One of the features in Lion that I didn’t think I would like has become one of my favorites: Launchpad. This is essentially Springboard from iOS, but for the Mac. It’s a nice iOS-like view of your /Applications folder, that you can get to by pinching on your trackpad using your thumb and three fingers. Once it opens, you see all your installed applications, with multiple pages, just like in iOS. Swiping left and right with two fingers switches between pages. Single-clicking an app runs it. Holding down Option makes the icons “go wiggly,” so you can move them around, just like in iOS.
The main problem is that you have to move apps around just like on iOS: one at a time. It makes sense on a touchscreen to only let you move one thing at a time, but on a traditional computer, it’s a limitation. My first suggested feature, then, is Apple should add the ability to select groups of icons and move them between pages as a group. It might also be nice to have a “consolidate” option that would just squeeze the apps onto as few pages as possible.
Which brings me to the second feature I’d like to see: pre-defined sort options. I like to have icons show up in alphabetical order, so having a menu option to “Sort Ascending” or something like that would be nice. I can also see something like sorting by most-recently used, so the apps you have recently used show up first. Or maybe a most-used sort, so those apps you use the most are at the top of the first page. Of course, they need an “as arranged” option so they show up how you arrange them.
These should be easy additions, and Apple should have already thought of them. I hope they will be in an update soon.
