[moonmonkey]

I made this mockup for the OSX Tiger forum, but thought it would be interesting in the lounge too.

I made 10 changes to the Panther finder (I couldn't think of 150).
How many can you spot?




Graphic explanation of the new contextual menus.

[- - e r i k - -]

That's very nice! All very Apple-like! I especially would appreciate the dialog bubbles instead of the inane bouncing. How would it handle multiple dialog-boxes and dialogs from adjacent apps in the dock?

[Mithras]

Lessee...

I like:
1. Theme support (or custom-Apple-menu, anyway)
2. Spiffy thought bubble error messages
3. minimized copy windows show progress in icon
4. Is that a "Smart Folder" I see?
5. Metadata views in the Finder

I'm not so sure about:
6. Cut file!
7. Finder History
8. Folder content listing specifies filetype ('documents' vs. 'images')

And the others are...?
9. ?
10. ?

[Socially Awkward Solo]

Well the bubble itself looks sorta gay but the idea is good.

[MindFad]

Originally posted by Socially Awkward Solo:
Well the bubble itself looks sorta gay but the idea is good.

I am offended by your use of the word "gay" as a negative connotation.

Nah, I'm just kidding.

I like some of these ideas. Especially the colored list view.

[d4nth3m4n]

cool mockup! but why arent the songs in alphabetical order?

[Socially Awkward Solo]

The finder should really show the progress of files being copied.

[d4nth3m4n]

i found one, i found one- it distinguishes between files and images in folders.

[moonmonkey]

Originally posted by - - e r i k - -:
That's very nice! All very Apple-like! I especially would appreciate the dialog bubbles instead of the inane bouncing. How would it handle multiple dialog-boxes and dialogs from adjacent apps in the dock?

I would assume there would be several versions, bubbles curling up, curling down etc. They would also grow to fit the amount of dialog text.

Clicking on the bubble would bring the dialog window to the front so you could deal with it.

Originally posted by Mithras:
I like:
1. Theme support (or custom-Apple-menu, anyway)
2. Spiffy thought bubble error messages
3. minimized copy windows show progress in icon
4. Is that a "Smart Folder" I see?
5. Metadata views in the Finder

I'm not so sure about :
6. Cut file!
7. Finder History
8. Folder content listing specifies filetype ('documents' vs. 'images')

Yes, its a smart folder
Cut file is in Windows XP and I like it, If you don't paste, the original does not disappear.
The folder info listing would only identify file/folder types if everything it contained was of the same type.
ie.
10 Audio files
35 Applications
25 Folders
5 Documents
30 Items (if contains folders, docs and apps)
I just think this would be more descriptive.

If you look behind the balloon, a Gaussian blur has been used in the user interface, I think this would be very cool.

[moonmonkey]

Originally posted by d4nth3m4n:
cool mockup! but why arent the songs in alphabetical order?

Its um, a very early beta.

[Diggory Laycock]

Originally posted by moonmonkey:
...Cut file is in Windows XP and I like it, If you don't paste, the original does not disappear.

That's not really a cut then - is it; it's more like "move to shelf" - but you can't see the shelf.

[Oisín]

Originally posted by Diggory Laycock:
That's not really a cut then - is it; it's more like "move to shelf" - but you can't see the shelf.

It's the same as Windows... you don't paste, the marked files aren't moved...

[d4nth3m4n]

Originally posted by moonmonkey:
Its um, a very early beta.

good answer man.

[OptimusG4]

Rounded Dock? Interesting.

[djohnson]

Looks pretty cool! If Apple doesn't make it, maybe someone else can?

[Turias]

I really hate the thought bubble idea. XP does that now with stuff in the task bar, and it gets incredibly annoying. Little apps always thinking something (most of which is pointless), shareware reminders, anything you can think of.

It's become mostly clutter and rarely useful.

[insha]

Very Cool moonmonkey.

If Apple don't have these features in Tiger, can somebody please create a shareware (if possible) with these mods.

The only thing I'm not sure about are the context menus; don't see how they are better (or more intuitive) than the ones we have today?!

[insha]

Originally posted by Turias:
I really hate the thought bubble idea. XP does that now with stuff in the task bar, and it gets incredibly annoying. Little apps always thinking something (most of which is pointless), shareware reminders, anything you can think of.

It's become mostly clutter and rarely useful.

I was thinking the same thing!

[moonmonkey]

Originally posted by insha:
Very Cool moonmonkey.

If Apple don't have these features in Tiger, can somebody please create a shareware (if possible) with these mods.

The only thing I'm not sure about are the context menus; don't see how they are better (or more intuitive) than the ones we have today?!

Your right, I was just messing about with those.

[C.J. Moof]

Originally posted by Turias:
I really hate the thought bubble idea. XP does that now with stuff in the task bar, and it gets incredibly annoying. Little apps always thinking something (most of which is pointless), shareware reminders, anything you can think of.

It's become mostly clutter and rarely useful.

Depends on how "dumb" the dialogs are. Dumb=what Windows XP does when I log in. I intentionally hit caps lock when I start my password. Every time. Always have. But every time, Windows puts up a big, yellow floating dialog to the effect of "HEY! HEY!!! YOUR CAPS LOCK IS ON!!!" every blasted time. If it could learn that this is an intentional behavior that I don't need to be warned about, I'd hate it one little bit less.

If Apple started using the thought bubble idea to promote .mac like XP does with .net, I'd be way beyond annoyed...... but I think they have more sense than that. Think and hope.

I'd like the thought bubble to be a click-through item, like the volume/brightness change overlay. Therefore, you wouldn't want to blur the background elements that are still accessable through them.

[d4nth3m4n]

Originally posted by insha:

...The only thing I'm not sure about are the context menus; don't see how they are better (or more intuitive) than the ones we have today?!...

i dont know about intuitive, but they would come in handy with older systems, where you can move the mouse easier in anticipation of the menu popping up. i know on my ibook 700 i try and do this with the current system. with the radial menu, it would be much easier to estimate where things will be.

[moonmonkey]

Added another few.
Trying to get 150 in there.

[Superchicken]

I like the way the contextual menu looks. Perhaps we could even see a rounded contextual menu. That would be pretty nifty. Have it all round out maybe even magnify like the dock. I don't know about having icons for everything though, that would get a little strange. And difficult for Apps like photoshop and what not.

[Link]

IMHO the graphic contextual menus are very cool. I like the idea. Something different for a change.

The way to better it, as always, is to make it optional.

Something ALL of OS X should have - GUI intensity. As I've stated before (as well as many others), it's s something that windows has had for years.

OS X full blown = zooming/animated contextual menus with text labels
OS X customized = not necessarily zooming or animated or having text labels or maybe just plain text
OS X minimal GUI = simple aqua texture (sort of like how even longhorn can be stripped down to the flat windows GUI).

Something like that could be an awesome thing for developers. I'd even add in brightness/contrast settings for the UI. (brightness adjusts the aqua to a more greyish color, etc) hrmm...

[iNeusch]

Originally posted by Socially Awkward Solo:
Well the bubble itself looks sorta gay but the idea is good.

LOL !

Cool mockup.
Is anything true Apple ideas in it ?

[- - e r i k - -]

Originally posted by Turias:
I really hate the thought bubble idea. XP does that now with stuff in the task bar, and it gets incredibly annoying. Little apps always thinking something (most of which is pointless), shareware reminders, anything you can think of.

It's become mostly clutter and rarely useful.

And this is any different from having all the apps jumping in line to get your attention?

It's not like all your apps suddenly craves your attention with a dialog box (which is what this system would latch on to), and if any app suddenly started to do it, it would quickly be shunned by mac users. Because you know, we just have lower tolerance for crap that most Windows-users.

[dru]

I'm pretty sure The Steve wouldn't accept "Cut" in the file system since it's never handled like the 20+ years of Cut/Copy/Paste metaphore. It was IBM who first came up with the concept circa 1991 and only Microsoft adopted it beginning with Win95--in fact, it almost wasn't adopted by them either. When finally implemented by IBM in their OS/2 product in 1994, IBM went with different naming of Pickup/Drop where the pointer gets a little suitcase dangling from it to remind you you're carrying stuf around you plan to drop somewhere else. You can always cancel tapping "ESC" or via a menu item.

Stickies attached to windows were in IBM OS/2 2.0 & 2.1, after that Stickiers were dropped from the OS but if you had it installed already, it still worked. The "thought bubble" concept was proposed on IBM's Use of Use website as a replacement for dialog boxes. I think it's a little over the top but might be something Apple'd flirt with as you've shown it.

The minimized copy progress badge is a no-brainer *except* Mac OS X uses one dialog to hold all progress indictors for move, copy operations. You'll never know which is at 11% unless there's only one operation. Adding another badge for each operation would get unusable very quickly.

Maybe a better solution would to leverl notification services to put up a small, carefully design note which would kind of be like the extra small "controller" view of iTunes in terms of how it would relate to the full size scrollable progress indicator listing window. A possible alternative would be some kind of menu add-on.

It's about time we moved beyond Blue & Graphite. Before Mac OS X was even final preliminary docs were showing sliders in other shades, iCal uses other shades too... why can't we just do that in the system? We've never not had accent color support since Macs adopted color in the System software in 1990.

Smart folders are overdue. More than "Finder History" we to have accidentally messed up icon arrangement as Undoable operations. Windows has had that since '95. Since the OS X Finder is such an unstable turd, this is pretty important to help user sanity. Another thing to help user sanity is being able to access View Options in the toolbar's shortcut menu without having to deselect everything.

I know Steve hates them but give me back pop-up windows in the Finder and let me have a Finder with a toolbar and no damn forced metal appearance just like I happily had in Jaguar.

[iNeusch]

Originally posted by dru:
You'll never know which is at 11% unless there's only one operation. Adding another badge for each operation would get unusable very quickly.

Still pretty useful to know you're 11% done on your 124 current operations

[voodoo]

Wow, I'd really lika Apple to change copy/paste for files to pickup/drop. It makes sense! Leave copy/paste for something you DO copy paste like pictures and text. Copy/pasting files makes me feel my Finder is a paper doll.

[Meneldil]

One thing that's a little more specific, but on the topic of dialog boxes- I wish Safari displayed errors in the page, like IE on Windows does IIRC. Instead of popping up a little dialog box when I switch to the tab with a warning sign, just display what went wrong where the page should have been. Since my connection is slow and I always have many tabs open, I tend to get a lot of tabs that stop me when I'm flipping through with the keyboard.

I wouldn't mind the dialog balloons if you could turn them off, or perhaps set a duration. Aside from that, looks good. Smart folders would be incredible, even if they only had the functionality of iTunes smart playlists.

[Oneota]

Hmm...is one of the new features severe networking schizophrenia? If Tiger can't even get to http://www.apple.com/ after 60 seconds, I don't wanna touch it!

[Turias]

Originally posted by - - e r i k - -:
And this is any different from having all the apps jumping in line to get your attention?

It's not like all your apps suddenly craves your attention with a dialog box (which is what this system would latch on to), and if any app suddenly started to do it, it would quickly be shunned by mac users. Because you know, we just have lower tolerance for crap that most Windows-users.

I don't like the bouncing icons either. Ideally, if an app has an error I would like the app to beep and then overlay a little warning icon on one of the corners of that application's dock icon. That's much less obtrusive, in my opinion.

[Sven G]

Great Finder ideas: I only wish Apple would implement at least some of them in Tiger...

[- - e r i k - -]

Originally posted by Turias:
I don't like the bouncing icons either. Ideally, if an app has an error I would like the app to beep and then overlay a little warning icon on one of the corners of that application's dock icon. That's much less obtrusive, in my opinion.

Yes. In YOUR opinion. In my world, anything that makes a sound is obtrusive. The general system beep says absolutely nothing and no matter what sound you switch it to, it's either too high, too low, too annoying or too unobstrusive. In short, it hardly conveys any information, and when it does it's generally doing it in an annoying way. And to put any badge in my overcrowded dock is futile. I can't even see anything resembling numbers on my Mail-badge.

[Turias]

Originally posted by - - e r i k - -:
Yes. In YOUR opinion. In my world, anything that makes a sound is obtrusive. The general system beep says absolutely nothing and no matter what sound you switch it to, it's either too high, too low, too annoying or too unobstrusive. In short, it hardly conveys any information, and when it does it's generally doing it in an annoying way. And to put any badge in my overcrowded dock is futile. I can't even see anything resembling numbers on my Mail-badge.

This is a message board. I'm just stating my opinion, as are you. No need to get touchy.

[- - e r i k - -]

Originally posted by Turias:
This is a message board. I'm just stating my opinion, as are you.

Yes, that was my point