Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

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Tal G in Jerusalem
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Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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Friday, November 8, 2002
21:32 - Unpleasant Little Surprises	(top)
In all the recent musings over the commitment to quality in Apple software and the ideals of design which are upheld for the express purpose of directly benefiting the user, it's easy to get the impression that I feel Apple can do no wrong. And yeah, there are some days when I feel that way, especially when my Mac looks like an inviting oasis that I can only reach after trudging through a day-long wasteland of Windows ennui. But Apple's far from perfect, as I have mentioned and demonstrated here from time to time-- and possibly not often enough. My musing on file-browser sort routines has had a fairly long aftermath, both positive and negative, for example. J Greely sends the following, by way of keeping me honest (in that "The Pravda of the bloggers. -- the New York Times" kind of way): So here's one that's been amusing me recently: I have a directory that contains JPEG files name 00.jpg through 30.jpg; if I try to open them all in Preview, the order they load in depends on the mode I'm viewing the folder in. Viewed as Icons, arranged by name, the order appears random: 00, 03, 01, 25, 24, 21, 14, 19, 30, etc. Viewed as a list, arranged by name, they're in reverse order, except for 20, which comes between 03 and 02. Only when I select them from the Columns view do the files load in ascending order. Doesn't matter whether I select with Command-A, click-and-drag, or painstakingly shift-click them in order. Only one view does the right thing, and the other two "think different". Touch�. This is indeed broken, and I (among others) have submitted this via Apple's handy-dandy Feedback page, as this is certainly a step backward in functionality from the OS 9 days. Isn't it ironic, as Greely notes, that the Column view-- the new, NeXT-derived one that was greeted with such suspicion from the long-time Mac-heads-- is the only view that does it right? Another long-standing and very stupid bug, which I wrote in with months ago but isn't fixed even in Jaguar, is the following: Cute, huh? If you are using List view, with large icons, if you click on a filename to change it, that filename jumps up by several pixels (as though it were still aligning itself with the default small-icon geometry, which is almost certainly what's going on in the code). It's an obscure and (probably) little-used mode, though, and the reason the bug still exists probably has a lot to do with the fact that Apple's QA staff likely uses that mode about as frequently as they fire up a Windows 3.1 box for its user-interface nostalgia. (It probably also has to do with the fact that this is purely a cosmetic problem.) But Apple is working on these things; with every new release there's a new tweak to the general user interface, a new piece of polish that wasn't there before-- either bringing OS X's functionality to a par with OS 9, or taking it beyond in cases where it's already reached parity. Windows file-sharing consisted of third-party SMB tools operated from the command line in 10.0; in 10.1 it became integrated in the form of typing a URL into the "Connect to Server" box, of a strict and difficult-to-remember form. In 10.2 we got name browsing. 10.3 will undoubtedly bring domain integration and further tweaks. There's always fine-tuning going on, and seeing everything from the bundled Utilities to the appearance of the file-copy dialog box gain extra levels of spit-shine with each update is, to be honest, rather exhilarating. The fact that it's (in many cases) compensating for existing shortcomings and flaws that shouldn't have been there in the first place is sort of a side issue. It's just fun. And it demonstrates that Apple knows what areas, no matter how trivial, are weak-- and is committed to sharpening them all up, across the board, with time. Some fixes are simply prioritized further into the future than others. I'm sure glad to see, for example, that the Installer program now prompts you automatically for an administrator password, as soon as you launch it, rather than flatly stating in big letters that you "need an Administrator password to continue", and making you "Click on the lock to make changes". Somebody noticed, and it got fixed. And there was much rejoicing.