It strikes me that 7 is basically Microsoft’s answer to both Apple’s “I’m a Mac” ads and a similar effort to Snow Leopard – the successor to 10.5 that Apple has announced.

Snow Leopard will purportedly contain no new features, instead focusing on improving the foundation of the OS and making under-the-hood performance improvements.

7 seems to be a similar effort: There are a few visual changes to the taskbar and start menu, but overall there is very much a “Vista 2.0″ feeling to it. However: unlike Snow Leopard – which has so far received mostly positive buzz, despite the lack of new features, I don’t expect Microsoft to attempt to market 7 as a “no features” release. Coming on the back of the poor Vista publicity it would be seen as admitting defeat.

Nonetheless, with 7 expected for a late 2009 / early 2010 release and Snow Leopard expected sometime within the same timeframe, it’ll be interesting to see the two “tidy-up” releases go head-to-head.

Sometimes though, you’ll come across features or behaviours that leave you scratching your head. Today we’ll take a look at one OS feature that feels as though it was added with 10.0 and forgotten about ever since: Clippings.

Text Clippings

If you’ve ever selected a bit of text in Safari and dragged it to your Desktop, OS X will save it in a “Text Clipping” file. Double-clicking this file will open a small window displaying your text. That’s all you can actually do in that window though: You can’t select, drag or edit the text in any way.

The only way you can re-use the text is by manually selecting “copy” from the menu bar and pasting it into another application, or by dragging the text clippings file itself into another app. Both are fairly non-obvious to the casual user: The copy & paste method because you can’t actually select the text to copy (usually a requirement for copy & paste) and the file-drag method because you don’t always expect dragging a file to result in its contents being pasted (the exact result of doing this will also vary from app to app).

(Actually some experimenting reveals you can select text: Dragging the cursor over part of a clipping and then using copy & paste will only paste the part of the text that you dragged over. It turns out you are selecting – but there’s no highlighting to indicate your selection – which means this feature is actually more fucked up than I had ever dare to imagine).

Image Clippings

These are actually harder to produce: Some apps such as Photoshop will create them if you drag a selection to the Desktop. Most apps default to saving a copy of the current image file to the desktop instead, so it could be argued Image Clippings are only still around for legacy purposes. 

As with Text Clippings, you can’t really do anything with the clipping except view the image and there’s no really obvious way to retrieve your content to re-use it elsewhere. In fact they’re actually even harder to re-use than Text Clippings: You can’t open an Image Clipping in Preview or any other Image editor I tried. Dragging it to Mail will attach it to a new message and dragging it to TextEdit will open a surprisingly low-quality version of the image. The only way to access your image is via the Clipboard – pasting the image will usually work.

Missing Modern Amenities 

Neither file format supports thumbnail previews or even Apple’s much-touted Quick Look feature and Spotlight will only find your Clipping’s file names.

Get to the Point…

Okay, enough snarkyness: Clippings are an interesting idea that were probably great in the NeXTStep era, but are not very practical nowadays.

A better solution would be to simply create “proper” files that other applications can interact with normally. Instead of creating Text Clippings, the Finder could create .txt (or preferably .rtf to preserve formatting) files with your text contents and instead of creating Picture Clippings, store a .PNG file with your image contents. Both are file formats most users are accustomed to and can be used by most applications.

Hopefully this is one forgotten corner of OS X that Apple can finally dust off and give some new spit and polish in Snow Leopard.

For those of you who have never used it, the short explanation is that Automator is a tool to automate repetitive tasks. You don’t need any programming knowledge and instead create “Workflows” by visually arranging “actions” (e.g. you could create a workflow to convert, rename and upload a folder of photos).

Sounds like a brilliant idea, right? The basic premise actually works very well: Apple includes a lot of actions for common tasks and some 3rd party developers also include their own actions that allow you to integrate  their apps into your workflows

But there’s one caveat: On both of the Macbooks I regularly use, workflows can sometimes take as much as 10 – 15 seconds to launch.

Whilst that might not seem very long, when you’re basically just renaming files, 10 seconds is an eternity. It’s made worse by the fact that there’s absolutely no user feedback at all whilst you’re waiting for Automator to kick into gear. Only when you’ve waited those 10 seconds does the “Running” icon appear in the menu bar and you can see Automator begin to process your workflow.

Since workflows often use the “Selected Finder items” action, you also can’t click on any other Finder objects during that delay, otherwise the wrong file will be manipulated, effectively forcing you to wait and click nothing else until a workflow launches.

When you take a look behind the scenes using Activity Monitor, you can see that a process called “Automator Runner” is launched almost immediately. But I assume the lag is due to the runner telling the other applications involved (in most cases probably the Finder) what to do. 

I think in order for Automator to be truly useful, launching these types of actions needs to be “snappy”: Once clicked the workflow should launch no more than 2-3 seconds later, allowing the user to get on with something else. Any longer than that and users either assume it “hasn’t worked” or gives up in frustration. 

Please Apple, fix it  - for the little Robot’s sake.