same name already exists in the destination, Mac only gives you an option to Replace.
This deletes the existing folder then copies the new one in it’s place (see common Finder gripes: “Replace vs Merge“).  Something deleted in this way doesn’t go to the Trash. This is insult to injury: Not only are you surprised to find that you just accidently did a delete and replace instead of the far more common and expected merge, but then you’re double-screwed because Apple decided to disable Undo for this most destructive of actions.  It’s pretty evil.

And to all the Mac users out there: all the other OS’s do merge, or will at least give the option for it.  I’d at *least* like Finder to present this choice, especially since the Merge operation is a lot harder for a user to replicate on their own, than a Replace.  By the way, it’s not perfect, but you can reclaim some of your lost Merge with MergetoFinder applescript

But at the Market, isn’t it Spelled “McIntosh”?

I now has a Macbook. w3rd!
To anyone who has tried them both:  I ask whether you prefer Word 2008 or iWork’s Pages ‘08?  Same goes, to a lesser extent, for the other Office vs iWorks components.

Leopard rocks, so much so that it is a worthy point of procrastination to mention it at midnight when I still have a paper left to write….

Addendum:

After using Pages (iWork’s wordprocessor) some more, I have to say, it’s nice, but because it uses it’s own format, I find myself still saving in .DOC format a lot in order to port my files between systems, and saving to other formats sucks.

If you save as a Word .DOC…

1. It’s not just another possible format to select in the save dialog… oh no. You’re not saving the file, apparently, you’re exporting it. Different rules apply, and you can’t just hit option-S.
2. I don’t think it does autosaves to DOC format.
3. Even when you haven’t modified the file, it say that the file has changed, and ask you to save it again. Gets very annoying when you just saved it. This is another reason I think it doesn’t autosave.

So basically it treats DOC as an alien format, and different rules apply. Very similar to Photoshop’s “Save a Copy” option.