"Find a way to give us back the capability to it a document to a specific application so that when a person tries to open a document it opens in the correct application." -- Richard Meyeroff
"It blows me away that still today there is no option built in to right click on an image file and from the contextual menu choose to set that image as your desktop folder. This seems to incredible obvious and blatant. I found a cmm plug in to do it, but this simple thing should be built in." -- Gary in Arvada
"As a designer on the Mac I often find myself working on a piece that folds, and many times a one section needs to be upside down to be in the proper position. While it's not that hard to rotate the artwork, there is always a chance that you might miss something when rotating and have to reprint a job... Why not have a built in rotate option that flips the display in 90º increments and even changes the mouse/arrow keys while rotated. " -- Doug Birli
And to put all our eggs in a basket, I'm rounded up all the previous suggestions:
"Print from the Finder, for heaven's sake. This ability used to be there, but now it's gone." -- Harry MacDougald
"How about the true resolution independence, and ZFS featured in early descriptions of 10.6? Yes, I know that Apple has officially killed ZFS and wants to write their own file system. I'd still like to see them adopt a standard directory structure that has had some serious development history to it and continues to have good support and ongoing development, along with some really great features.
"And while not part of OS X directly, Apple needs a real networkable media player application independent of what's on the Apple TV hardware. One that can officially run on any Mac (a mini to Mac Pro) and compete with MS media center. Perhaps it could be a version of iTunes optimized for playback across multiple devices.
"Regardless of the player limitations, iTunes also needs improvement for working with large diverse media libraries. It needs speed, AND feature enhancements. Just take a look at all of the workarounds that have been created with Applescripts and third party apps/add-ons for
iTunes. That should tell you something about the missing capabilities. I would pay for a seriously enhanced iTunes (iTunes PRO?)." -- Parr Crone
"It would be nice to have a 'coordinate locator' for the cursor tip, perhaps from the upper left corner. This would be of great aid in setting up macros needing mouse clicks.
"Very often, as when closing a page in a word processor, one is offered two buttons, one of which is the default (SAVE), which is activated by the RETURN and ENTER keys, and the other its contrary (DON'T SAVE), and perhaps a third button also (CANCEL). Could there not be an 'alternative default,' say OPTION-RETURN, etc. for the contrary, just as the OPTION-DELETE turns a backward delete into a forward delete, or two alternative defaults, adding say CONTROL-RETURN for the Cancel function?
"Time after time I see a NEXT button on a web page, and have to go to click on it to continue. Some way to avoid mousing around to this button, with some sort of search function to locate the Next button and keyboard way to click on it, would be most useful." -- Dr. A. N. Feldzamen
"Constancy in the way the Finder highlights the parent folder in column view. If the parent folder has a color label, it is highlighted with a circle around the little arrow. The fill color of the circle is the color of the color label.
If the parent folder has **no** label color assigned to it, it is highlighted **without** a circle around the little arrow. In this case there should be a white circle in the highlight bar. This would not only make the highlight behave constantly, but make it much easier to see which is the parent folder. Which is the parent folder containing the files in the rightmost column? You actually have to look for the square edges to see which is which." --
James Udo
"I would like to see the incredibly elusive feature of being able to right-click to rename a file. Nothing is more frustrating than sloooooowly double-clicking a file to rename it, just to have it launch on the second click. The anger builds as it is relaunched several times in subsequent attempts to rename the file. And speaking of that, isn't it about time that a right-click, cut function be placed? Windows had this eons ago." -- Bill Buchanan
"I'd love to have something -- widget, menu bar display, whatever -- that could show the user in real time what was happening behind the scenes with their computer. I have MenuMeters installed, and after a boot up when the Finder is launched and it settles into its working mode, you can see the disk activity arrows flashing like crazy and the CPU percentage indicators busy in the 80-90% range, etc. In plain English, I'd like to know what the heck is going on!" -- Dave Atkinson
Brad Chatellier wants to see the the Labels feature in the Finder expanded. Currently it's limited to seven colors, whose names can't be changed. Chatellier would like to see an option for unlimited labels, with a color wheel to set their color, and the ability to rename them to anything you like (like for organizing my movie collection by genre).
"This would be further augmented by adding customizable columns in the Finder’s List View where we are currently limited to Size, Kind, Version, Label (just one label column), Dates modified and created, and Comments," he says. "I want the equivalent of multiple (endless) customizable Comments columns, where all sorts of metadata can be stored. In effect I think I’d like to see a more iTunes like interface come to the Finder to help organize all of the music, movies, and photos we all use at the Finder level. Also, I also think these columns should be prioritizable for sort purposes. For example, at the moment, in iTunes, if you click on the Artist colums, it automatically sorts those Artist’s albums alphabetically. What if I want to sort them by chronology next? So I think you should be able to drag a priority #1 to Artist, then a #2 to Year, a #3 to whatever."
Peter Wilson says he doesn'tt know how inexperienced computer users ever get their heads around copying files from one folder to another -- creating a second window, navigating to both source and destination folders, and then dragging files from one to the other. He'd love to see a "Shelf" in Finder windows, Ã la Cocoatech's "Path Finder" Finder replacement app.
"With a shelf, they can at least work in one window, and do the task sequentially: drag the file(s) to be moved to a little 'Shelf' area in the upper left of every Finder window (this doesn't move anything, but merely establishes a draggable proxy that won't get lost)," he says. "Then navigate that one window to the destination folder and drag from the Shelf to the destination."
Roger Waltes makes this suggestion: "Make the boot drive appear at the top right corner of the desktop like it always did before. These days if you boot from a drive other than the internal drive, it may appear anywhere on the desktop and you don't know what drive you booted from. When I do a backup I tell my backup software to boot from the backup drive to make sure I have a bootable backup. After rebooting, the backup drive is still right where it was before rebooting so I can't tell if it's the boot drive!"
Jorg Weijers thinks the Mac OS should have a security feature that could be triggered if your laptop or desktop computer is stolen. He would also like to see some tweaks to the Finder column view. The column width should automatically adjust, so that ALL characters are visible in column at the longest word in the column list instead of making the column width larger by hand and Command+Alt+Shift.
"If you are working in list-view, and you want make an new folder within a open triangle folder, the new folder will be made in a level higher instead of the open triangle folder," Weijers says.
He also likes Pathfinder. In fact, Weijers thinks Apple should try and buy it.
And here were my original suggestions:
° The ability to rename, delete and trash folders from the Open and Save dialog boxes.
° External drive support. Wouldn't it be great if you could tote your entire user folder around easily on an external FireWire drive? And wouldn't it be even better if you could plug that drive into another Mac and log right in, just as if it were your own?
° The ability to control-click on the Trash and choose to only empty files from particular volume.
° Enhanced syncing between Macs. I do a lot of syncing files between my desktop and laptop Macs. The dialogue for replacing a file goes something like this: "An older file with the filename xx exists." This isn't very valuable information. What needs to be done is to take a page out of the Windows operating system and place both files on the screen, side-by-side, so that an accurate comparison can be made.
° An expanded Disk Utility that can optimize and defrag Mac volumes.
° Auto-font activation in FontBook.
° Receipts in Mail so you know when sent email has been read.
° Expand the Disk First Aid function of of the Disk utility so it repairs things outside the System folder.
° Restore the ability to double click a file and have the app used to create it open it. At least make this an option.
° Give the Finder a "memory," so when I go back to a particular folder it's still in list view (or however I left it) with the window size and column width adjustments I made. Don't forget everything every time I close a window.
° Bring back cmd+N for a new folder. Nobody EVER makes a new empty Finder window.
° Give me back hierarchical navigation of folders in the Dock.
° Give me back the applications menu and the ability to drop a folder in the Apple menu. This is a complicated beast and we need navigation aids!
