In the spirit of being a day late, always, looks like Dan Wood has beat me to the punch and starting the Report-an-Apple-Bug Friday. Mine was going to be called something a little less nice, but you get the point. Dan’s execution probably will be a hell of a lot more elegant than mine anyways.

His bullet points so far for bugs are:

• Safari, please detect if a page has an RSS feed available (fixed!)
• Please add PDF viewing directly to Safari (fixed!)
• iTunes needs a way to store cover art in external files (I hate having to embed image data into every song file in an album; wastes precious iPod space!)
• System needs to look inside files to find metadata (see “man 5 magic” at the command line)

I am not sure how I feel about his second item, on stuffing a pdf into a browser. I just don’t know if I would have been able to justify reporting it as a “bug”. Nonetheless, it was, and seems to have been remedied.

Maybe it’s the haggard past of browsers and PDF preview from the OS 9 day’s. Something about it just makes me feel a little less clean at the end of the day. Sure, it works, just not too well. If you hit up a 10MB PDF file, you are in for a wait. If you have not changed the default Safari setting to show the status bar, you are pretty much in this limbo state where you really do not know what the browser is up to. Don’t even get me started on the what a bastard the “back” button becomes on a slower machine once you have loaded up a pdf.

At least with Quicktime, you get a Quicktime icon, and it is animated to show you *something* is happening. Not the case with PDF. Given all that, assuming you have the patience to wait through the grey screen of forever, if you want to save the file, you really do have to step outside of the “new to the Mac” user arena and into the “I am a expert” arena. The thing is, it’s not a bad idea, it’s just one that is not self-learnable, but very well could be.

I am not alone in this, as the comments on Dan’s site illustrate:

So you’re the rascal! PDF viewing in Safari is the worst thing that’s happened since it launched. I was so much happier when I could actually control the way I viewed a PDF. Now they always render too small. So, I now have to take that extra step, right-click, download, and tell it where to save the file. It was all so perfect before—opened right up in Preview. Your bug was my feature. Sigh.

The problem here is one in execution, one that many other software developers are guilty of as well. It reminds me so much of a similar case with Entourage. There were complaints abound about the sounds that Entourage makes being a little on the quiet side (or was it the loud side). God knows I tried to muck with the “soundset” to adjust the overall volume numerous times. Finally, I just bought the excellent Detour and was done with it.

Now, these requests did not fall on deaf ears, Microsoft did indeed change the volume, much to my chagrin, far too aggressively. Worse, was I specifically suggested a volume slider to put the control into the users hands. Of course, they took the other road, and I am back to using Detour to manage my friggin email clients audio.

Taking a cue from the folks over at AdiumX was more what I was after. These guys must eat, sleep, and breathe their preference system. For an app with so much that can be changed, very little has to be learned to understand how to change it. Very little is left up in the air, most, if not all of the app is rather self-educational. Good job guys, just in case you are reading.

The AdiumX volume slider in all it’s glory…

Now, to apply this to the Safari issue, and whether or not it should show pdf files inside of its browser window. We can debate it all day long, and I am sure there are great points on either side of the fence, but why bother? Here is a perfect case where you can have your cake and eat it to, not to mention, learn now the cake was made in the process.

Excuse my rapid hack together an example in photoshop, and my too lazy to find the correct font sizes, but I think you get the idea in the image below.

Now, you have put the power back into the users hands, and while you were at it, you taught them something. There is no ignoring the fact that you had to make a choice about what to do. Hopefully, as long as you are not stupid, this alert box will have trained you about one of OS X’s behavior’s. As it is now, the behavior is opaque, it just is. And yeah, this is a nudge to do the same with the alert box that pops up every time I download a file!