Please Mr Jobs

Not much to ask. Ring Tim and get him on it.

Get It Try It

Please Mr Jobs! Before your new Snow Leopard is released, please make sure a few things are taken care of. This is a relatively short list so it shouldn't be that difficult.

Thanks so much.

1. Don't mess around with file permissions. If a file is not writable then say so. Don't try to circumvent speed bumps in the system that are there for a very good reason.

2. Don't move files from temporary locations to their final destination. Copy them. And only if you know the copy operation worked and the copy is identical to the temporary then delete the original.

3. Don't tell me a file has been modified on disk when it hasn't. Stop overloading ordinary applications with loopy change notifications. Keep the processing power for what it's intended and needed.

4. Please get someone to fix the ailing NSTableView. That poor thing is asthmatic, down for the count, and could soon become unusable. See to it your programmers stop playing leapfrog with the message queue. One message per thread processed at a time, thank you.

5. Speed a few things back up to where they were before Leopard. Kludges include Terminal and the NSTextView control.

6. Put full file permissions back in your interface. No one is ever going to take your Finder seriously (and word has it you don't either) but not allowing ordinary users to set executable bits and sticky bits and set ID bits is downright ridiculous.

7. Make sure your Finder doesn't drop its .DS_Store do-do on network shares by default. Go one better: see it doesn't drop this crap at all.

8. Fix your file copying primitives and don't read everything into memory and start deleting disk files before you know - absolutely know - your operations completed successfully. Failing at major file ops only makes you look like a bunch of ninnies.

9. Stop the Automator hysteria. Your people today have enough silly Automator files on an average system to fill a minor external device when all that's really needed are ordinary Unix shell scripts. If you insist on keeping Automator then see the design people come up with something a lot better.

10. Cut down on window shadow. We all know it's a three dimensional interface. Don't get obscene and obnoxious about it. And they still haven't cracked the 'shadow additive bug'. With all the people you got working there someone has got to be able to find a way around it.

11. Do something about /home and /net. Most of your users aren't even aware of their existence but we are. And we seriously have to wonder what your coders are up to.

12. Stop putting temporary files in a gazillion locations. You've got a good half dozen already. You don't need these. Your frameworks create new cache directories for applications that are never used.

13. See your IDE doesn't throw an exception when it can't create a directory it knows it's not going to use.

14. Speed up the startup and first run of Xcode.

15. See Xcode works better for batch build projects.

16. Figure out how to use vector graphics for icons.

17. Make 'Finder' an option on the dock.

That's all. Thanks so much. Get well soon.