Why is it so hard for Microsoft (or an enterprising Windows developer) to create a useful freaking date/time display? It looks there won’t be one in Windows 7 either. I’ve had one on my Mac (provided by a third party) and Linux (built right in) machines for a long time now. It just shouldn’t be that difficult, you know? Is Microsoft making it difficult?
I can’t believe there’s no audience for this.
And, just to be fair in my critique, it looks like Windows 7 might also fix one of my long, long, long, long time annoyances with Windows itself – its system tray.
By default, new tray icons are hidden and invisible; the icons are only displayed if explicitly enabled.
I’ve moved off of Windows as a day-to-day platform and don’t plan to return, but these are big steps toward a decent user experience. Kudos to Microsoft for really considering that aspect and working to improve it.
One thing I’ve never gotten used to, or learned to like, with Mac is its inconsistent and inexplicable approach to window sizing.
Microsoft took the time to explain some new features of Windows 7 to us. There have been a couple of user interface enhancements. You can now resize Windows by dragging them to edges of the screen. Top to maximize, bottom to minimize and dragging to the left or right automatically resizes to half the display. If you’re comparing documents side by side you can just move the documents to the left- and right-hand sides to automatically fit both on the screen.
I really like the the approach Microsoft is trying to take and, from the description, the gesture seems perfectly intuitive. The optimist in me feels sure that Apple can see the benefit of consistent, intuitive and just plain sane window sizing. Can’t they?
Gizmodo has its own review of the Windows 7 UI improvements including a video showing the new window resizing feature in action.
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve noticed something about how I’ve organized my desktop: it no longer includes a taskbar. And, although it’s one of those computing metaphors that been around forever and seems timeless, obvious and necessary, I don’t miss it at all. In fact, I really like not having it around.
The taskbar, as it exists by default (but with variances) in each of the three operating systems that people talk about when they talk about operating systems, exists to serve three primary purposes:
What I’ve gradually realized is that the only capability I really need and use is the notification area. The other two concerns are better handled, I think, in other ways.
In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll admit that I keep this functionality around on my desktop, but only in the interest of fallback. Except in the case of emergency, I used a third party key-based application launcher that is unobtrusive and more productive for me. My choices: Quicksilver (Mac), GNOME Do (Linux) and Launchy (Windows).
There’s no escaping the fact that a few key taps is easier and faster than wading through layers of nested menus.
The window manager is the visual metaphor that indicates which applications are running and/or which windows of a given application are open. On Mac, this is a function of the dock, on Linux it’s a panel accoutrement that can be added or removed like every other panel option and on Windows it’s that middle area of the taskbar between the Start button and the system tray (now called the notification area). But why do we need it?
Once I noticed that I’d effectively removed it from my consciousness, I started thinking about why. The fact is that I already know what windows are open when I need to know. At any given time, only one window is, and can be, active. If I need another application or window, I use the keyboard-based task switcher to access that application or window. On a Mac, that’s Cmd+Tab to switch applications and Cmd+` to switch between windows of the active application. On Windows and Linux, Alt+Tab does both. In order to switch tasks, the task switcher includes a display of the other applications or windows that are open.
In my mind, the only time I need to know what other applications and windows are available to me are when I no longer want the one that’s currently active. At that time, I’m using the task switcher anyway, so the constant visual cue on the taskbar is actually just visual clutter.
Unfortunately, removing the window manager and application launcher isn’t possible on Windows, but I no longer use Windows on a regular basis and it is possible, at least superficially, on both Mac and Linux.
Mac separates the three purposes of the taskbar nicely for me. The application launcher and window manager are contained within its dock while the notification area exists on the menu bar. I can’t remove the dock without doing some potentially detrimental system-level hacking, but I’ve set it to auto-hide and moved it to the left of my desktop where I’m less likely to hover over it and make it display. Although it’s still around and available, I haven’t used the dock in a very long time.
Linux, or more accurately, the Gnome desktop environment that I prefer, does an even better job of separating these concerns. Gnome uses a panel metaphor on which the user can place different functional components. My desktop includes a single panel at the top of my screen that looks a lot like my Mac menu bar. It contains my application launcher – as I’ve admitted, I do keep it around just in case – and my notification area, but no window manager.
Not too long ago, I wrote about keeping Firefox sync’d across multiple machines using Dropbox. Now that I’ve used that system for going on two weeks, I feel like I can report that there’s nothing to report. By and large, things are running quite smoothly (since turning off Dropbox notifications). This morning, though, I did come across a gotcha that was a direct result of this profile sync’ing, so I thought I’d mention it and share the solution. Or at least a solution. There may be others.
This morning I tried to download something and couldn’t. I could click on it, I could even see the .part file appear in my downloads directory (~/Downloads for me), but that was it. Firefox seemed to create the partial download file and then stop. There was no error, no indication of anything afoul, just an aborted – and orphaned – download. My preferences all looked okay, so I rolled up my sleeves and ventured into about:config.
In about:config, I didn’t know what I was looking for so I did the obvious and typed “download” into the filter textbox. The only thing that looked odd in any way was that I had a preference named browser.download.lastDir (this may not be exactly right, after fixing the problem and before returning to write about it, the setting has disappeared) and the path it contained was a Windows path – the path to the downloads path I have set on the Windows box that shares this profile. I reset that value and tried my download again. This time it worked exactly as expected.
My guess is that the presence of backslashes in Windows paths throws the Unix-based Mac a curve ball it doesn’t know how to handle. Perhaps it’s treating the backslash (\) as an escape character in this context, but I don’t know that. I’m going to try turning off the download history retention on all of my machines to determine whether that makes any difference moving forward. I suspect it might. To do that, just open up Firefox’s Preferences, select the Privacy tab and uncheck Remember what I’ve downloaded.
