A Proposal to OS Makers

Original Copy Window of OSX 10.5

With Windows Vista, Ubuntu 7.10 and Mac OS Leopard we’re experiencing the newest generation of operating systems. All three are (to a point) better than their predecessors and acquired tons of new features, both big and small.

There is a feature though, that I sorely miss in all the OSes as of today.

Sometimes when a friend visits me, I want to copy some files from ~/Music/PublicDomain and some from ~/Music/CreativeCommons and some from ~/Movies/OnlyLegalVideosHere over to their USB drive.

Or sometimes I want to get 13 different Linux ISOs from my file server.

I usually end up having 10 or more copy-jobs open at once, regardless of whether I use Linux, Windows or OS X, which vastly decreases my overall performance: My computer gets slower and the files take longer to copy. And my screen gets all cluttered up.

So I’d like to suggest an advanced form of the copy dialogue: Add a copy queue. What I want is something like this:

I copy a file somewhere, and while I see the little progress bar window, I can simply drag another file or folder onto the bar, adding it to its queue. The files will then be copied one after the other.

Proposed “Small” copy window

Proposed “Big” copy window with file list

The above mock-up shows how this could look like. When a whole folder is dropped into the window, its files will be added to the queue individually.

This has a lot of advantages over the many-windows method.

  • It uses your available bandwidth more effectively.
    A drive usually will be faster when it doesn’t have to fetch files from different blocks at once. So you have less search time and your file will complete more quickly. Over the network, you should also have less overhead copying just one file at a time.
  • Your desktop won’t get cluttered.
    This is obvious. Instead of many small copy windows, you’ll have one big window you can handle or hide more easily.
  • You can sort your files by importance.
    Just drag the most important file to the top of the list. Once it has finished copying, you can start working on it right away, while the rest of the files is still being copied.
  • Time estimates get more accurate.
    When you have 10 files being copied at once, the time estimates in the different windows will usually be far off. Compare that to copying a folder at once, where the estimate is usually quite good. With all files to copy in one queue, the OS should be able to calculate the remaining time quite accurately.

So that’s my idea. As far as I know, this is not possible in today’s operating systems, but I could be wrong.

The only way to get that functionality I know of is to stack cp instructions in the console with &&, but that’s not very user-friendly.

Alright, dear OS writers, get going! I’d be delighted to see this in a file manager somewhere. What about you?

About this entry

You’re currently reading A Proposal to OS Makers, one of the many eloquent and thoughtful entries on breakthesystem.org.

It was published on 11.29.07 at 6pm.
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