Much-desired feature finally restored to the Mac Finder

OS 9 had it, and Windows has always had it: the ability to select an item from the Trash, and restore it to its original location – wherever it was you originally deleted it from.

But for some reason, Apple dropped this incredibly useful functionality (along with window shades). Instead, you can only grab things out of the trash and move them manually to some other location. If you can’t remember where something was before you deleted it, you’re out of luck.

Good news: Reports are coming in that the next Mac OS version, 10.6 or “Snow Leopard,” will have a “put back” feature. This is really important for scenarios where a file you delete, accidentally or otherwise, needs to go right back to the exact same location where it started out.

The inability to do this has led a lot of users, myself included, to come up with clunky workarounds. For example, if I’m removing an application and its preference files, I end up creating a new folder on my desktop and re-creating the entire subdirectory scheme, moving elements manually into their appropriate folders. That way, I can delete the folder, knowing that if I drag the folder out of my trash back to my desktop at some point, I can figure out how to put things back together again.

If this feature makes it into Snow Leopard, that will be good news indeed – I can simply select a file in the trash, and click “restore” or “put back” or whatever Apple decides to call it, and have the file go back from whence it came.

Isn’t it stupid that this “feature” hasn’t been there all along?

6 Windows 7 Versions

We don’t know exactly when Windows 7 will be done, or what it will cost. But we do know that there will be six– yes, count ‘em – six different versions of Windows:

• Windows 7 Starter
• Windows 7 Home Premium
• Windows 7 Professional
• Windows 7 Enterprise
• Windows 7 Ultimate.
• Windows 7 Home Basic

Luckily for you, you only really need to worry about deciding between two of them, unless you run a business network of Windows computers.

Windows 7 Starter will most likely be available only via pre-install, from select manufacturers.  Windows 7 Enterprise and Ultimate are probably more than most “normal” users need. Windows 7 Home Basic is a stripped down version, which Microsoft says it will sell only to “emerging markets.” Meaning, mainly in second- and third-world countries, although not exclusively. Their list of emerging markets starts with Afghanastan and ends with Zimbabwe.

That leaves Windows 7 Home Premium and Windows 7 Professional. Pretty much the same split as with XP, where we have Windows XP Home and Windows XP Pro.

Microsoft will most definitely do a better job explaining the differences, at least if they’ve learned from their mistakes with Vista. Also, it’s important to note that you can actually upgrade to a higher level of Windows online – give MS your credit card, and you download whatever it is that turns one version into another. In other words, the core of all the various versions is identical, and all you need to do is unlock the additional functionality to upgrade.

ExtremeTech has a pretty decent, if not preliminary summary of the 6 versions of Windows 7. If your next new computer purchase happens when Windows 7 is the main offering, you might want to spend some time looking at the various versions and deciding ahead of time which is right for you.

In the XP days, I recommended that people buy the Pro version, even if it was for a home computer. It just made the computer more valuable on the used market, because Home was limited in what you could do in a multi-computer business network. Looks like the same advice may hold true for Windows 7.

What I wish were different about the Mac OS. And by different, I mean better.

There’s a derogatory term used on discussion forums for people who blindly support an operating system and poo-poo its shortcomings and weaknesses, despite all reasonable evidence to the contrary: Fanboy.

I’m no Apple fanboy. Yes, it’s my operating system of choice, and I recommend it to people whenever I can, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things about it that make me nuts. Now, I’m in “corporate IT guy mode” at the time of this writing, so I’m setting aside all the great things the Mac can do as a creative tool and focusing on the work-a-day aspects of it.

First-up: remote control. Quite frankly, Apple’s Remote Desktop feature is lame in many ways when compared to Microsoft’s remote desktop solution (based on the very mature and solid Terminal Services foundation). Apple RD is slow, allowing minimal customization of the remote view upon launch. You get a color slider, and that’s about it. Any adjustments you want to make to the remote GUI have to be done within the remote GUI. That’s absurd – why should I have to suffer through all those remote clicks and make trips to System Preferences? With a Microsoft RDC client, I can create a remote connection profile that specifies screen resolution, color depth, sound on/off, mapping local to remote drives, mapping printers, and more before I even connect. And the speed. Yikes. Microsoft’s RDC performs so well, sometimes I forget that I’m not actually at the computer I’m controlling.

Now, in fairness to Apple RD, it does do some things that Windows RDC doesn’t do. You can generate a variety of reports on remote systems, send application packages that automatically install software and reboot the remote system, and observe a remote desktop versus controlling it.  I just wish they’d fix the speed issue. It could be that part of that speed issue has to do with the Mac GUI itself. For example, there’s no way in OS X to turn off the fat, obnoxious drop shadows behind every window. Those drop shadows make remote control sessions slower, because the remote session has to draw that many more pixels.

Second – badly behaving network shares. Maybe this one should be first. Connect to a share on your network so that the remote volume mounts on your desktop. “Family Room iMac” for example. Fine. Now, go shut down Family Room iMac, return to your computer, and you’ve got about an 80-90% chance of staring at the bouncing beach ball for 2 minutes the first time you open a Finder window or click on the desktop (tip: force-quit the Finder to get out of this situation). Even if you don’t try to access that now-closed share. That’s ridiculous for an operating system with Unix underpinnings. Windows doesn’t do that. A Windows share does nothing at all until you double-click on its icon. And then, Windows just says “nope, that share’s not here” and lets you go about your business.

You can imagine how this little problem becomes a big problem in an office environment with 20 or more Macs connecting to each other, off and on all day. Invariably, somebody you’re connected to via sharing shuts down and goes home for the day whilst you’re still working. Grrrr.

Third – Apple really needs to fix the shortcomings of the Finder. There’s even a phrase that’s been coined for this desire: “FTFF.”  You can figure out what the abbreviation stands for, ha ha.

Sometimes when I have to spend all day working on a Windows system, I realize just how much better of a workhorse Windows Explorer can be. The Finder just has too many maddening little quirks that surface after hours and hours of heavy lifting.

For example, one thing I can’t stand is that if select a bunch of files from one folder, and drag to copy to another drive or folder, and one of those files can’t be copied for some reason (it’s corrupt, or has a bad filename, whatever) THE WHOLE OPERATION TANKS. On Windows, you’ll get an alert about each and every file that can’t be copied, and you can decide to continue the operation with the rest of the files or cancel.

There are tons of other Finder “issues” – so many, that there’s a software company out there who’s main product, "Pathfinder,” is meant as a Finder substitute. I’ve purchased and used Pathfinder in the past, and always end up disabling it after a few months because of its system overhead and quirkiness. But I see that they’ve got a brand-new version out, so maybe I’ll give it another shot. I do miss its tabbed Finder windows and ability to customize all text and icons with OSX.

And finally, peer to peer file sharing on a network, with trusted computers set up with shares which everybody should be able to read and write to, is NOT as simple as it should be. In fact, it’s downright maddening. In this case, Apple technology does NOT “just work.” It’s not the Apple way. It’s more like the “obscure Linux way” or something. I’m sorry, but Windows NTFS settings for permissions and file shares are much, much easier for me to work with.

I can imagine how somebody with less experience might go mad trying to sort out peer-to-peer sharing. I have issues on my company’s network with shared folders that I’ve never, ever been able to figure out, and believe me I’ve tried. Sometimes they work for one user, but not for another with the exact same setup. Sometimes you have to authenticate when you want to put a file into a Mac share that’s explicitly set to be wide-open. Other times, you have to enter a password to copy, move, or even open files ON YOUR OWN HARD DRIVE if somebody else put them there via file sharing.

How about you? Where do you think Apple could make improvements to its operating system – whether compared to Windows or not?

"OS Rot" - Like vulgarity, it's hard to define. But you know it when you see it.

I don’t think there’s a single Windows-using tech support customer of mine out there who hasn’t heard me talk about Windows “OS Rot.” I’ve even blabbed about it in other blog posts.

There’s a great piece by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at ZDNet called “Windows Bit-Rot: Fact or Fiction?”  He takes a look at whether OS Rot is real, imagined, or mainly just used as a way to justify getting a bigger-better-faster new PC.

Turns out the debate can really come down to semantics. Yes, if you install tons of badly-behaving applications over the years, uninstall things, and generally junk up your computer, it will get slower and less reliable. But some would argue, that’s not really the operating system’s fault per se.

Anyways, check out the article and the discussion thread that follows it. Some good reading for computer nerds to be sure. However you define it and determine what causes it, the results are the same: if you actually USE your Windows computer, it will eventually start to slow down. The only way it stays as fast as the day you took it out of the box is if you don’t use it.

And by and large, in my experience this simply does not happen on OSX. Maybe the upcoming Windows 7 operating system will make bit-rot a thing of the past. I’m not betting on it though.