Please. Fix. That.

Mac OS X Software Update: Installing 6 items

UPDATE: Fixed! As of Mac OS X 10.8, Software Update is no more and has been replaced with the App Store which doesn't have this particular flaw.

If I've learned one thing in 25 years of computing, it's that you can't trust a progress bar when installing software. I appreciate the complexity around that problem. But this needs to be fixed:

As you can see here, the installation is all but finished, but the dialog is still showing that it is installing 6 items. Instead, it should be indicating the number of items that are left to install, updating the display as it goes.

What's particularly frustrating about this is that the Finder gets this right. When you are copying or deleting files, the Finder displays a progress bar but also displays a count of the files that are left to be processed. As files are being copied or deleted, that number ticks down to zero. Why Software Update doesn't repeat that pattern puzzles me. There's no chance I'm going to trust that progress bar, so it should least indicate the number of packages left to install.

Mobile Safari and the auto-opening bookmarks menu

Update: Fixed in iOS 7.

If you use Mobile Safari a lot on your iPhone or iPod touch, you may have experienced this one.

After closing all of your open sites, Mobile Safari leaves you with a blank, "Untitled" view. Now, click the home button to leave Safari. Now, relaunch Safari. Instead of just displaying that same "Untitled" view, it loads up your list of bookmarks. Now, that might be helpful to someone, but for me, I always end up tapping the "Done" button to dismiss my bookmarks, because inevitably, I already have a site or web search in mind, and it isn't in my bookmarks. Rather than tap the "Done" button every time this happens, I'd rather tap the bookmarks button on the off-chance that I do want to use my bookmarks.

Perhaps another way to fix this is to have the bookmarks display, but show not completely hide the address and search field. That might be a little too cluttered, though. Suppressing the bookmarks list is probably the better approach. It's notable that this is not the behavior for Safari for iPad, which behaves and looks more like Safari on a Mac.

If you too are annoyed by this, I do have one workaround to share for this. You can create a home screen icon for the address "about:blank" (just type that into the address bar, then use the middle toolbar button at the bottom of the screen to create a home screen icon for it). This icon will cause Safari to always launch and display a blank page.

 

Safari's broken cookie table

Update: Fixed, I guess? Safari 5.1 greatly simplified this view. It no longer shows detailed cookie data. This table simply lists the domains and the fact that cookies exist. If you remove cookies for that domain, you are removing all of them; you can't delete individual name/value pair. But, the design problem has been addressed, and this information is accessible in the Safari Web Inspector.

Safari (5.0.3 currently) is my preferred browser, but I loathe the interface for managing cookies. I hope you have a wide display so you can see the contents of the entire cookie value. Maybe you can use this as an excuse to get that 30" monitor.

Lots of issues here:

• There's no way to copy the value of a cookie to the clipboard.
• You can't even see the entire cookie value in some cases.
• Some cookies will expire when the browser is closed (a session cookie) and this list doesn't indicate that.
• There's no way to restrict the search field to only search the domain, path, cookie name or cookie value field.

Firefox (3.6.10 at the time of this writing) gets most of these issues right, except that really long cookie values are cut off (however, you can highlight the it to copy it to the clipboard and see the entire string that way).

Chrome (version 10, sorry... 11, now — I'm on the dev channel for Chrome) has a web-based UI for preferences, and the cookie management view is a little odd: if you have lots of cookies — and who doesn't — you select one to view, then scroll waaaay down the page to view the detail for it. But, it does let you see the whole cookie value there, and that value can be copied if you want it.

 

There is a workaround for some of the Safari issues. If you've enabled Safari's "Develop" menu (which you can turn on from the "Advanced" tab of Safari's preferences), you can view the Web Inspector, which opens up a pane at the bottom of Safari that shows lots of things about the site you're on. One of the tabs in that panel is labeled "Storage". Within that, you'll be able to inspect the cookies that are active for that specific web page and domain you're visiting. This view still suffers from the problem of trying to show the cookie value within a column, but each value can be selected and copied to the clipboard. It also tells you if the cookie will expire with the session (meaning, when the browser is closed). I just wish these improvements were available in the other view of cookies, and thus accessible to all without having to enable a developer feature. Granted, most users do not need to delve into their bag of browser cookies, but you must admit that the existing dialog is pretty poorly designed.

iTunes Store featured album navigation

Update: Fixed as of iTunes 11, which changed the featured item presentation entirely.

This is a minor nit, but one that has been bugging me for years. When you open the iTunes Store, you're greeted with a panel at the top that rotates through some of the featured albums or applications (this is now repeated in the Mac App Store and iPad App Store). The problem I have with it is that it only lets you scroll this list one way. Here's the button they give you to view the next thing (Mac App Store UI pictured here, but it's the same problem):

When you use that button, the thing at the bottom scrolls off and moves to the big panel on the left. Or, if you just sit there, it does that itself after a few seconds. But there is NO WAY TO MAKE IT GO IN REVERSE. So, if your eye catches a glimpse of something you find interesting on the big panel but it swaps out with the next thing before you can click on it, you have to sit there and wait for it to roll around again. Or click-click-click the little down button to get back to it.

Now, Apple could fix this by adding an up button to the top right panel. That seems like a small thing to ask. One teensy extra button? Oh — right. Apple has a thing about extra buttons.

This bad apple in the iOS App Store

This isn't a software bug, but a process bug. There's an app in the App Store called "All Phone Tracker Real Spy HD". This app claims to "Locate any phone in the world, on any network, anywhere in the world on iPhone/iPod/iPad". Sounds great, but it's completely fraudulent to claim such a thing. Yet, somehow, this app has managed to evade the iOS App Store police.

Worse, right this moment, it sits at pretty high on the App Store's Top-Grossing chart (minutes before this screen shot was taken, it was #12):

Perhaps it is top-grossing partly due to selling a few copies at a new price of $449.99 (it had been priced at $0.99).

And somehow, this app has managed to get 20 5-star ratings since releasing version 1.0.1, an update summarized as "BUG FIXED."

I'm afraid that simply being listed on that chart is drawing extra attention and maybe there are just that many iPad users who are willing to spend $449 at the drop of a hat?

This app is a total scam (the 60 1-star ratings and negative reviews of the 1.0 release make that plain). It is in the "Entertainment" category, but claims it works ("WE GUARANTEE 100%"). Please Apple, remove this thing from the App Store and ban "Bendary" as an iOS developer.

Also, Apple shouldn't allow App Store submissions that specify an "App Support" URL of "www.Apple.com".

UPDATE: It's been less than 30 minutes since publishing this post and the app's price is back down to $0.99. The developer must really be having fun gaming the system. And now there are 50 5-star ratings.

Photoshop's stretched drop-down control

If you use Photoshop (CS5 pictured), you may have seen this one, found in several places in the Layer Style dialog:

Man, is that ugly. Much has been written about Adobe's love for home-grown UI controls. You'd think someone at Adobe would be on the ball about glaring things like this, but nope — it's been this way for years.

Flickr and self-favoriting

I've been a Flickr user for years and love the service, but if I could be the Flickr product manager for a day, I'd fix this:

I can't favorite my own photos. And you can't favorite your own photos. There is no technical reason for this. Flickr has simply decided that a user cannot favorite their own pictures, and that is that.

"Oh, silly user -- you can just make a set and put your favorite pictures in that!" No. It's not the same thing. When other people view my favorite pictures under my profile, I want them to see all of my favorite pictures on Flickr, even if some of them happen to be my own pictures. No, I don't want to futz around with photo set management to corral my own pictures into a "Favorites" set. I want to click that little star button and mark it as a favorite.

Another problem with the "just use a set" solution is that Flickr doesn't let me put other people's photos into a set. So that won't let me combine favorites from my photos and from others into a common place either.

Mac OS X screen grab coordinate bug

UPDATE: Fixed in OS X Mountain Lion (10.8).

Hey, this may be an educational post for some. When you press "Cmd+Shift+4", Mac OS X will enter into a screen grab mode, where you can select a rectangular area of the screen. The cursor changes to a crosshair and then you click and hold to begin selecting, drag the cursor to select the area you want to capture and finally release the mouse/trackpad button to capture it. The resulting image is saved to your desktop.

When you first hit "Cmd+Shift+4", the cursor shows a pair of numbers which are screen coordinates of the cursor's position. The top one is the X coordinate in pixels, relative to the left of the screen. The bottom one is the Y coordinate, relative to the top of the screen.

Then, while you are holding down the button, the cursor shows a different pair of numbers. These are the size of the region you are selecting, in pixels. The top one is the width of the region and the bottom one is the height. But, sometimes those numbers change back to the screen coordinates of the cursor. Therein lies the usability problem. Observe the behavior:

Now if you're trying to grab an area of the screen of an exact size, like 100x100 or something, having the size of the region toggle like this is extremely annoying. Oh, and I have further discovered that this seems to only be happening with the MacBook trackpad. This doesn't seem to happen when selecting the area with a mouse.

This is something I fight with for each screen shot I take for this blog, so keep that in mind, won't you?

Apple Mail's column headings

Update: Somewhat fixed in Apple Mail with Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion). The new default view of messages doesn't have these columns but, the "Classic Layout" option will display them, and the unread column is no longer sizeable. The attachment column still is, but that's forgivable since it does contain text (I suppose someone out there likes to see that count). So, I'll call this fixed.

The message listing in Apple Mail has a few columns for showing things like: whether a message is flagged or not ("Flags" column), whether it is unread ("Message Status" column) and whether it has attachments ("Attachments" column). The first of these cannot be resized, but the latter two can. This is unhelpful:

There's no need to display the number of attachments — most of the time it is misleading because often they're just images that are part of some email signature or something. But the point is, no one needs to resize these columns... they should just be fixed-width, like the "Flags" column is.

 

iPad App Store showcase navigation

Noted on November 17, 2011 that these panels now support swipe gestures and the arrow buttons are no more. There are some lingering arrow buttons on search result pages, but those should be replaced in the near future as well.

It strikes me as odd that the iPad App Store relies on good old-fashioned buttons to scroll through pages of applications. It'd be a little more forgivable if touch-and-slide worked in addition to the buttons, but nope!