[Tom C]

Most of the talk about Tiger has been about the new features, e.g. Spotlight. I have a few questions about relatively minor things that wouldn't receive much attention.

1. In column view in open/save dialogs, can you resize the column width in Carbon apps like you can in Cocoa apps in Panther?

2. Does the new version of Safari let you turn off animations?

3. In Address Book, if a contact has multiple e-mail addresses, can you set a default address (as in Entourage)?

4. I've read that the Finder now supports contextual menus in the sidebar. If you have a CD-RW mounted and right-click it in the sidebar, is "erase disk" one of the options in the contextual menu? I hate having to go into Disk Utility just to erase a CD-RW.

5. Have they made any changes/improvements to Font Book? When it first came out, these forums were full of suggestions/complaints, but I haven't read anything about changes in Tiger yet.

6. In Panther and earlier, if you have a docked folder, navigate through the folder, and select a detached alias, you get no feedback whatsoever; it doesn't even say that it's a bad alias, it just does nothing. On the other hand, if you select a detached alias in the Finder, it gives you the option to re-attach the alias. Have they finally made the Dock consistent with the Finder?

7. In the Finder->Advanced preferences, one of the options is "show warning before emptying the Trash." In Panther and earlier, this preference works just fine if you're emptying the Trash from the Finder menu, but doesn't have any effect when emptying the Trash by right-clicking on the trash in the Dock. Does it now affect the Dock, too?

[biscuit]

I haven't used Tiger so I can't answer your questions, but I thought it worth suggesting that submitting these observations to Mac OS X Feedback might be a good idea, since Tiger's still in early development...

biscuit

[Angus_D]

Tiger is still in early development and it seems that most of the work so far has gone into underlying technologies, not the user interface layer. Due to the extended development schedule, I'd expect a fair bit of attention to be paid to fixing bugs in the areas you talked about, but I personally wouldn't expect that to happen until later in the development cycle.

Basically what I'm trying to say is you shouldn't really have any reason to care whether they're fixed now or not (other than "just being interested", which is somewhat valid), and you shouldn't take that as an indication as to their overall status in Tiger.

[Thinine]

Wow. The answer to all your questions so far is no. That's incredible.

[Webscreamer]

BTW, I mb missed this, but is the QT Player now completely rewritten in Cocoa?

Any screenshots of it?

[Thinine]

Yes. It doesn't look much different. Should have better performance, especially if you have a DX9 video card.

[Developer]

Which process owns the spotlight results window?

[Fonzie]

Originally posted by Thinine:
Yes. It doesn't look much different. Should have better performance, especially if you have a DX9 video card.

DX9 = DirectX 9 ?

Is that not Windows-only ?

enlighten me, please.

[bmedina]

Originally posted by Fonzie:
DX9 = DirectX 9 ?

Is that not Windows-only ?

enlighten me, please.

DX9 card is shorthand for "a card that has vertex and pixel shaders."

[Catfish_Man]

Originally posted by bmedina:
DX9 card is shorthand for "a card that has vertex and pixel shaders."

DX8 introduced those, iirc, so DX9 is really "a card with modern vertex and pixel shaders"

[Big Mac]

I would also be interested to know if Font Book is more robust. And concerning Tom C's seventh point about the empty trash warning not applying to the contexutal menu, I imagine that a purposeful design choice. If someone chooses to empty the trash that way, OS X's designers probably felt the warning would be unnecessary. I do agree, though, it is an inconsistent behavior.

[workerbee]

Originally posted by Big Mac:
I would also be interested to know if Font Book is more robust.

Seconded. FontBook currently is a weak point of OS X.

Something else I'd really like to see in Tiger is ... a better Finder (a classic, I know).
I really hate it when the Finder does not update its windows when new files are written into a folder.

Or things like this:

http://philby.net/finder001.png
[ALL inline images must be no wider than 480 pixels! --tooki]

These are files I worked on yesterday, and I've just duplicated "make-dummy-split.fla" in the Finter a few minutes ago. Result: the Finder only updates the date for the duplicated file, not the original. Also, all the other files are marked "today", when all of them were created and modified yesterday.
The only file marked "Yesterday" is, in fact, the one I've created today -- the copy.
This is extremely annoying, IMHO.

[qnxde]

Originally posted by Developer:
Which process owns the spotlight results window?

SystemUIServer. It's resources appear to be called from Search.bundle which is located in CoreServices.

[Wulfi]

i really wish they'd bring back a simple little feature called Print Window.

[Developer]

Originally posted by qnxde:
SystemUIServer.

So then what happens to the active application's menu bar?

[qnxde]

Originally posted by Developer:
So then what happens to the active application's menu bar?

Nothing. SystemUIServer is a background application. (like DiskImageMounter and the process that zips/unzips files) The menubar does not change at all.

[Developer]

Originally posted by qnxde:
The menubar does not change at all.

That's what I mean. Isn't this a problem?

Do menu commands disable when the search results window is in front? If not and they apply to objects in the application window behind the search results window, isn't this confusing the user?

[Amorya]

Originally posted by Wulfi:
i really wish they'd bring back a simple little feature called Print Window.

I think it's back. I saw some finder screenshot with a Print command in the menus... don't think it was faked.

Amorya

[- - e r i k - -]

Originally posted by Wulfi:
i really wish they'd bring back a simple little feature called Print Window.

Drag a folder to the print center / desktop printer.