Several years ago when I was really big into Linux, I decided quickly that my favorite thing about the command line was the flexibility. As an extension, that applied to the system as a whole which is why even to this day I prefer unix-y operating systems, but the specifics of flexible applications really enthralled me.

In the years since I’ve quite obviously become a Mac guy. I’m fine with that, I’m sorry if you’re not. But while OS X has enough of the unix-y stuff to keep me happy 95% of the time, there is still a very large part of the system that is rooted in GUI applications with no direct command line equivalent. For the most part, this is cool with me. In fact a certain part of the reason why I started sliding away from Linux was that for all the flexibility being offered me by the command line-oriented approach to computing, it isn’t very useful in terms of time management. What you exchange for being able to do whatever you want with your programs is that you have to do stuff with them all the time.

A quick example is grep versus Spotlight. Spotlight is, in essence, a grep/find hybrid. Now you can do almost anything with a combination of grep, find and maybe a couple other shell-based tools. Spotlight has some functional holes in it, comparatively. But the difference is there are probably very few people who could do with grep and find what Spotlight does in the same amount of time. Doing it with Spotlight is typing search strings into a text box available on the system menu bar. Doing it with grep means remembering and correctly typing a series of command-line switches, options, flags, formatting requirements or, more likely, looking them up and trial-and-error-ing it until you get what you want. Flexible? Definitely. Easy and fast? Negative.

So here’s what happens: Most of the time, I’m a happy little Mac guy. I use all these i-apps on my iBook (which, coincidentally is officially my most favorite computer I’ve ever had) and everyone wins. But then every so often I’ll run up against something that just seems so obvious and easy and yet it doesn’t work, doesn’t exist or hasn’t been thought of by anyone else and I remember the upside of flexibility as I realize there’s nothing I can do.

Here’s my example from today: Safari has a fairly nice bookmarking system. There is a bookmark bar below the address bar which can contain folders of bookmarks (which appear as drop-down menus), regular bookmarks (for one-click access) or what they call “Auto-Click” folders which open a series of contained bookmarks in separate tabs in the current window. There’s also a Bookmarks menu that contains a list of all the bookmarks (which takes over the whole browser window) but that’s not really relevant to the discussion here.

I use Auto-Click for my webcomics reading. I have a master bookmarks folder called “Comics Trawl” which I open about once a day that contains all the webcomics I read and fills up a browser window with about 15 tabs. The problem is that many of the comics I read aren’t updated every day. Some are once a week, others are every other day, Mondays and Fridays, Tuesdays and Saturdays, whatever. The point is I end up opening a site and waiting for it to load just so I can close it because that comic hasn’t updated that day. This seems dumb.

I also make extensive use of the bookmarks bar at the top of the Safari window. I have seven menu-folders up there, plus two little bookmark-functions (one for TinyURL and the other for Del.icio.us). Those plus the Bookmarks Menu button take up about 80% of the horizontal space at my current resolution (the iBook’s max, by the way) so having just enough space for one or two more items up there means my Comics need to take up just one spot.

My solution is obvious: I need a master Comics menu-folder with five Auto-Click folders inside, one for each day of the week. Those folders will only contain the comics that are updated on those days. Simple, yet brilliant. Thanks, I know. Here’s the glitch: Safari won’t let you have Auto-Click subfolders. Only top-level folders can be Auto-Click. Whaaa? Why? I don’t know, but there it is.

Now, if Safari was an open source command-line app, it wouldn’t be a problem. Somehow there would be a way to hack in and make what I wanted to happen work. But this is part of my trade off, I want to do something that will really save me some time and effort with minimal trouble, except no one has thought of it or just done it so I have no recourse. I must live with substandard comics browsing.

So anyway, I’m submitting a feature request to Apple, but I don’t have much hope. I requested that they add timestamp data to the iPod shuffle’s Recently Played info, I suggested that they make the top-level “Shuffle” feature on the 4G iPods work as advertised and shuffle the currently selected Playlist and I suggested that they provide a function to export iCal data into other applications (such as To-Do List into an email). I’ve heard nothing on any of these, and my optimism isn’t a trait I exactly refine and polish—it is therefore unsuited to the task of providing me with hope.