Ben Michael Ward is a Web Developer in San Francisco.

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Leopard Wish #1

So, Apple have previewed Mac OSX Leopard. I can’t say I was blown away by the WWDC keynote, but everything there was interesting enough: The implementation of virtual desktop is gorgeous, iChat 4 looks very cool (although I continue to dislike the chat bubbles) and Time Machine might just bring backups to all (if Apple start shipping redundant hard discs as standard… which they might, I suppose). OK, so the new Mail.app templates are shite, looking like a car crash between iWeb and Outlook Express (and not of the chocolate and peanut butter kind). In fact, that seemed remarkably consumer-centric for a developers conference but otherwise all is good.

I’ve actually been far more interested in the less visual enhancements: Tasks being moved into a centralised service for Mail.app and iCal (and anything else) to share, a central feeds service (ala the RSS Platform in Windows Vista, I presume) might mean we don’t have to manually subscribe to Podcasts in iTunes anymore if it could just query a central repository for music enclosures (and likewise for pictures in iPhoto).

Tonight, I read through Impulsive Highlighters, a blog full of leaked Leopard screenshots. Lots to appreciate on the evolutionary side of things. Particularly, I noticed this (screenshot from Impulsive Highlighters):

The Trash folder in Leopard now has a kind of ‘infobar’ including a nice clear ‘empty trash’ button

This kind of ‘info bar’ UI is very appealing indeed, and I would love to see it used to fix one of my pet-hates with OSX: Application installation.

Yes, you read that right. Installing Applications in OSX is so elegant and smooth it is near theraputic. Drag, drop, run. It’s a thing of pure UI beauty. Except, not everyone copes so well with drag-and-drop. Sure, the percentage of Mac users is higher by far (since they’re trained in a world where drag and drop actually works reliably) but I wouldn’t fancy telling my Gran to do that. And I would have loved for her to have a Mac rather than a Dell. Ditto my parents.

The use of D&D as a primary means of user interaction is odd generally. Normally it is in addition to something else, a means of intuitively bypassing button and click based interaction for those who want it. In all the recent discussion about drag-and-drop in web applications, it’s been emphasised a lot that you should not (nay, must not) use drag-and-drop in place of everything else. Your functionality must not depend on drag-and-drop since fundamentally it’s not accessible enough. Yet the glorious easy installation selling point of OSX breaks this rule (you can of course go Edit->Copy and then Paste into the destination, but I don’t consider that overly intuitive).

So, here’s a mock-up of what I’d like:

A Finder window containing an application displays a button labelled ‘Copy to Applications’

This ‘Copy to Applications’ button would be displayed at the top of any Finder window for any mounted Disk Image that contains an application. Not only does it make it very clear for less drag-and-drop trained users to install an application to their hard disc, it would make it even easier for existing users to install applications to the most common location.

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4 Responses to “Leopard Wish #1”

  1. Comment by Lisa McMillan

    August 27th, 2006 at 6:56 pm

    That copy to applications idea is really smart. I’ve always wondered how such an obvious flaw in interface design got passed the apple design team. I hope they see your post.

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  2. Comment by Lisa McMillan

    August 27th, 2006 at 6:57 pm

    Erm. Passed = past. grrr.

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  3. Comment by Ben O’Neill

    September 3rd, 2006 at 9:07 pm

    I never did quite understand why you’re forced to copy the program as a way of installing it

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  4. Comment by Ben

    September 3rd, 2006 at 11:11 pm

    Well, it’s kinda logical and simple really. Rather than an ‘application’ being an incredibly complex system requiring a step-by-step process to make it usable on your system (as in the Windows world), OSX applications are contained in their .app packages and can just be run, as is, from anywhere. They can be moved around at will too (most of them, anyway).

    You can generally run an application direct from the Disc Image (.dmg) download if you wish, but of course to use it regularly it needs to be copied to a permanent location like /Applications.

    I guess the word ‘Installation’ in the context of .app’s shipped in disc images is somewhat inaccurate (OSX does of course have a dedicated ‘Installer’ application for more complex software), but the concept of ’copying Applications’ is so simple just because an ‘application’ in OSX is better designed and more robust than a folder full of files in Windows (although, outside of the OSX Aqua UI, a .app is just a folder full of files, but handled with great grace).

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