Picking Off iCal’s Paper Bits

Commenter SG on Daniel Jalkut’s post:

It’s especially grating that Apple’s UI designers have become so divergent in the approach discussed in the article: consider that, while the “Base Window” of apps like iCal have become more exaggerated and colorful than necessary, standard elements such as toolbars have gone so far in the other direction (bland) that it’s become an obstacle to use.

For example, all toolbar icons are now small, flat, medium-light-gray on medium-dark-gray buttons with actual button borders and no text labels. So what was once a colorful, descriptive, large action button is now a tiny incomprehensible symbol.

Indeed, Apple does not seem to be “spending” color wisely in Lion. They’ve moved it from areas where it can help differentiate to areas where it’s just distracting chrome.

Preview Regressions in Lion

1. Some applications I want to remember which documents were open when I quit, but never Preview. To prevent it from opening unwanted documents at launch, you can enter this command in Terminal:

   defaults write com.apple.Preview NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false

   Another good candidate for this treatment is:

   defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false

2. Preview opens every PDF in “Continuous Scroll” rather than “Single Page” mode. It will remember the change for a given document, but there seems to be no way to change the default.

3. The “Move to Trash” feature, which I use all the time, no longer works when only a single document is open. Update (2011-08-10): And, though it does work when there are multiple documents, it messes up the order of the remaining ones.

4. When trying to work around this, I noticed that it’s no longer possible to make Preview AppleScriptable. Preview has, inexplicably, never been scriptable. However, from 10.4–10.6 it was possible to enable the default Cocoa scripting support via these Terminal commands:

   sudo defaults write /Applications/Preview.app/Contents/Info NSAppleScriptEnabled -bool YES
   sudo chmod a+r /Applications/Preview.app/Contents/Info.plist

   This was sufficient to be able to get at the file of the current document to delete it, change its Finder label, import it into EagleFiler, etc. Under 10.7, modifying the Info.plist file breaks the application’s code signature. I would expect this to cause a harmless warning message in the Console, but it actually causes Preview to crash.

   Update (2011-07-26): See these instructions.

5. Not exactly a regression, but the swiping gestures for changing pages now seem backwards compared with the rest of the system. Swiping left takes you to the previous page in Preview (or Safari), but it scrolls you to the right and moves you to the next space or full screen application.