Mac OS X 'Panther': User at the Center 550
MatthewRothenberg writes "Over at eWEEK, we believe we've got the drop on the much-discussed interface enhancements to Mac OS X 10.3, a k a Panther: The theme of this September release will be 'User at the Center,' an umbrella term for a variety of new features aimed at leapfrogging Microsoft when it comes to pervasive, user-focused computing. Niceties include user-configurable 'piles,' a fast-user-switching-type feature, and easy transferral of home directories among devices and the Web. Oh, and it's mo' definitely 64-bit-complete, too."
OS X is based on BSD and BSD rules! (Score:4, Funny)
You just can't take Linux [redhat.com] seriously when its fronted by losers [nylug.org] like these. You Linux groupies need to find some sexy girls like her [hope-2000.org]! I mean just look at this girl [madchat.org]! Doesn't she [madchat.org] make you hard? I know this little hottie [madchat.org] floats my boat! This guy looks like he is about to cream his pants standing next to such a fox [spilth.org]. As you can see, no man can resist this sexy [spilth.org] little cock teaser [spilth.org]. Even this old bearded Unix guru is apparently unable to take his eyes off her [spilth.org]!
Join the campaign for more cute [madchat.org] open source babes [madchat.org] today!
Re:OS X is based on BSD and BSD rules! (Score:5, Funny)
You forgot the best one! [madchat.org], definitely not your average teenage chick celebrity [wemakedotcoms.com].
::fumbles OS X in a frenzied rush to BSD::
mirror (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, dear. Looks like I'll have to mirror the original [virginia.edu].
heh.
Re:mirror (Score:3, Funny)
OS X is based on BSD and BSD is dying! (Score:3, Funny)
</SarcasticTroll>
Re:OS X is based on BSD and BSD rules! (Score:4, Funny)
Did he say... (Score:3, Funny)
I'm not touching those things.....
Yuck!
drop, what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Leapfrogging? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to troll, but if they're thinking they can leapfrog with user switching and roaming home directories, they need to jump a lot higher than that. User switching came with XP, and roaming home directories has been in since 2000. My home directory syncs automatically between my desktop & laptop & other home workstation, and it's been brain-free for years with Windows 2000 Server.
Re:Leapfrogging? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Leapfrogging? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Leapfrogging? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well maybe not better by nerd standards. Better in the sense that a lot more of the user base actually finds the feature understandable and easy enough to actually use instead of being one of those wierd "did you know?" features of windows that only nerds use.
Actually I hope they hide the feature away in some rarely-looked at place. Your average user who doesn't know the difference between a document and a program certainly doesn't know the difference between logging out and logging out while leaving applications running. I mean just think of the people who have come to you and said "mydocument is gone!" because it no longer appeared in the "recently used" list.
Re:Leapfrogging? (Score:5, Insightful)
Whoah there buddy. Is that really necessary?
And I use "did you know" with my Mac users far more often than I do with my Windows users.
I agree that most computer users don't know what they are doing, regardless of platform. But there's no use in denying that when Apple does something they usually don't bother until/unless they have made it highly accessible to novices. Take DV editing. Sure you could do it before, but it was so complicated that almost nobody did. Now it's different.
And why would you want them to hide a wonderful feature?
Primarily because I have no desire to field the support calls from people who need to be told that their computer is slower today because their son logged out leaving a Quake III server running. Because most people will not understand the consequences of this feature.
calling OS X new and original is a load of crap. It's new to the Mac hardware, but it's all old ideas.
Well I'd say the main "new" thing about OS X is the fact that nobody has ever had a unix GUI worth a damn before. That's new enough.
Re:Leapfrogging? (Score:5, Interesting)
OS X - Yeah it's cool, but it's not that cool. And besides, most of the features Apple is putting in OS X are things Microsoft did with Windows many years ago. That's not to say Windows is some amazing product, but calling OS X new and original is a load of crap. It's new to the Mac hardware, but it's all old ideas.
No, you're wrong. Mac OS X is much more than the sum of its parts. You can compare feature lists and say smart-sounding things, but if you have truly used both Mac OS X and MS Windows you don't defend MS Windows after that. It's like when you hear someone say that Hitler built good roads, it is easy to point out that good roads or not, that doesn't make up for the other stuff. It's not a question of politics or opinion, but just that people don't go "Hitler ... good roads". You have to ignore so many deal-breaker features of MS Windows (no security, no reliability) to point out "you could do feature Y on Windows two years ago". Who cares? Not Mac OS X users. Truly, we don't care. We have the best of everything with very few exceptions and it's cheap ($999 iBook, $1299 flat-panel iMac) and the stuff you can do is next-generation not because it's possible for a geek to do it but because everyone can do it. A whole range of things that you can't do with MS Windows without someone to hand-hold it and clean its viruses and update its miserable design flaws and workaround its broken features and battle installation-entropy.
Also, the creative media tools on MS Windows are crap. Even where there are ports of Mac titles, the ports are missing professional features in many, many cases. And adding hardware or software is a misery, so the fact is that people don't use as many tools on their MS Windows systems unless they have a full-time computer geek to play roulette with DOS day by day. As I said, you can compare this stuff on paper and it looks OK, but it's not the same at all in the real world.
Re:Leapfrogging? (Score:2)
If Apple really want's to get a leg up on Microsoft, all they need to do is make competant software that makes my life better. Unfortunately publicly traded companies seem to be nigh incompetant in this area.
Linux is probably our only real hope for free computing. Someday anyway.
Re:Leapfrogging? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Leapfrogging? (Score:4, Interesting)
As of Logic 6, there is a new "project" file format for Logic which is the same old file, but sitting in a standard folder structure with folders for audio files, plug-in settings and such always in the same place. In 10.3 these project folders could easily be represented as a single document, or as a single item with child items.
Suitcases? It's the 21st century, man. Suitcases are early 1990's Mac platform stuff ported badly to MS Windows and repurposed as a way to sync two folders. The history of bundles is all Mac and NeXT. On the old Mac OS they were forked files with "resources" stored in the resource fork. On NeXT they were folders that appeared to be single icons most of the time, and that's how they work on Mac OS X.
Speaking of syncronization, that's what this article is about, too. Mac OS X will sync your contacts and such across your phone, PDA, iPod, and their Web services. Now they are adding the whole home folder, basically.
All the tech for this stuff is already in Mac OS X. They are in a phase now where they are just building on the solid foundation that they worked so hard on for the past five years. They don't have to do a bunch of hacking and trickery to make a UI feature like this happen. It makes sense along with other features, like the way you can easily manipulate disk images in Mac OS X, even encrypted ones, even your grandmother. The whole platform gets better because when they build a feature in they do it right and then it is a problem that's taken care of. We all build on top of it.
Apple's software is the best desktop software there is. This is widely, widely accepted in the industry. People buy Macs often to run just one great app, like iPhoto or Final Cut Pro or Logic or Pro Tools, and that software is so good, so perfectly realized, so easy to use, so reliable, it's worth getting the Mac just for that. The creative tools are a generation and sometimes two ahead of what's on MS Windows.
Re:Leapfrogging? (Score:5, Insightful)
> leapfrog with user switching and roaming home
> directories, they need to jump a lot higher than
> that. User switching came with XP, and roaming
> home directories has been in since 2000. My home
> directory syncs automatically between my desktop
> laptop & other home workstation, and it's been
> brain-free for years with Windows 2000 Server.
Not to troll, but NFS has been letting my home directory roam from station to station since it made it out of the lab at Sun in 1984.
Thanks to Google:
http://classes.csumb.edu/CST/CST434-01/w
But you are correct. Fast user switching and roaming home directories do not an intuitive desktop make. (Actually, that sounds like UNIX, cerca 1984. But I digress.)
The point the eWeek writer was trying (badly) to make is that Apple is rumored to be implementing the foundations of intuitive, pervasive computing that Microsoft is likely to shoehorn into Longhorn.
From Microsoft's perspective, computer's always existed as disconnected nodes, hence their late (and rather loud) entry into all things internet-enabled. (Speaking of which, naming something ".Net" was the epitomy of this internet obsession that is Microsoft's reaction to how they missed the burgeoning of the internet and allowed someone else - Netscape - to challenge their strangle hold on personal computing. But I digress again.)
So, in Microsoft's mind, the only way to have "pervasive" computing is to extend the PC experience, so that your PC can follow you around. Its not so much that data lives on the network (as a properly NFSed or even better, AFSed, network might work on a corporate plant site), but that your data will follow you around from PC to PC, if you so choose.
Apple, by way of its BSD folk, understands that this is silly, and that data should just live on the network, hence iDisk is a main selling point of
Apple also understands that whatever decision Microsoft makes, it will be held liable in the court of public tech opinion if it doesn't do it the same way.
So, this is just a long way of saying that what the eWeek write meant to say is that Apple is going to implement a boat load of stuff that Microsoft is planning for Longhorn, so as to make those "features" a moot point.
Re:Leapfrogging? (Score:3, Interesting)
Would you like my 3B2?
http://unixpc.taronga.com/
Re:Leapfrogging? (Score:5, Informative)
To have a roaming profile, what MS calls roaming home directory, you must authenticate into a domain and have a domain controller available. This is fine in a corporate environment, but most Windows users (other than my esteemed colleagues here on Slashdot) wouldn't know what those terms mean, let alone how to implement them. Then there is the matter of how roaming profiles are actually implemented. When you log onto a system, your home directory, preferences, registry settings, and everything else that makes up your profile is copied from a Windows share to your local host. And when you log off, it is copied back to that share. Notice, I didn't say changes were copied. That's right Sparky, the WHOLE thing gets copied back to the server. And the next time you log on, it does it all over again. Now considering how things like Outlook OST files tend to get large, or as we in the industry like to say, "F*$&@%G HUGE", that means that you get to slog this data back and forth across your network each time a user logs on/off their system. Now, do that for a 5000 user company. Have fun.
So, apple has the opportunity here to do it MUCH better. After all, when you only have to aim as high as "I think I'll just copy everything on my computer every time I log on/off", its pretty easy. So yeah, maybe they will "leapfrog".
- Peace
Roming Home Directories (Score:4, Interesting)
Each of the client machines in my office are essentially identical. Users sign on and their l/p are authenticated against our Xserve, their home directory (plus appropriate groups, etc) are mounted locally, and they go about their work. Everything runs out of their account on the server. We mount via AFP, but we could do NFS if we opted.
Users have no idea that they aren't working locally until they need to walk up to some other machine, log in, and everything is exactly the same. Users can run multiple sessions from their account as well. Network traffic isn't too bad since it's generally only reading config files and prefs and hitting the server on demand.
BTW, this is a pretty straightforward setup on OS X Server. If the server is on your subnet (mine isn't) then you hang the entire thing off of DHCP - plug in a brand new machine out of the box and you can hit your user account with no configuration. That's cool...
Cat got your tongue? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Cat got your tongue? (Score:4, Funny)
Re: Cat got your tongue? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Cat got your tongue? (Score:3, Funny)
As well as leopard, nittany lion, bobcat, and lynx...and the lambs and sloths and carp and anchovies and orangutans and breakfast cereals and fruit bats and large chu--
Re: Cat got your tongue? (Score:5, Funny)
Rumour has it they will really emphasise the lickable interface and of course change the color of all the buttons to pink. Since Steve Jobs announced this year as "The year of the laptop" for Apple, the ad slogan will be "Put a Pussy on your lap for the greatest user experience yet."
They'll also announce that the new 64-bit processor designed to run this OS is not the long-awaited G5 but instead the relatively unknown G-Spot manufactured by Cervix...errr, I mean Cyrix.
How sexy does Longhorn sound now? I expect a doubling of Apple's market share in 3 months after release.
Re: Cat got your tongue? (Score:3, Funny)
Doubling after release? I think you meant before. ;)
-1 Offtopic, +1 FunnyPanth-ire? (Score:5, Funny)
Panzer (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Panzer (Score:4, Funny)
"Panza vill roll over ze enemy, and crush it!"
Re:Panth-ire? (Score:3, Funny)
But will Steve even be heard form behind the bullet proof glass, needed for when he announces there is no 970 for Apple, and Moto have a neat new chip out?
Piles (Score:2, Funny)
Holy Unavoidable Lawsuit Batman! (Score:3, Funny)
They might actually be able to meet the demand by now.
hm? (Score:5, Insightful)
Keeping copies of your home directory on the web at the moment would seem to me impractical as many/most 'home users' still use a 56k modem which would make synchronisation of anything more than your office documents a bit of a joke.
Once you have broadband then you encounter the problem of web storage and assosiated costs. Most providers won't let you host illegal files to cover their own arses, and more than a few hundred MB is rare on most traditional web hosting packages. I see a market for a premium file mirroring monopoly here, jump onboard before AOL takes over!
Re:hm? (Score:5, Insightful)
on another note, has anybody else noticed how much
Re:hm? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the reason /. is reporting Apple news a lot is that all the /. crew bought powerbooks and have become born-again Mac users ;-)
Re:hm? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Apple platform has made more progress in the past two years than MS Windows has made in the last eight years since Windows 95. The Mac stopped crashing altogether, is UNIX-compatible, Java2 with all the trimmings, an updated API and a new object-oriented API, next-generation graphics system and so much more, while you can receive an email and lose your MS Windows system at any time. From top to bottom the Windows platform looks like a joke right now after all these years of "it will be stable soon". Remember when they delayed Windows 2000 and left out features just to "concentrate on fixing bugs and improving reliability" because people were demanding it. Now, a really advanced user can set up a halfway-decent Windows XP machine, but even they can't get close to the quality of a Mac, and for regular users, they are in a completely different world if they get a Gateway instead of an iMac as far as what they can do with it, and what they will have to do to admin it (almost nothing for the iMac, even adding hardware and apps is dead easy, just drag and drop at the most, and often it just works even without that.
Easy (Score:3, Informative)
One word: rsync [anu.edu.au].
-Waldo Jaquith
Re:hm? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:hm? (Score:2)
Gee, if only Apple [mac.com] had thought about doing that...
Re:hm? (Score:4, Interesting)
Piles (Score:5, Interesting)
This seems like an awesome UI concept, and one which will (Once again) put the Mac GUI head and shoulders above the rest.
Re:Piles (Score:2)
Piles vs. Folders (Score:5, Interesting)
So I did a quick search for piles, and just about every article I read echoed this one [macpronews.com]. So, basically piles are folders (directories) that are non-nestable.
About the only use I can see for this feature is that it will help certain users who are fuzzy on how folder hierarchies are supposed to work...but heck, if that makes the user's computing experience all the more rich and it keeps people like my mother from calling me asking how to find her documents, why not?
Has anybody else reached a different conclusion than I have?
-AP
My understanding is that piles don't... (Score:5, Informative)
replace folders - they are strictly an organizational metaphor, nothing to do with how files are actaully stashed away.
Re:My understanding is that piles don't... (Score:3, Insightful)
OF COURSE it's an organizational metaphor. What on a GUI screen isn't? The only question is whether it's more or less useful than other metaphors for more or less humans.
Orthogonal, baby! (Score:4, Informative)
Also, you can browse through your pile effectively, and you can tell by looking at the pile roughly how much stuff is in it, and possibly (it's been talked about) how old it is or how long since it's been touched by how much dust and spider web it's collected.
A lot of people are excited by this and have talked about it for a long time, so I hope it will be good. Only actual use will tell though.
Re:Piles (Score:5, Informative)
"Apple holds a patent on this one. Developed by Gitta Salomon and her team close to a decade ago, a pile is a loose grouping of documents. Its visual representation is an overlay of all the documents within the pile, one on top of the other, rotated to varying degrees. In other words, a pile on the desktop looked just like a pile on your real desktop.
To view the documents within the pile, you clicked on the top of the pile and drew the mouse up the screen. As you did so, one document after another would appear as a thumbnail next to the pile. When you found the one you were looking for, you would release the mouse and the current document would open.
Piles, unlike today's folders, gave you a lot of hints as to their contents. You could judge the number of documents in the pile by its height. You could judge its composition very rapidly by pulling through it."
Re:Piles (Score:5, Informative)
Not Piles, Stacks! (Score:4, Funny)
I would prefer to call piles "stacks." It sounds neater.
You could put all kinds of content in them, including pictures, text, sounds, video, user-programmable buttons, etc. And you could link items to other items in the same stack--or even items in different stacks! And if you could attach some sort of script to any item in a stack, that would be hyper cool!
I know... I know... that idea's waaaay too far ahead of its time.
piles (Score:3, Funny)
Piles? (Score:4, Insightful)
I must have missed the "much-discussed" piles conecpt on
How does this differ from a hierarchical filing system? Aren't my directories "piles of related documents"? Does ths just automate filing by indexing the content or am I missing something?
Re:Piles? (Score:5, Informative)
http://homepage.mac.com/rdas7/piles.html
OS X Icons (Score:4, Informative)
That stuff about the home folder (Score:2)
Re:That stuff about the home folder (Score:3, Informative)
> switch our home folder to a different partition or disk.
That's already easy... simplistic even. It's the first thing I did when I switched to OS X, actually. Two commands in the terminal, and you're all set:
mv
ln -s
I don't remember if you have to log out and back in for this to take. I did it as root from the console just to be sure. But in any event, you're all set. If you wa
'Panther' retires Sherlock (Score:5, Funny)
here is a preview [bka.net] of their new ad campaign.
(credit where due: my friend andy is a hopeless mac addict with apparently too much time on his hands, this is his handiwork)
---
^nA - my daily illustrations [creaturesinmyhead.com]
The question I can't find an answer to anywhere... (Score:5, Interesting)
Will we get to upgrade for free? Or is this our yearly $100 for an OS upgrade? Why not just have people who know they will want to upgrade subscribe to the OS (say, at a reduced rate maybe)?
Re:The question I can't find an answer to anywhere (Score:2)
How come people always want things for free? What's the deal? Sometimes I think that people's adversion to capitalism hurts companies worse then Microsoft's anti-trust violations.
-BrentRe:The question I can't find an answer to anywhere (Score:2)
Don'tcha think you jumped the gun a bit?
He didn't say free. He offered to pay a subscription. He wanted a little discount for being a loyal customer. It's a common thing these days.
Re:The question I can't find an answer to anywhere (Score:3, Informative)
10% speed improvement. It's also 10% faster than the almost identical code running
on Windows and Mac OS9. Again, this was free for the download. Plus, nothing
(at least for me) broke after the upgrade unlike countless Windows updates I've
done through the years. It's also packaged cleanly; a couple clicks, wait a little bit,
and everything works better. Paying $120 a year for Apple's diligence is a bargain.
It also appears that Appl
Re:The question I can't find an answer to anywhere (Score:3, Insightful)
How do you know if you're going to want to upgrade? If it comes out and it's worth $129 to you, buy it (for $79 or $99 from Amazon, of course); if it's not worth it, or especially if it sucks, don't upgrade - your computer will still work fine, and they'll keep releasing the security patches you need for quite a while.
Piles system (Score:2, Interesting)
Thought it was totally innovative, and a very cool way to classify documents, something like a crude version of the OS seen in Minority Report (why do all of the video clips in the future have to be all flickery and dark though?). I'm not sure if I would use it, but props to Apple for innovation.
Of course if you want to use this OS you will have to shell out $100 to upgrade
Re:Piles system (Score:5, Informative)
I actually think Apple's switched to a new version numbering sceme: 10.x.x. The 10 is constant (a marketing number basically), and the x.x is the 'real' version number.
So basically the current version is 2.5, and Panther is version 3.0.
damn rumormongers (Score:2, Insightful)
And if they don't, why it'll be Apple "failed" to ship them.
Isn't there a cull on journalists sometime?
Culling journalists (Score:3, Funny)
It's "slow" for a reason (Score:3, Interesting)
The biggest thing that helps Windows' speed is the registry. It's basically a database and so it's faster in searching for settings and library links. However, there are two big problems with the registry that in my opinion do not offset its speed advantage. First, the registry slows down a lot as it grows and software is installed and removed. After a certain size, the registry actually makes things slower. Second, anyone who's used Regclean knows that it is almost NEVER in a clean state and eventually program installations get corrupted, "cruft factor" sets in, and people concede it's time to reinstall. You don't have this problem in OSX.
Re:It's "slow" for a reason (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It's "slow" for a reason (Score:3, Insightful)
An analogy is that you could watch a 2-hour movie in 1:45 if you took out all the wipe transitions and just went boom, boom, boom between scenes. Technically this is faster, but it is not better. The way MS Windows is doing its display and
Re:It's "slow" for a reason (Score:3, Interesting)
So a lot of these benchmark suites have built-in assumptions that show when they test Mac OS X. They may simulate hitting a database for 1000 32k chunks
Re:It's "slow" for a reason (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, searching thru 10 megs of data for the registry is definately going to be slower than reading and parsing a 2k text file, especially if you're actually using all the info in the text config file.
A more likely explaination of why Windows GUI apps are faster is because of how GDI resources work. All th
well it seems like Apple understands what PC means (Score:2)
Hype? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Yeah, it's got this feature and this one too...and it's gonna whoop up on Longhorn! Woohoo!"
Other than a feature list, which can be found in many other places, and some that aren't confirmed yet, this look like hype to me with little to back it up...
New Journaling System (Score:5, Informative)
Re:New Journaling System (Score:5, Informative)
Re:New Journaling System (Score:4, Informative)
Replace "/" with other volumes (/Volumes/foo/ and /Volumes/bar/ for example) if you have them on your system.
Other info on Panther (Score:4, Insightful)
Piles = Spatial Browser improvement? (Score:3, Insightful)
I want to remind people to check out this article [arstechnica.com] as well, and keep this in mind as you hear about possible new features.
live views? (Score:3, Interesting)
iTunes has this (Smart Playlists), and I'm quite smitten by it, and I'd like to see something similar rolled out across the UI (and, possibly, done as a framework for other apps to hook into).
Combined with 'piles', you could have your smart pile of apps, pile of word docs, pile of porn divx, etc.. Makes some sense to me..
Longhorn Lead Time (Score:5, Funny)
Sources said Longhorn should reach users by early 2005.
Panther must be jam-packed with OS goodness if it's going to take Microsoft more than a year to rip off the feature set!
Leapfrog? (Score:5, Funny)
OS X font smoothing kicks `Cleartype`s ass (Score:3, Insightful)
.:diatonic:.
Re:OS X font smoothing kicks `Cleartype`s ass (Score:3, Informative)
Re:OS X font smoothing kicks `Cleartype`s ass (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Will Font Smoothing be less horrid? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Will Font Smoothing be less horrid? (Score:5, Informative)
I wondered if that was the case. (Score:2)
I will note, however, that when I checked in stores the newer PBs weren't exactly beautiful to me. Then again, I am an old, old Mac fan dating back to 1987, so to me small, clear screen fonts like Geneva are best. Maybe the young'uns like their text fuzzy, I don't know.
I only wish we had the level of control over text in X that we did in 9. If you want to use Geneva/Chicago and NEVER smooth, this should be a choice! But not even TinkerTool makes this happen.
Re:Will Font Smoothing be less horrid? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If so, that's really bad. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Will Font Smoothing be less horrid? (Score:4, Informative)
1. Add RAM.
2. Newer, faster HDD.
3. Add RAM.
4. The dock settings:
Shrink the dock down as small as you can, and still use it.
Magnification off
Possition whatever you like.
Minimize using Scale Effect.
Uncheck Animate opening applications.
Uncheck Automaticly hide and show the dock.
5. Did I mention add RAM.
This is what I did to my 266Mhz Wallstreet, 192Meg RAM, 20 Gig HDD, and it is quite useable. A little slow opening apps, but quite useable otherwise.
With all the Dock eye candy turned on, it was unusable.
No wonder it's horrid... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Will Font Smoothing be less horrid? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Funny)
Those fascists.
Re:What should be improved to beat others (Score:3, Insightful)
Please. The sooner OS9 is forgotten, the better. I understand that there are devices, and applications that haven't been brought forward - Quark for example, and many scanners and printers. That doesn't mean Apple should have to maintain one modern OS, and one legacy OS.
Microsoft doesn't support Win3.1 for a reason, you know. Granted MS did a better job of making printers and scanners work, but the point remains.
Re:What should be improved to beat others (Score:3, Informative)
Drag your "Applications" folder into the dock.
Click-and-hold for a second
Blammo, instant "Start Menu"...and you can do it for any folder you want.
Re:I just want... (Score:4, Insightful)
That said... maybe if you put it in as a feature request that could be activated as a system preference... well then you might just get somewhere. If you're not snide about these things, you just might find that they'll take you a bit more seriously.
And yes, i realize this was probably intended to be a humorous post, but even as a joke, there are probably people who seriously take such stupidly non-diplomatic approaches to dealing with Apple or any other software developer.
Re:I just want... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it can work! (Score:3)
Your major problem has already been addressed.
Simply predict where the cursor is going, if it's going to stop before it gets to the menu bar then switch, otherwise don't switch applications.
It's already done with menus (though it's just more of a delay than a prediction). Notice how you can switch from a menu to an item in a submenu and cross over the desktop yet the submenu doesn't disappear? That's the same technique that can be applied to the cursor follows mouse control.
Re:I just want... (Score:3)
Don't be so depressed, the problem that the poster mentioned isn't really a problem at all [slashdot.org]. :-)
Re:People are too stupid for new file management (Score:4, Insightful)