Membranophonist’s Ramblings

When importing, iPhoto should use the date and time the photos were taken and your calendar to suggest event names. For days with an all day event (such as a holiday) and time-specific events, the default suggestion should be the more specific event. Overlapping events could be handled by suggesting one and presenting other event titles as options.

Bonus points awarded for allowing embedding of location data (XMP address, city, state/province, ZIP fields) if present in the calendar event’s location field. This embedding would probably be off by default for privacy reasons.

Some people (such as myself) would like to know more about the pictures used as desktop backgrounds. Photographers would probably appreciate it if the interface exposed a path to their self and/or portfolio.

Fortunately, images can carry useful information such as the photographer’s name, e-mail and web addresses, et-cetera in various metadata forms (XMP, EXIF, IPTC).

Basic Information Displayed

1. The photo title (XMP Title field).
2. The author’s name (XMP Creator field) formatted as a mailto: link with their e-mail address (XMP Creator: Email field).
3. The author’s website (XMP Creator: Website field) as a web link.

Extended Information Displayed

1. A description of the photo (XMP Description field).
2. The place the photo was taken (the XMP Location, City, State/Province, and Country fields).
3. The date the photograph was taken (EXIF digitization date).
4. The camera used to capture the photo (EXIF make and model).

Though the photo is not actually by him (as far as I know; all metadata is stripped from the default desktop pictures), Art Wolfe is a great photographer.

A few comments for Many Tricks’ yFlicks, a video player and organizer for Mac OS X.

1. A first-launch-only prompt to import the user’s movies (searching based on UTIs or whatever magic is required) and perhaps user-selectable locations would help them immerse themselves in the application. Creating groups from folders might help them orient themselves by carrying over their existing arrangement.
2. An option to set up folders to monitor for new videos would be nice. Sensible defaults could include ~/Movies and the user’s Safari Downloads folder and whichever other folders the user picks at first launch (should such an option be presented).
3. Allow drag-and-drop to the main pane; it is usually a much easier target because of its size (Fitts’ Law).
4. Group renaming is quirky. Double-clicking quickly does not engage the rename mode, but single-clicking a selected group does. The Enter key should also activate rename mode.
5. Command-Left Arrow and Command-Right Arrow should be bound to opening and closing the group folders.
6. The active group’s name should be displayed in the window titlebar. This is particularly useful if the Library pane is hidden, leaving no visual indication of which group is active.
7. Display metadata embedded in QT files. At least Title! Please! Director and Performers would also be nice.
8. Center the movie thumbnails within the right pane.
9. Retain the main window’s size across launches (ideally, in a relative way so that it can adapt to different screen setups, but I don’t know if that is feasible with available OS X technologies).
10. Allow multi-select and contextual menu star rating assignment. Having to rate videos individually is tedious if you have a large existing collection.
11. Clicking the Hide Library button in the lower left moves the right pane over, triggering the preview playback of the bottom left movie. This seems to be a bug with calculating the position of screen elements.
12. I dig the mouseover video previews, but I think the delay should be increased by a wee bit to prevent them from starting unintentionally.

Folders can be a crappy way to organize files. Fortunately, there is metadata such as Spotlight’s Project label, which is accessible through Desk Lamp.

1. Find the files related to your project in Desk Lamp.
2. Add a Project label.
3. Type “project:insert label here”.
4. After buying a license, save the blotter. Or if you honestly can’t spend the $20…
5. Switch to the Finder.
6. Select File > New Smart Folder.
7. Select Other… from the pop-up menu.
8. Scroll to or filter for “Projects”.
9. Type the project label you used in Desk Lamp.

Desk Lamp also has the benefit of being able to set actual Spotlight keywords rather than (ab)using the Comments field like several other apps out there. I use Comments for comments.

Due to differences in Kind labeling, the same (PDF) or similar (PowerPoint and Keynote) filetypes are not grouped together when sorting by Kind alphabetically.

I’d like the Kind column in the Finder to provide secondary sort options, similar to the Album column in iTunes 7.

Clicking on the column header label would switch between the alphabetical Kind sort and Kind by Category, which would group files by the basic type. The mockup shows PDF, other vector formats, word processing, presentations, spreadsheets, and finally bitmap images. The order of categories would need more consideration.

Issues

• The category is not explicitly stated.
• Most people don’t know the difference between a vector-based image and a bitmap, making the groupings seem arbitrary.
• There are many custom filetypes that don’t fit easily into a category; what is a Curio document? Technically, it is a package, but it’s essentially a compound document.

Star ratings can be assigned to any filesystem object (kMDItemStarRating) as of Mac OS X 10.4. There is currently no way to do this in the Finder, but it is possible using third-party tools such as Desk Lamp.

What if that rating could be sent to the application’s developers along with comments and certain system information that could help them put the feedback in context? If someone is complaining about the performance of your heavy-duty application, you want to know if they are running it on a B&W G3, right?

1. Assigning a rating from the Finder

   

2. The Send Feedback dialog
   
3. The Send Feedback dialog expanded
   

Implementation Notes

• The Send Feedback button would be disabled until the user either assigns a rating or types in the text box.
• Feedback would only be sent at the user’s initiation and with explicit permission; no annoying dialogs when you upgrade an application or change the rating.
• Ratings would be carried across version changes.
• Feedback destination address(es) would be defined somewhere within the application bundle’s .lproj folders, allowing feedback to be sent to different addresses based on language.
• If multiple applications are selected, multiple feedback windows are opened (the same behavior as the Info windows).
• An option to submit ratings and comments to MacUpdate, VersionTracker, and Cool OS X Apps would be nice.

I like listening to artists’ recordings in chronological order to follow the evolution of their sound. The ID3 (v2) specification supports the input of precise recording dates (and times, but even I’m not that particular), data which I’ve added to some MP3s using the only application I know of that supports extensive ID3 tags with a somewhat understandable interface, ID3-TagIt for Windows. Unfortunately, iTunes does not take the day and month into consideration when sorting albums by Year.

How iTunes sorts Grant Green’s albums by year and when they were actually recorded:

An artist’s sound can change significantly over a handful of months, a process I’d like to be able to follow. I know this is not of interest to a majority of music listeners, whose favorite artists usually release an album every year or two.

Some ideas for using the XMP Creator metadata (name, title, e-mail, address, website) that can be attached to Adobe files such as PDF, Illustrator, and PSD. Obviously, this type of thing would work for any file containing such metadata.

• File metadata in a PDF file:
  
• Contextual menu commands exposing the metadata:
  

Another variation…

1. Open the file in a PDF reader and select some text:
   
2. A message opens with the text pasted as a quote:
   

Evolutions of the Konqueror microformats plug-in in the context of the Flock browser.

Contacts (hCards)

1. The browser indicates the presence of hCard markup on a page using an icon in the status bar. The icon provides access to the pop-up menu:
   
2. To allow multiple selection without having to repeatedly open the menu, a dialog allows the user to check individual names:
   

Contacts Service Preferences

Online Contacts Services

• Plaxo
• Yahoo! Address Book
• .Mac

Calendar (hCalendars)

A dialog similar to Add Contacts would facilitate multiple event selections.

Calendar Service Preferences

Obviously, the Default Calendar setting would only work with services that allow multiple calendars.

Online Calendar Services

• Plaxo
• Yahoo! Calendar
• Google Calendar
• 30 Boxes

The Konqueror plug-in currently works with Kontact, the KDE PIM. Along those lines, it would also be nice if browsers could pass hCards and hCalendars to external applications like Address Book/iCal on OS X, Outlook on Windows, and Evolution in GNOME.

(For example,) we wanted a flat filesystem, where you wouldn’t put your files in directories, but you would tag them with keywords, and instead of saying “Open this directory,” you’d say “Open all my email and send it to this person.” In the end we realized that directories are nice and the industry has been using directories for a long time, so it’s almost intuitive. We do have database features in the filesystem, but they’re not as extreme as we first thought.

Cyril Meurillon, Senior Kernel Engineer for the BeOS circa 1998

You can learn more about the BeOS Bible at the publisher’s page.

NetPositive, the default browser for the BeOS, allowed users to attach keywords to bookmarks and create dynamic groupings (Smart Bookmark Folders, essentially) based on these and other metadata such as the title and URL.