I HATE APPLE

Tracer you could take the files you need to use a lot and make aliases of them in the dock and use that but after a while that gets ugly and confusing too.

My main problem here, which I will reiterate again because, you know, spotlight and dashboard (uh didn't Windows try to do this integrated embedded browser/"active desktop" thing too? Dashboard, I mean. Wasn't that, uh, a problem?) will not fix my problem with OSX: they've taken some integral functionality features, "petty" ones or not petty ones, and removed them to give the user less ability to customize their computer. SEE ALSO: MICROSOFT, A FEW YEARS AGO BEFORE DOJ STEPPED IN AND SUDDENLY THEY MADE THEMSELVES A BIT MORE MAC LIKE. I'm going to pick again on the simple cosmetic issues because it seems to be the only thing that I can get people to agree on, without a judgement call as to whether or not xyz would use this feature, has definitely changed from previous versions of the OS to now. Adding a feature like that--and the slew of far more useful customization features that came with it--was like an integral part of why the OS was so great. You could make it react exactly how you wanted it to without having to use command line not-exactly-hacks of the system or third-party programs that don't always work. This wasn't a feature that caused any drain of the system and it wasn't a bug that needed to be fixed due to instability or computer-destruction issues. It was a feature that a lot of people liked. So why get rid of it? Why is Steve Jobs being quoted as saying customization is dead and why are they forcing people to use exactly this theme?

I absolutely, without reservations, despise Helvetica and Lucida Grande. A lot of people don't. On my old Mac, I deleted those fonts. I can't do that now. That was my very first, quiet disappointment when I opened up my iBook. Going to system preferences and realizing this system preference no longer existed. Yeah, this is a minor issue but it goes along with about 20 bigger issues of things I used to do a lot on my old Macs to customize programs and the way it reacted to certain things that seem to require a rather obtuse level of hoop jumping to get to now.

So basically, what I am asking here is why? Why have these features, which were a really large bonus of previous systems and features that are slowly being added to other OSes, been removed from OSX? Mac was a pioneer in this department--why are they going backwards, why are they going cagey and proprietarial and territorial, and what does this say for future developments?

No one ever wants to answer this question for me at all, but I think it is a perfectly decent question to ask. These features were NOT system drains. They did NOT cause computer/OS instability. They were GOOD. Why do they no longer exist?

If I could get a good reason as to why the system is becoming more dictatorial and less user-trusting, that might change my mind. As far as I can see though there isn't a good reason for this.

Spotlight looks fantastic, but I'm wondering if it would be a serious resource hog.

They should have implemented this already. I think it's a great idea.

Ally, where you and I differ; I have a T-Shirt with the slogan 'USE HELVETICA' on it, although Johnston would be better than Lucida grande which is an unpleasant font I'll grant you.

I'm kind of in love with this "Hollywood Hills" truetype I downloaded but strictly because it makes all my official documents really amusing and stupid looking.

Johnston and Gill Sans are superior and more beautiful sans serif fonts but helvetica has it's place.

Haha Tom, that's what I loved about the old easy switcheroo font crap on Mac, you could make, like Budmo Juggler your default list-view font, it was hilarious.

I would like to know what the name of the font used for place names on french 1:25000 maps is called. See bottom right of the above image.

You know what I hate though? Optima. Can't say why, exactly. It's the "Joy of Sex" font, and the "Planned Parenthood" font, and I can't look at the shampoo bottle in my shower now without being reminded of either those awful nude sex illustrations from the 70's or birth control.

Probably not as much as people are fearing. Basically, Spotlight is a front end to Tiger's database file system which allows for files to have metadata tags. It's very similar to the file system used in BeOS. Quoting from that article:

For the everyday user, though, BFS has much more tangible advantages. Any file or file type on a BFS volume can have arrays of metadata associated with it, in the form of "attributes." There is no limit to the amount, size, or type of attributes, and attributes can be displayed and edited, sifted, sorted, and queried for directly in the Tracker (Be's equivalent of the Finder). Because most attributes are indexed, search results are nearly instantaneous, regardless the size of the volume or the number of files being searched through. By default, BeOS ships with reasonable sets of attributes for common file types, but users are allowed to extend and customize these, and to create entirely new file types with entirely new arrays of attributes. In other words, the Be File System doubles as a database.

Users can use built-in filetypes with existing attributes, or create entirely new filetypes with custom collections of attributes. These files were used to deliver a dynamic web site out of the BFS database without using 3rd-party database software.

It is difficult to describe to users of other operating systems just how advantageous an operating system built on top of a virtual database can be. Only other BeOS users really seem to understand the power and flexibility of the database-like file system, and it is the single feature I miss the most from BeOS.

Copy your MP3 files' ID3 tags to Artist, Title, Year, Genre attributes. Sift and sort through your collection in the Tracker in almost anyway imaginable, or build playlists from MP3 attribute queries with far more flexibility than you get in other OSes.

BeMail messages store Subject, From, To, CC:, Date, etc. in attributes. Create virtual mailboxes based on live, instantaneous query results. This lets you obtain views of your email store that are irrespective of the actual folder locations of BeMail messages on disk.

Years ago, I created a custom file type based on text, with attributes for author, title, email, URL, etc. Then I wrote a CGI script in perl to extract and dish up these attributes over the web. In other words, I was serving up a database-backed web site without having to install or learn any database software whatsoever. That site now runs on LAMP, but you can see how the site was created here.

The OS-level metatags in BeOS was really really cool and I can't wait to see how it's implemented in Tiger.

xpost

I'm intrigued by the legal difference between Johnston and Gill Sans. Transport For London still claims ownership of Johnston and, especially, New Johnston - does the Strategic Rail Authority have any rights over Gill Sans?

I'm intrigued by the legal difference between Johnston and Gill Sans. Transport For London still claims ownership of Johnston and, especially, New Johnston - does the Strategic Rail Authority have any rights over Gill Sans?

Definately Original Johnston. I believe on Johnston the copyright has lapsed, Johnston himself having died more than 70 years ago but I don't know if a font can be trademarked as an entity in itself or whether it is is just the usage (Roundel, signage, map styles etc.) that is trademarked. I believe that New Johnston is under copyright and the move to new johnston was as much about having an important part of the coporate identity under copyright as improving clarity.

I shall persuade Ambrose to ask his Dad who knows about thses things.

As for Gill Sans, it's not been used on the railways for years. I'm not sure what is the type face is nowadays but it's not proper Gill Sans nowadays.

(*somewhere* I have a 1970-something issue of Modern Railways magazine with a "Ten years of the Design Panel" article)

* this may not have been what it was actually called - I'm sure it was Corporate Something, though.