Snow Leopard: Top Seven Grievances

Snow Leopard is a different kind of beast for Apple. Previous Mac OS X releases have focused on adding new features to the operating system. Past releases have given us features like Spotlight, Time Machine, QuickLook, Expose, and more. WIth Snow Leopard, Apple decided to take a feature “time out”, and instead focus on performance, underlying plumbing, and usability tweaks to more than 90% of the apps that make up Mac OS X.

Apple has done a terrific job with Snow Leopard. However, there are still annoyances that make me scratch my head and wonder “Why hasn’t Apple fixed this?”. Here’s a list of said issues.

• Desktops & Screensavers. Want a solid color for your desktop background? Apple has a few for you to choose from. Want a color that’s not on the menu? Better get out your favorite image editor and create it, because Apple still hasn’t given you the ability to select a custom color for a background image. Sure, you can create one and export it as a JPG, TIFF or PNG. But come on Apple – you have the Color Picker at your disposal. Allowing users to select a custom color would have taken all of 20 lines of code to enable.
• Finder Preferences, Color Labels. Again, here is another instance where 20 lines of code would have given users the ability to set their own custom color for Finder labels. Instead were stuck with the same 7 colors Apple deems appropriate to be displayed on your Finder items.
• FTP in the Finder. Still. Broken. Sure, you can mount FTP volumes in the Finder, but you can’t write to them. It’s 2009. 8 years after Mac OS X was birthed, and this is still broken. Can someone tell me why you can mount and view an FTP volume, but not write to it? It makes no sense to me.
• Finder Sidebar. You still can’t rearrange the order of the main top level categories of Devices, Shared Items, Places, and Search for.
• Mac OS X Help. Still exists as a floating Window above all other windows. I understand wanting the Help window to be easy to find among all your other windows, but if I click another on another window behind the Help window, I expect that window to come to the fore front.
• iChat. Still no unified Chat window when using different chat protocols/accounts. This is the one feature that keeps me using Adium. I want one window for all my buddy lists, not one for each protocol.
• Sound/Sound Effects. We’re still using the same notification sounds that shipped with Mac OS X back in 2001. Many of these are the same sounds that shipped with Mac OS 9 and earlier. Apple produces two of the coolest sound editing/creation apps with Soundtrack Pro and Logic. Would it have killed them to refresh the system alert sounds?

So, in my quest to write a “Top 10 Snow Leopard Grievances” article, I could only come up with seven. I think that speaks volumes about how polished Snow Leopard is. Although I’ve been a huge supporter of every Mac OS X release to date, I can honestly say, this one is the most polished operating system releases by any company producing said product.

Category: Opinion