Moving toward a click-less OS: a suggestion for improving the Mac interface

Question

This is a long post, so if you have a short attention span, or are not interested in UI design, have a nice day and move on to the next post!
A little history first. Back in the days of OS 7 and earlier, I recall a feature lacking from the OS that was really important. For a long time, Apple did not use sticky menus, and you had to use a third-party extension to have the ability to click once on a menu heading and have the pop down menu display and stay there without having to hold the mouse down. Around OS 8 or so I recall that they made sticky menus part of the OS and all applications, and that was a welcome ergonomic improvement. No need to click and hold when we explore menus. What I plan to talk about in this post is a similar improvement -- one designed to facilitate the easy exploration of files and folders while completely eliminating the need to click at all.
My idea was inspired by another feature of OS 8 (or thereabouts). This was the ability to display the files in a folder as buttons. This allowed the user to launch the application/file with a single click, rather than the ergonomically bad double-click required in previous OS's. (You could still select a file without launching it by clicking the label rather than the icon.) This very useful feature went away in OS X. So one is back to double clicking to launch all documents, photos, movies, or whatever. If you are editing hundreds of pictures in a folder as I am, and double clicking them to launch PREVIEW for a quick inspection, you start to develop problems with the tendons in the wrist. I have to switch hands regularly to deal with the fatigue.
The elimination of buttons was a huge step backward for me in OS X. It is simply not acceptable to have to double click files to launch them. I think a future OS -- truly improved, not just one with more flash -- must solve this problem. As I thought about how it should be implemented, I realized there is a much better and more general solution than that offered by buttons. One that allows the examination of files without ever clicking at all.
Imagine a folder with multiple file types: photos, mp3's, movies, text edit files, etc, and assume the files are displayed as icons (although my suggestion would work with list view as well). You see a jpg thumbnails and want to see some of them at full size. Or you see a song and want to hear it, or a movie and want to view it. Now imagine that there is a special "preview" mode which allows you to easily and quickly examine the contents of the files without having to launch them in an application by double clicking, then close the window with another click, go on to the next icon of interest, and do this again, and again, and again until your hand is ready to fall off. Instead, you toggle an assigned key (say F5), or select an appropriate menu choice in the Finder, in order to activate what I shall call dynamic preview mode (DPM). With DPM, whenever you move the cursor over a file icon you get a preview. For example, moving the cursor over a jpg file would immediately expand it to full size on the screen. The image would stay up for as long as the cursor remained over the file's icon (which may not be visible). Moving the cursor off the icon causes the preview image to "collapse" back into the file icon. Moving the cursor over another jpg would cause its image to expand to full size until you moved on to the next, and so on. Note that you are able to view ALL of the jpg images without ever clicking the mouse once, well enough twice. There isn't any way I can think of to make reviewing large numbers of images easier. All you have to do is move the mouse around and the images appear and disappear dynamically, without you doing anything other than moving the mouse. Since you would have to do that anyway to select a file for launching under OS X, DPM brings the effort down to the bare bones minimum (short of using a slide show -- but that has other problems, which is why I don't use it except at the end for the fully edited pics). Think of DPM as a super convenient way to browse images without launching applications, closing windows, double-clicking, and so on. When you find an image that you might want to do something with, say edit the color balance in Photoshop, you then launch it using the appropriate application.
Of course, applications are indeed launched during DPM. But not in the usual way. No doubt the Preview app would be used to handle the display of the jpg's in DPM but it would be modified somewhat for dynamically viewing images. When the cursor goes over a jpg, Preview opens it and displays it, but not in the usual window with a close box, but just as a simple untitled pane showing the image. And as soon as the cursor moves the pane disappears. Likewise, there is no Preview menu bar showing at the top of the screen, because Preview is only used for dynamic display, not editing of the jpg. Now, the user might want to launch the parent application when placing the cursor over the icon because they want to use the application to do something with it (besides viewing or listening). No problem. We simply design DPM so that when the option key is pressed while the cursor is moved over a file icon, it fully launches the application with the file, just as it now does when you double click the file icon. You get the usual titled window, application menu bar, etc. But note that you get the application running with the file loaded without having to double click. This click-less OS interaction, of course, could be implemented right now since it is a only a minor tweak on the OS.
What about other file types? Putting the cursor over an mp3 file (or other supported format) would start playing the song, and putting the cursor over a movie file would start playing the movie, again in an untitled pane. Presumably Quicktime would be used to handle both of these latter two tasks, but without launching in the usual way and taking over the menu bar. Putting the cursor over a text or RTF file would display it in a pane (possibly using Text Edit). More complicated file types (word processor, spreadsheet, statistical, etc.) would probably not be supported in a first-generation DPM. But jpg, mp3, mov, txt, and rtf files could be easily handled using just three applications that come with every Mac. Also, "compressed" stickie notes could now be deposited individually anywhere, in any folder or on the desktop, and putting the cursor over the note would expand it to full view. With the current OS, we need to run the stickies app which displays ALL the sticky notes at once, and which constrains them to the desktop only, both of which are serious limitations.
Of course, once we have DPM users will want to complicate things -- they always do. For example, they'll want the mp3 preview to have a play bar with a bug to position in the song, volume control, etc, just like the Quicktime player. But be careful what you ask for, or we are right back with full fledged apps loading with a menu bar and a window that has to be closed, and that defeats the point of a click-less preview. This is because any interaction the user might wish to have with the viewer or player will require moving the cursor, and in DPM that would normally cause the preview to cease. That's the point, after all. So I would argue that dynamic preview should be kept very simple: cursor on the icon opens a preview, cursor off the icon closes the preview.
Would this be enormously difficult to do? No. It is already being done -- kind of. For any of the file types discussed above, you can click on the file icon, then press command-I (Get Info), and you will see a preview at the bottom of the info box. If it is a pic, that's all you get. If a song or movie, you can play it. Unfortunately, if it is an rtf file, no preview is displayed -- kind of odd, that. (How hard is it to display some text?) The only thing not offered in the command-I previews for pics and movies is a full (or at least larger) screen preview. But that shouldn't be too difficult since Preview and Quicktime allow that as a matter of course.
Oh yeah. We can add folder icons to the list of icons supported by DPM. Right now, if I want to quickly peek at some folders just to see what they contain, I have to double-click each one to open it, and then click on the close box to close it again. With dynamic preview activated, all I would do is move the cursor over the folder icon and it would immediately expand to its usual size showing whatever contents can be seen in that view. Moving the cursor would make the folder collapse again. Again, all that is need to examine the contents of folders would be to move the cursor around. That's it.
(Don't get greedy -- you might want a scroll bar for the folder preview, but that defeats the point of a quick preview and would require cursor movement which, with DPM, would close the folder preview. Again, holding the option key down while placing the cursor over the folder icon could open the folder in the usual way, without needing to double click. But as with option-launched previews for images and the like, you will have to close the preview window yourself.)
Now, I do not think think dynamic preview should be activated out of the box, at least not at this point. Inexperienced users will be confused to see things popping up on the screen when they are moving the cursor around (or hearing songs). But for experienced users who have thousands of files archived in dozens of folders who need to quickly and easily examine them without the steps required now -- double-click, look or listen, close -- this would be a real improvement in the UI, one that would really make a difference. One, that once a user tried it (just like the first Mac OS) would make them say "I'll never go back!"
In closing, I must post a question, or fear being chastised for not following discussion group rules. So, what are the technical obstacles to doing what I am suggesting, and who else would like to see it done? (And, yes, I am sending these suggestions to Apple, so no need to tell me that.)
Drake

Answer 1

BDAqua wrote:
I agree with you totally... except the clickless preview though, since Apple doesn't like to give you options to turn stuff off or not use it at all if they go to the trouble of putting it in the OS!
Well, they give you the option to display the contents of a folder in list, icon, or column view. So why can't you have the option to view files with and without dynamic previewing? It is the dynamic equivalent (off vs on) of the static options provided by list, icon, and column view. Also, by the logic you give above (for Apple), one should not have preferences, because that makes the functioning of the OS or app different from one user to the next. And as a counter example, the features of the OS for people with disabilities are great to have, but they are not active just because they are there. One has to want to use them...
And if you think about it, Expose is an optional utility, as is Dashboard. Some people use them, some don't. DPM would be the same.
Every new OS release makes me spend a lot of time learning how to shut off/disable things like Spotlight, Dashboard, Time Machine, Transparent Dock & Menubar, ad infinitum!
Me too. Although I have learned to like Spotlight (although it has bugs), and the dock.
Did I ever tell you Leopard's System Preferences icon in the Dock looks like a Skull & Crossbones to me?
If you close one eye & squint the other one until it does to you, then you'll get an idea what OSX looks like to me... LOL.
I tried, but couldn't conjure it up! I must have too limited an imagination.
BTW, Are you aware you can select as many things to view at once as you want & drag them to say Preview's icon?
Sure. Have you ever selected several hundred pics and launched preview? Ca-chunk, ca-chunk, ca-chunk, wheez! It is quicker and less demanding of system resources to view one jpg at a time, unless you want to compare them in some way or do a slide show. But for just exploring the files, I want to do it one at a time, especially if iTunes is playing in the background, Photoshop is running and waiting to load a pic that I might decide to edit, mail is up to let me know if anyone is trying to reach me (ding!), Safari is running so I can follow Apple Discussions, etc. In other words, a lot is going on. No need to make matters worse by loading a bunch of pics into Preview, when I am happy to view them singly. This is why I object to the Cover Flow aspect of Quick Look and Safari 4.0. It is just another way to dog down limited system resources.