Saturday, December 5, 2009

OSX 10.6: Finder FIXED! I weep with joy.

A while back I lamented how awful the 10.5 (and previous) Finders were. I complained that Apple was leaving out all sorts of long-overdue improvements and basic features that Windows had possessed for years.

Well, I just installed 10.6 yesterday, and looking through the New Features list, I'm suprised that several of my prayers have actually been answered. Not all of them, and not all are in perhaps the best way possible, but they're there. I think I need a moment alone...

Well let's go through them, shall we?

1)Restore deleted items to original folders.
Items in Trash now have a "Put Back" option, which works the same as "Restore" in Windows.

2)More reliable disk eject.

System services such as Spotlight indexing and file system events will intelligently stop their work so you can remove your drive. And improved dialogs tell you which applications are using the drive so you know what to close in order to safely disconnect your drive.

3)Change search locations.

One of those things that makes you say "Well, it's better than nothing." You can change Spotlight to have it search the currently selected folder by default. But you can't have it search by Filename by default. Say whaaaaaaa...?

4+) There's plenty more, but that's it for the Finder fixes.

Other ones are:

Quicker Time Machine backups, Faster wake/sleep, writing Chinese on the trackpad, PDF text selection that works across columns, Boot Camp support for HFS+, configurable grace period for screen locking,