Apple Peel

Mac OS X at Work - Part 4: The Need for a Decent “Recent” Feature

[PLEASE NOTE: This column also includes, as a postscript, a follow-up to my last column about AirPort range problems with the PowerBook G4. Click here to access the postscript directly.]

See also, Part One, Part Two, Part Three.

Several readers have responded to my last “Mac OS X at Work” column with constructive comments, for which I am, as always, very grateful.

The most obvious comment had to do with the apparent lack of a decent “Recent” feature in Mac OS X — i.e. something roughly equivalent to what has been available for years through third-party file navigation utilities such as Default Folder (a personal favourite). In my last column on Mac OS X, I deplored the lack of such a feature in the OS X Finder.

Several readers were quick to point out that OS X’s Finder does indeed include a “Recent” feature, in the form of a command called “Recent Folders” in the “Go” menu of the Finder menu bar. I am not sure how I missed this feature for so long, but I did. It probably has to do with the force of habit (there is no such menu item in the classic Mac OS Finder, which doesn’t have a “Go” menu) and I simply didn’t go looking for one. It might also have to do with the fact that menu performance under OS X is still fairly sluggish and this causes me, somewhat subconsciously, to avoid using menus at all unless I have to.

Regardless, now that I am aware of this menu item, I thought it would be appropriate to explore this issue of a decent “Recent” feature, and to try to better identify what Apple still needs to do to provide Mac OS X users with such a feature.

Three Facets of your “Recent” Work

Mac OS X’s current “Recent” feature operates in three significant ways. One is the “Recent Folders” menu item in the OS X Finder “Go” menu, which gives access to a sub-menu of the ten most recently used folders, sorted in alphabetical order. The second one appears in the “From:” pop-up menu in the “Open” dialog of Mac OS X applications and in the corresponding “Where:” pop-up menu in the “Save As…” dialog — in the form of a section of the pop-up menu titled (through a greyed-out menu item at the top of it) “Recent Places,” which lists recent locations that you’ve recently used (for opening or for saving files), in reverse chronological order. And then the third one is an menu item in Mac OS X’s Apple new menu, called “Recent Items,” which includes a subsection listing “Recent Applications” and another one listing “Recent Documents.” (Mac OS X also includes a “Recent Servers” list, accessible through the “Connect to Server…” command in the “Go” menu, but the user interface issues are the same, so I won’t dwell on that one.)

The first problem in this approach is that the “Recent Folders” in the Finder’s “Go” menu and the “Recent Places” in Open/Save dialog boxes don’t appear to have anything to do with each other. They are two different lists of locations, apparently managed independently from each other. Why is this problematic? Simply because it’s perfectly natural, for example, after you’ve saved a file from within, say, BBEdit, in location A, to want to access said location A in the Finder to make changes to the name of the file, move it to another location, etc. Right now, you simply cannot do this. You need to search manually for the location in your maze of files and folders, even though you probably just conducted the exact same manual search from within the “Save As…” dialog box in BBEdit. (Of course, using Mac OS X’s “Favorites” feature does alleviate the problem somewhat, but you simply cannot add all the potential destinations for your files to your “Favorites.” Unless your work is limited to a few, very repetitive tasks, you are very likely to have a great number of different files in a great number of different folders, and you can only use the “Favorites” feature to access those that you use more often.)

Similarly, the list of “Recent Documents” included in the “Recent Items” menu (in the Apple menu) doesn’t list any of the recent documents you might have been working on from within another application, but only those documents that you’ve recently been working on from within the Finder, for example when you double-clicked on a document icon in the Finder in order to open it in the corresponding application. It simply doesn’t make sense that, when you double-click on a document in the Finder, it does get added to the “Recent Documents” section of the “Recent Items” sub-menu in the Apple menu, whereas, when you open the same document through the Open/Save dialog of the corresponding application, it does not get added to “Recent Documents.” Those are two equivalent operations that should have the same impact on your work environment — in this case, the document should be added to “Recent Documents” regardless of the method used to open it. We expect our computers to be smart, and this is an aspect of the UI where the Mac OS remains persistently dumb.

Conversely, of course, if you open or save a document in a given location through an application’s Open/Save dialog, the corresponding folder does get added to the “Recent Places” section of the “From:”/”Where:” pop-up menu accessible the next time you use an Open/Save dialog (from any application), but the document does not get added to “Recent Documents” in the Apple menu. This doesn’t make any more sense. While saving a file does not have any equivalent in the Finder, this doesn’t mean that the document is not a “recent document” that should be remembered as such.

In short, the Finder should not be the only application that affects the contents of the “Recent Items” sub-menu in the Apple menu. And, conversely, whenever you do something in a given Finder location (folder), like double-clicking on a document icon in order to open it in the corresponding application, the system should add this location to the “Recent Places” list in the pop-up menu in Open/Save dialogs. There is no reason to separate those two areas of your work (the Finder on one side and your other applications on the other) when they are so intricately related to each other.

No Possible Customizing

To make matters worse, neither the “Recent Folders” menu in the Finder’s “Go” menu, nor the “Recent Items” menu in the Apple menu, nor the “Recent Places” in Open/Save dialog boxes seem to be customizable in any way. Even though those are three features with system-wide implications, they are not part of the options that are available in the “System Preferences” control panel, and there’s nothing about them in the Finder preferences dialog either. You cannot change the number of files/folders to be remembered, you cannot exclude certain items or types of items, you cannot get the system to sort the lists of items in a different way (you cannot sort them by name or by type in the “Recent Items” and “Recent Places” menus and by date in the “Recent Folders” menu, for example). The only thing that vaguely evoques customizability is the “Clear Recent Items” command at the bottom of the “Recent Items” sub-menu. This is clearly far from sufficient.

As well, while the Finder Toolbar is, over all, a great addition to the Mac UI experience, it makes absolutely no references whatsoever to any of Mac OS X’s “Recent” features: there’s simply no “Recent Folders” button that you could add to your toolbar. If the feature is available through a Finder menu, I fail to see why it shouldn’t be accessible from the toolbar, especially since using the “Go” menu to access a recently used folder actually affects the contents of your current foremost Finder window! If the user is using the Finder Toolbar at all, its buttons are available at the top of his foremost Finder window, so why force him to go to the menu bar, to pull down the “Go” menu, and to select the “Recent Folders” item — when all this could be done through a single-click from within the Finder window that is already at the fore?

Those last few flaws have probably to do with the fact that, unlike the “Recent” features of Mac OS 9 (accessible through the Mac OS 9 Apple menu and through the “Navigation Services” in Open/Save dialogs), Mac OS X’s “Recent” features are based, not on file aliases, but on XML files. For example, the contents of the “Recent Items” menu in the Apple menu are stored, not as aliases in a folder inside your System Folder, but as file references in an XML file called “com.apple.recentitems.plist” in your “Preferences” folder (inside your personal “Library” folder).

Still, I don’t see why Apple’s software engineers couldn’t develop a mechanism that converts an XML list of references to recently accessed folders into actual folder aliases “on the fly” whenever you want to access the list of those recent folders from within a Finder window. (The locations included in your “Favorites,” on the other hand, are stored as actual, “physical” aliases in a folder called “Favorites” inside your personal “Library” folder, so that clicking on the “Favorites” button in your Finder Toolbar doesn’t involve the use of an XML file.)

Still Not Included

Utilities such as Default Folder also provide you with the ability to assign keyboard short-cuts to some of your favorite destinations. Here again, I don’t see why, after all these years, Apple still hasn’t included similar functionality in the Finder. While I use a great number of destinations during the course of my daily work, for which my already long list of “Favorites” is definitely insufficient, there are also a few of my favorite destinations that I use many times during the day, and having keyboard short-cuts to access them from within Open/Save dialog boxes (especially in “Save As…” dialog boxes, where your hands are likely to be on the keyboard anyway, as you are expected to type in the name of your file) would be a welcome addition.

It should be noted that the functionality provided by Default Folder (I haven’t tried any other file navigation utilities with OS X) is still available from within Open/Save dialog boxes for applications running under Classic — since those applications still use the Platinum interface and the traditional Mac OS 9 mechanism, with its Navigation Services and folders of aliases inside the System Folder. Unfortunately, this also means that you have to maintain two separate lists of favorites (one for Mac OS 9 applications running under Classic, which is stored as folder aliases in the “Favorites” folder inside your volume’s “System Folder” — and another one for Mac OS X applications, which is stored in the “Library” location mentioned above). And Mac OS X doesn’t synchronize the “Recent” feature of OS X with the “Recent” feature of the version of Mac OS 9.1 running as Classic — which means that whatever folder you recently used from within a Classic application will not appear in the “Recent Folders” menu in the “Go” menu of the OS X Finder.

Conclusion

While the presence of several “Recent”-type items in Mac OS X is a obviously a good thing, their behavior is far from satisfactory from the point of view of the user who wants to work as efficiently and with as little repetition as possible. It is possible that third-party developers such as St. Clair Software will come up with ways to enrich those features, but given Apple’s recent history of increased responsiveness to user feedback, it might be worth taking the time again to submit ideas such as the ones identified in this article to Apple’s Mac OS X team. Mac OS X needs a unified, consistent, built-in “Recent” feature that encompasses all aspects of the user experience. The more people write to Apple’s OS X team about it, the more hope we have that Mac OS X will really become the great operating system that it is promised to be.

Postscript: AirPort range problems with the PowerBook G4 Titanium

In closing, I’d like to give a quick follow-up to my last column about the PowerBook G4 Titanium and AirPort range. I have received a fair amount of reader feedback on this issue, most of it from readers from all over the world stating that they too were experiencing AirPort range problems with the PowerBook G4 that didn’t occur with other Macintosh computers in the same setting. This all points toward a very real issue that, so far, has not been officially acknowledged or properly dealt with by Apple. The bottom-line is that, if you are considering purchasing a PowerBook G4 and you are planning to use its AirPort capabilities, I strongly recommend, based on my own experience and on the experience of the many readers who responded to my column, that, at the very least, you do some prior testing in order to determine whether the (apparently limited) AirPort range provided by the PowerBook G4 is sufficient to meet your needs.

This said, for those of us who are stuck with a PowerBook G4 in a situation where its AirPort range is clearly insufficient, there only seems to be two alternatives at the present time: either you can return your machine, ask for a refund and purchase an iBook instead (not an option for every user, as the PowerBook G4 is otherwise an excellent machine with great performance, a great screen, and other features not found on an iBook) — or try to find alternative ways to improve the range of the PowerBook G4.

Several readers have pointed me to various articles containing tips about improving the range of the AirPort Base Station (in an effort to compensate for the dismal range of the PowerBook G4 itself or for other purposes). All of those suggestions, however, involve manipulations that will, at the very least, void the warranty of your AirPort Base Station. No matter how easy they may seem to be to the electronics-savvy individual, this is not, therefore, an acceptable solution for the average Mac user. Here are a few links nonetheless, in case you’d like to explore those suggestions further:

http://macsupport.about.com/library/column/uc052900a.htm

I, Cringely (6/28/2001)

http://macintouch.com/airportantenna.html

http://vonwentzel.net/ABS/Extender.html

http://wwwc.edu/~frohro/Airport.html

Extending AirPort

antenna price comparison

item description with image

Other readers provided me with tips that do not require any fiddling with electronics gear. One particularly useful tip was provided by a reader who likened the design of the PowerBook G4, with its metallic casing, to a “Faraday cage”:

I believe the reduction in Airport range you are experiencing can be attributed to the effects of a “Faraday cage.” Basically when an object is surrounded inside a metal “box” (it doesn’t even have to be a real box, for instance it could be a thin layer of chicken wire) the electromagnetic signals entering and leaving the box are severely attenuated. For this reason Faraday cages are often constructed in walls to enhance the security of 802.11 networks, and to allow for interference-free testing of BlueTooth devices (which is currently being done where I work). Another effect of this means there are some buildings where your cell phones just can’t get a signal unless you are near a window. (Ikea is a particularly good example...)… Since the TiBook is made of metal, it suffers from the constraints of this electromagnetic effect. The attenuation will be increased when the TiBook is plugged into its AC adapter since the casing will have an easier path to ground. The G3 (and iBook) are unaffected because they are constructed of a cheaper (and unconductive) polycarbonate.

The tip about using the TiBook on its battery without plugging it into its AC adapter (my emphasis) is particularly useful. After experimenting myself, I’ve noticed a very definite difference. While the AirPort range of the PB on battery is still not satisfactory, it is better than what I get when the PB is plugged in.

A less useful tip was: “When the AirPort antenna is mounted in the screen, it is mounted vertically. In the PB G4, it’s mounted horizontally. If you hold the laptop so that the keyboard is in the vertical axis, it may make a small difference.” I honestly don’t think I know of any context within the Earth’s gravity field where I might want to work with my PB keyboard oriented vertically… A more realistic option would be to change the orientation of the Base Station so that its axis is perpendicular to the axis of the antenna in the PB G4. However, as I indicated in my previous column, I’ve tried all kinds of different positions for my Base Station, and none of them have provided me with any significant increase on range.

Other solutions involve third-party products (with the additional expense, of course):

If you really need more range, you might consider an AirPort-compatible PC card. My PowerBook G3 doesn't support the Apple AirPort card, but the Lucent WaveLAN card I bought for it works flawlessly with my AirPort base station. The antenna is in the protruding section of the card, so the case attenuation problem should be reduced; moreover, the card has a port for an external antenna.

While this sounds encouraging, I am somewhat reluctant, at this time, to incur yet another significant expense for something that I haven’t been able to test beforehand and that is supposed to be part of the functionality provided by the machine I purchased. I think my short-term solution is going to be to draw a long Ethernet cable (over 100 ft., but CAT5 cabling is pretty cheap these days) from my office through the attic to a more central location, from which the AirPort network should be accessible in the other half of the house. The whole point of AirPort, initially, was to avoid such cabling, but I guess I don’t really have any other realistic options.

Pierre Igot