9 Windows Features MacOS X Can Probably Do Without

The Apple Blog has a list of Windows’ features it figures Apple ought to add into Leopard or some other future version of the OS. It’s a follow-up to 10 Classic Features to ‘Bring Back’ to OS X which as the title suggests features from Classic MacOS that OSX needs to have back. The latter is a far better list of wants than the former.

Cut and Paste from the Finder? Awesome, it’s called drag and drop and has been there for a really long time. Switchers find drag and drop to be somewhat awkward but TAB doesn’t bother giving a justification for adding cut and paste. The default drag and drop behavior on Windows is to copy files so cut and paste makes sense as an outlier need. The opposite is the case on the Mac so there’s little need to duplicate the default drag behavior with a menu item and shortcut key. System Restore? It’s called Archive and Install from a Mac’s recovery disk. Not only does it preserve user information and move the old OS to the side but it also installs based on a known good configuration, i.e. the system’s original restore image.

An application uninstaller is also a fifth wheel on the Mac. The best applications support drag and drop installs. Having an uninstaller in the system would give third parties less of an incentive to bundle their apps properly. Application resource removers do have their utility but developers (including Apple) really ought to take advantage of bundles and the “Shared Frameworks” bundle resource. I don’t think an installer would help matters much.

Requests like window resizing and refresh buttons don’t make a lot of sense. Window resizing works like it does on the Mac because it’s far more friendly to users than resize-from-anywhere on Windows’ windows. For one the Mac doesn’t need windows taking up all of the desktop real estate, you can either size them manually or use zoom to get windows as big as they need to be. Second, resize cursors are really annoying when you’ve got a lot of overlapping windows on the screen. Moving the cursor around a semi-crowded screen would see the cursor changing to resize arrows almost constantly. If you were trying to click next to an overlapped window you might end up inadvertently resizing a window instead of clicking a widget. Windows’ window resizing is not well thought out and fails far more often than OSX’s resize-from-the-corner resizing method.

The expanded Finder view options and individual folder sharing points are valid but aren’t necessarily deal breakers. Finder does have a pretty useful inspector window that can handle single and multiple file selections. The Get Info window shows pretty much the same information. As pointed out in the article the “More Info” bullet of the file inspector shows a fair bit of information. It’s not exactly Vista’s detail pane but gets the job done.

All in all I don’t think the list is all that useful. One of the last things Apple needs to do is make MacOS X more Windows-like. There’s some features in Windows that aren’t horrible ideas and others that are billiant ideas. However simply copy and paste jobs isn’t going to advance UI technology any. Nor is applying today’s technology to yesterday’s problems. An info pane could make good use of Spotlight’s existing metadata but it’s not the only way to expose it nor necessarily the best way. What data do you choose to show on such a pane? Do most users really care if a picture they downloaded off the web is RGB color space? Do they need to know? The seemingly simple answer is let users configure that pane. That ignores however that different metadata importers are going to store different bits of information about different file types. Third party file formats would need some mechanism to allow those third parties to extend the info pane to show information they think is important. That simple answer is no longer simple. A little creativity might find there’s a better solution to the problem of displaying metadata than just sticking it in a pane in a Finder window.