There was a stage during the development of Tiger where Apple had actually changed the behaviour of the Preview column in the Finder significantly, with full display of all kinds of tags beyond the basics (i.e. name, size, date created/modified). All the major tags of music files were displayed in the Preview column. That would have been a first step towards making the tags directly editable there.

Unfortunately, Apple backtracked later on and removed all this from the Finder. So now in Tiger the Preview column doesn’t even show the artist/title of a music file. You have to bring up the Get Info window for that. And of course none of it is editable except for the file name and Spotlight comments.

Yes, iTunes’ tag editing has some issues: the autocomplete text-case handling sucks, no doubt about it. And the modal dialog should give way to an inspector or drawer.

Simply put, it’s embarrassing. And this is just an example of a very common task that Mac OS X makes unnecessarily complicated.

(The downside, of course, to being willing to adopt new features quickly is that I can procrastinate indefinitely by dinking around the system going, “what else can this thing do?”)

I think the fact that virtual desktops are a power-user feature is a bit of a red herring, because I also think that, say, metadata editing in the Finder is a power user feature. Indeed, most of the enhancements that I can think of are power user features. (A big exception, in the metadata arena, is Web 2.0-style tagging in the Finder and Mail. Tags are a very simple subset of metadata, but something that people seem to grasp fairly easily.)

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind Apple giving it a try. I just do think it qualifies as a breakthrough of any kind.

I didn’t say that Pages was a revolution, only a (relative) breakthrough in that it finally provided a realistic alternative to MS Word, which has had a stranglehold on the Mac market for far too many years. In other words, it proved that it was possible to design a relatively feature-rich word processor without turning it into an unusable mess. (Pages does have some significant usability issues, but on the whole it’s an encouraging first step and has a remarkably clean interface.) Now if only Apple would move it further forward…

Basically, at this stage I would like to see some major usability improvements in Mac OS X. Instead, we’ll get Spotlight 2.0, with probably more of the same glaring UI atrocities, and some new features (Time Machine, Spaces) that will face significant implementation and adoption issues and add to the overall inconsistency of the Mac OS X experience.

To me, a real usability improvement (a breakthrough) would be something fabulously user-centric as opposed to application-centric. I am tired of having to deal with file extensions, of having to find out which application to use with which file, of seeing applications launch that I didn’t mean to launch, of having so little control over what does what and when.

For example, I find it absurd that, in order to be able to edit the ID3 tags of an MP3 file, if I don’t want to add the file to my iTunes library, I have to find a third-party tool to edit those tags. Why can’t I just edit those metadata tags in the Finder?

Now, I’m sure I’ll have pet peeves that remain unfixed. And probably every Mac user will find pet peeves that remain unfixed. But I do think that a lot of the upgrades in Leopard will be customer-driven.

I use QuickSilver instead of LaunchBar, but I do think it’s fantastic. I guess the main reason I don’t chalk it up as a real revolution is because its surface features were in LaunchBar first, so by the time I got hooked on QS it wasn’t so new any more :-)

Pages a revolution? Meh. It’s just a word processor… When it was just a rumor, i was hoping they’d produce something more semantic, like LyX done right. Instead, we merely got a good implementation of a consumer word proc.

There’s plenty they could and still may do with Pages; WordPerfect and Ami Pro are/were bursting with good ideas ripe for stealing.

Paul: thanks :). I don’t want to sound too pessimistic, and there is still lots of quality stuff coming from Cupertino, but I can’t help but feel that the pace of innovation has significantly dropped lately.

Dan: Latest breakthrough from Apple as far as I am concerned? Probably GarageBand 1.0. Putting all this music-making power in the hands of “ordinary” Mac users in a very affordable package and a very usable (if still imperfect) software application… Terrific stuff. Pages 1.0 was quite encouraging too, but unfortunately the product has stagnated since its original launch.

These were not huge breakthroughs, but they were breakthroughs just the same. GarageBand because it “democratized” music-making software. Pages because it provided some real competition for the MS Word monopoly. But there has been nothing of significance since then.

I’ve experienced bigger breakthroughs with third-party developers. One of the biggest as far as I am concerned is LaunchBar, because it’s user-centric rather than application-centric and lets you do so much with so few keystrokes. And while it’s been around for a while, Spell Catcher X in its Cocoa incarnation has proven more indispensable to me than ever as a professional writer.

Also, while Apple has been doing a lot of fine-tuning, it has also steadfastly refused to listen to customer feedback and add much-needed features or fix much-derided interface flaws. I mean, the whole Spotlight 1.0 interface is ridiculous, from the “search as you type” behaviour that wastes so much power doing completely useless searches to the moving targets of the search results list… And the lack of keyboard shortcuts for styles in Pages is unforgiveable.

What I would really like to see from Apple is a combination of real fine-tuning and real innovation. And, in that respect, what I have seen of Leopard so far disappoints me.

Looking over the last few years, there’ve been a multitude of small revolutions, things that have had a big day-to-day impact on how I interact with the system and that I don’t want to live without (Quicksilver, Spotlight, Dashboard, the Edit in TextMate input manager) — but I just don’t see a revolution waiting in the wings.

On the other hand, the dashboard style scroll bars shown in Mail’s new Notes type doesn’t give much hope for unification or consistency. :P (These are only briefly visible in the movie on the Mail page.)

I do think the iCal, Task and Notes improvements are especially important in combating MS Exchange and its stranglehold. A few years ago I knew several designers who moved away from the Mac specifically because of difficulties in working with Exchange’s calenders.

All in all, Leopard is actually looking pretty good to me compared to Tiger, which I sometimes view as mostly just Spotlight + Dashboard.

Dan: Disk space requirements would be a huge concern for me. I know several Mac users who’ve quickly run out of space on their laptop or iMac because of all the music and video files that they have accumulated (more or less legally). If Mac OS X 10.5 keeps a full copy of each original MP3 file even after you delete it or edit its ID3 tags, that’s going to add up very quickly. I am all for features that make people’s data safer, but the real breakthrough here would be a guarantee that you won’t lose anything if your hard drive fails. That would imply the inclusion of a second internal hard drive or some external device included with every Mac.

Spaces: We’ll see how it works in the real world. Exposé certainly didn’t change my computing life much. I occasionally use it, but the truth is that it took so long for Apple to come up with the feature that, by that time, I had already developed all kinds of habits to reduce window clutter, and Exposé certainly didn’t convince me to change all these habits overnight. I suspect the same kind of situation will happen with Spaces. Again, this is just my personal, subjective response. It could very well be that Spaces will help a lot of other Mac users reduce window clutter. It’s just probably not going to help me improve my computing experience much. So I am personally underwhelmed. That’s all.

iCal: It might be too early to call, but the signs sure are not good. We’ve been living with these flaws in iCal for years. During that time, Apple received more than enough bug reports from me and others. They clearly decided that the current interface was good enough. Maybe they’ll fine-tune the current interface in 10.5. But I certainly am not holding my breath.

As for notes and to-dos, again, I didn’t wait for Apple to come up with something in 10.5 to try and organize my own work. So for me personally I doubt that the new features will cause me to significantly change my work habits.

The bottom-line here is, as a Mac user, I am always hoping for new UI breakthroughs, for the “next big thing” that will really change the way we experience computing. So that’s why I am not particularly excited about 10.5.

Then again, as a MacInTouch reader noted, the one word that was conspicuously absent from Apple’s presentation was “Finder.” So maybe Apple does have one big ace up its sleeve that we don’t know about yet.

Re Time Machine: I don’t think you should underestimate the usefulness of protecting against accidental deletion (or accidental changes), but I’m concerned that the disk space requirements make incremental backup an overly expensive option for many users.

Spaces: no, it’s not revolutionary, but it’s a well integrated implementation of something that lots of people want. I think it’s a bit harsh to look at a clean, Apple-style implementation of a well-known concept and chastise them for “lack of imagination.” Apple’s imagination us Expose, and it’s even better than virtual desktops for many types of window clutter. Adding virtual desktops as an option doesn’t make them unimaginative, it just means this particular feature has been done before, many times, and lots of people have thought it through.

iCal: the main interface looks the same, but none of the fundamental flaws you describe in the linked article have anything to do with the main iCal window visible in the screenshot. They may have fixed some or all of them, and I think it’s too early to call it a loss.

Mail: the templates are a kiddie feature, certainly, but I don’t take issue with the Notes feature — I doubt it took that long to implement; it’s just a special message type and a Smart Folder for them, but providing some integration between notes and e-mail makes sense, and giving them a visually distinct look is nice in Exposé.

RSS support in Mail just makes sense, and it seems like it completes the cycle — use Safari for Live Bookmarks-style RSS usage, and Mail for subscriptions.

And to-dos: they’re manipulable from either Mail or iCal, and other applications will be able to tie into them as well. I think this will be fabulous — it doesn’t take much imagination to think of tying To-Dos to folders or files in Finder (or Path Finder, if Apple doesn’t do it); or to documents in Pages; or to users in Address Book — and then manage them centrally in iCal.

Speaking from Moscone Center West, I can assure you that you have a very fragmented picture of the whole.